CHRIS SHARP
INTERVIEW Michael Oliver Harding PORTRAIT Ana Hop PHOTOS Courtesy of Chris Sharp/Lulu
Many art practitioners would agree with Chris Sharp when he claims that the single greatest enemy to creativity is consensus. But few defend that statement so unsparingly and with such a flair for the disruptive as does the prolific American writer, editor and independent curator.
Based in Mexico City, where he co-runs the unorthodox Lulu project space – not a commercial gallery, neither an institution, nor a non-profit, but all of the above – Sharp is a man passionate about presentational aesthetics, thrilled by art that thwarts expectations, and serious about spatial economy. Lulu, which is located in the re-purposed living room of his apartment, is quite possibly Mexico’s smallest art space. Co-founded with artist Martín Soto Climent, its aim is to provide an alternative to the type of art that dominates Mexico City’s gallery circuit. But more on that later.
This worldly curator, who has lived in Paris and Milan prior to relocating to Mexico, is an eloquent advocate for artists who think plastically, whose bodies of work aren’t solely embedded in language. That applies both to Los Angeles painter Tom Allen and his hallucinatory renderings of botany, as well as New Zealander Dane Mitchell’s heartbreaking multidisciplinary elegy to the past, entitled Post Hoc and currently on view at the Venice Biennale.
Shortly after landing in California, where he spent the month of August winding down from a busy year of creative engagements, Résidence Éditions rang up Sharp for a wide-ranging conversation that touched upon Lulu’s raison d’être within the Mexican art scene, how he cut his curatorial teeth in Paris and why there’s arguably nothing worse than hegemony.
MOH: I’d like to start by praising the honesty of your Out-of-Office Auto-Reply: “It's August, and it's been a helluva year, and I need a break. So I am taking one (sort of).” Your email signature lists five different ongoing projects. As an independent curator, how many projects can you juggle at any given time?
CS: If you're crazy like me, you have a tendency to over commit. This year was particularly busy, but I guess I just do a lot. I run Lulu in addition to maintaining a curatorial practice and writing. When I initially started Lulu with artist Martín Soto Climent, it was a side project, but it quickly developed a lot of momentum. It came to be as if not more important than my main curatorial activities. And Lulu is not necessarily what pays the bills – it's just, you know, a money hole. So those other activities are still really important to me.
MOH: How did you find your way into art curation? Is it something you had long wanted to pursue?
CS: I totally fell into it. It was an elaborate, happy mistake. I went to study French literature in Paris as an undergrad, met a woman there and ended up staying. I shrewdly or maybe not so intelligently thought I could make a living by working in art. Prior to that, while living in New York, I had always been an enthusiast. I would see all the shows in Chelsea, but it was never something I took seriously. I wanted to write novels. But in Paris, one thing led to another and I got an internship at a great gallery called Air de Paris. Then, I got interviewed at another gallery called In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc. She didn't give me the job, but she invited me to curate a show for no good reason. A wonderful woman. She sent me on an all-expense-paid research trip to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. I came back and curated her 2006 summer show. I had no idea what I was doing, but the show was beautiful, weird and kind of successful.
MOH: And that set in motion plans to pursue curation more seriously?
CS: Well, it’s when I realized it was an extraordinary activity. One of the things that drew me to working in contemporary art was the communal aspect. You go from writing books – where you spend a lot of time alone – to engaging in this activity that involves working with others and responding to what they do. There's a certain degree of authorship but it's shared. I'm not necessarily an advocate of collectivity, but this just felt like a more palpable way of being in the world.
MOH: As opposed to the more lonesome pursuit of writing fiction?
CS: Exactly. That’s isolated to the bitter end. You don't really have a relationship with your readers. It's a very lonely activity, which I love as well. But there's something about going to artist studios, speaking with them, other writers and curators… I love the way contemporary art perfectly parallels the notion of an ecosystem, and depends on it to exist.
Santiago de Paoli at Lulu, Mexico City
« I’m generally drawn to artists who have considered practices, but who are also open to other readings. People who are still developing. »
MOH: About this 2006 Paris show you curated, the year seems to overlap with another exhibition you’ve previously described as “revolutionary” by Ralph Rugoff, a curator you admire.
CS: Indeed. I studied the show you're talking about, A Brief History of Invisible Art, and was really impressed by how Rugoff positioned it and wrote about it. At the time, Jens Hoffman was the great European auteur-curator and I kind of position them against one another. In the aughts, the field felt saturated with curators who were more interested in their own curatorial voice and the formats they had ingeniously created than the actual art. Every time I saw a Jens Hoffman show, the wall texts just spoke about the curatorial format. Rugoff seemed to balance that auteur-style curating with a real emphasis on the art.
It’s interesting because Europe was really open to the curator-as-author and the curatorial imagination. They valorized curators as having an authorial position, which generated a lot of questionable shows, but also lots of experimentation. The U.S. had a much more classical, art historian notion of the curator as somebody who’s not an author. So it was an interesting moment, but Rugoff seemed to be a kind of beacon – somebody who prioritized art above his own curatorial vision, even though he had a very strong one.
MOH: I was perusing your Instagram account and noticed that you post a lot about the artists you meet with during studio visits. I counted over five in the past month. Are these integral to your curatorial process?
CS: Absolutely. I do between 50 and 100 of them each year. It’s how you make discoveries. You meet the artist, get a better sense of where they're going and how they talk about their work. I’ve done studio visits all over the world. Like yesterday, I went to a studio visit in El Cerrito, outside of Oakland, in the middle of nowhere. I would have never otherwise gone to El Cerrito, which is interesting.
MOH: Given that curators can play a pivotal role in articulating an artist’s vision and challenging their ideas, I’m wondering what you look for during these studio visits. Do you prefer that artists already have very polished statements about their practice or still be working through their concepts?
CS: I’m generally drawn to artists who have considered practices, but who are also open to other readings. People who are still developing. For instance, I think back to when I lived in France as a young curator. You had a lot of very self-reflexive, nombriliste practices where artists and curators sat around pontificating about Deleuze, Derrida, etc. They had everything figured out, but the practice was not interesting. It just felt very safe, kind of witty and derivative. It was all kind of Ars Poetica, and in some cases, Ars Curatica. That’s interesting to a certain degree, but it got tiresome to walk into an artist’s studio and get a lecture about a French theorist. For me, it's important to go into an artist studio and see that they're working on something that partially escapes their comprehension and kind of confounds mine. You feel like they've opened up something that’s really going somewhere, and maybe someday people will understand this.
Aliza Nisenbaum at Lulu, Mexico City
MOH: Alongside your aversion to nombriliste art, you've also talked about how, through literary inspirations such as Vladimir Nabokov, you’ve never been big on overtly topical art. Why is that?
CS: I read Nabokov compulsively in my mid-twenties, and he kind of hammered into me what I've transformed into a deep suspicion of borrowed problems. For instance, you have all these neo-conceptual artists who revisit some form of historical violence or oppression from the ‘50s or ‘60s that didn't have anything to do with them. It might've affected their parents or possibly their own worldview, but it feels like a borrowed sense of urgency. I'm much more drawn to artists who have real problems and are thinking through them plastically or formally. But it's tricky…
MOH: How so?
CS: That’s a potentially incendiary thing to say right now, in the context of identity politics. But it just isn’t a point of interest for me. I guess you could say that I have the privilege to not be interested in it given that I'm a straight white guy, but at the same time, most work I see that is preoccupied with identity politics just seems like pure politics. Art inevitably responds to its moment because it’s not being made in a vacuum, but I think it also transcends that moment. It transcends whatever its own political issues might be and becomes something much larger and more complex.
MOH: Would you say that sentiment is shared by many of your Mexico City counterparts?
CS: Not at all. A lot of exhibitions here are predicated on historical investigation. You almost feel as though curators are attempting to explain or exclusively historicize works of art through their sociopolitical context. The art itself almost become incidental, like a footnote. Obviously, these things are important, but I don't think they determine the content or value of art. I think great works of art – and this is where I remain a good student of Nabokov – transcend their context. I feel it's reductive to always try and interpret art through these academic or scientific filters, you know?
MOH: That reminds me of something I read of yours, where you talk about art that's resistant to language – art that can't solely be explained by preexisting concepts or sociopolitical currents.
CS: You’re talking about The Theory of the Minor. Resistance to language is important for me, and a response to how, when and where I was formed as a curator, at a time when it felt like language preceded everything. You couldn't get involved in contemporary art if you hadn't read Mille Plateaux and didn't know your Adorno inside out. It was all framed in an academicism of conceptualism. That pushed me to a more radical extreme. I just think that the best art and literature invents its own language and you have to learn it. You don't come to it with all these codified frameworks.
MOH: Frameworks that people immersed in the art world understand, but that are mostly unintelligible to outsiders?
CS: Perhaps, but that's less a point of interest for me. I'm much more interested in a case like an Argentine artist I recently worked with called Santiago de Paoli. He’s an amazing painter and fucking weirdo who makes work that feels improbably Freudian, with strange depictions of genitalia. It’s funny because Latin American curators won't go near his work because, I suspect, it doesn't look Latin American. It doesn't fit into any of the codified categories of what constitutes ‘Latin American art’. To me, it's some of the most radical art being made in Latin America at the moment. It's the real thing. And in this case, I feel like non-specialists are able to access this work more quickly than those supposedly trained to do so.
Jennifer J. Lee
MOH: Where would you say you fit in as an American curator living in Mexico, running an independent arts space like Lulu? Do you aim to spotlight a different subset of so-called ‘Latin American art’?
CS: Absolutely. I hope so. Lulu is this strange monster because we show artists from all over the world, although we are also in dialogue with Latin America. I want to show a guy like Santiago because I don't think anyone else here will, especially so-called serious curators. I appreciate the scene in which we exist, locally and more generally in Latin America, but I also think it’s pretty dominated by the academicism of socio-politically engaged conceptualism. So I see Lulu as providing a very modest alternative. Young artists can come and see work by artists like Aliza Nisenbaum or Santiago and be like, “this is possible too.”
MOH: There also appears to be a focus on medium-specific practices like painting, sculpture and photography at Lulu.
CS: Lulu tends to show a lot of painting because painting in Mexico is very taboo. Barely any mainstream spaces show any. There's an assumption that painting is somehow complicit with the market and therefore devoid of any political content or agency, which I obviously disagree with. At Lulu, you can see amazing work like Santiago’s or our current show by Tom Allen, a Los Angeles painter in his mid-forties. He's one of the most talented painters anywhere at the moment, and he's totally overlooked by the commercial art world. Nobody knows what to do with it. Those are the kinds of practices I want to valorize, the idiosyncratic ones, the ones that don’t fit. I recently read a quote by New York gallerist Mitchell Algus. He said that for him, the great enemy is consensus. I would say the exact same.
“Lulu tends to show a lot of painting because painting in Mexico is very taboo. Barely any mainstream spaces show any. There's an assumption that painting is somehow complicit with the market and therefore devoid of any political content or agency, which I obviously disagree with.”
MOH: You also talk about the need for an art world that embraces cosmopolitanism over nationalism. That definitely comes across in your curatorial orientations at Lulu.
CS: I'm certainly in favor of cosmopolitanism. It’s just a fact that all great scenes are cosmopolitan. Like the Paris of fin de siècle that everybody reveres. Non-French artists were integral to the success and composition of that scene. You can say as much about New York, London and Berlin. I think Mexico, at certain points in history, has been very cosmopolitan as well. Even the 1990s that put Mexico on the map with artists like Melanie Smith and Francis Alÿs. Both of them became important components of that scene alongside a number of Mexican artists. So I think diversity of culture, language and voice is crucial.
MOH: Having lived in Paris, Milan and now Mexico City, do you think the singularity and specificity of each of those places can benefit artists?
CS: I’ve been thinking about this lately. All those cities, for instance, become a part of who I am and what I am. I think one of the great artists in Mexico who is just starting to get more historical valorization is Mathias Goeritz, a German sculptor who moved to Mexico during World War II and became close friends with Luis Barragán. He became this single-handed advocate for abstract art at a time when the dogma of Mexico was the figurative muralism of Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This was in the ‘50s and Goeritz became their mortal enemy. He threatened to upset their hegemonic control of art production in Mexico. And I think that Goeritz came along and did these kinds of gold monochromes. It was really important.
So ideas move and come from different places. Nothing is worse than hegemony, especially in cultural production. And it’s a complex monster. People can be totally complicit with hegemonic structures of cultural production without even knowing it. They just buy into the cliché of what it means to be a Mexican artist and start producing art that looks Mexican without reflecting on it. They just end up perpetuating the hegemonic structure. I’m much more interested in people who come along and upset, undermine or… bouleverser these dominant paradigms.
How did you come to recreate Lulu’s space inside the Palais de Tokyo?
I selected a single work from all of Lulu’s past solo and group exhibitions – around 45 works from 45 different artists.I programmed a different hanging inside the Lulu space every week.
MOH: That’s a nice segue into the colossal Palais de Tokyo exhibition Prince·sse·s des villes, which you contribute to as a Mexico City representative. How did you come to recreate Lulu’s space inside the Palais de Tokyo?
CS: One of the main curators, Hugo Vitrani, asked me how I would feel about rebuilding it. It was something that Martín, my cofounder and I, had considered in the past. We thought of making it a rule that if anyone invited us to do a show, they would have to rebuild the space. We actually turned down a number of invitations to curate as Lulu, because it didn't make sense without the proper space. So we decided to do a symbolic retrospective of the program. I selected a single work from all of Lulu’s past solo and group exhibitions – around 45 works from 45 different artists. The basic principle is that the Palais would rebuild this kind of one-to-one scale replica of Lulu. I programmed a different hanging inside the Lulu space every week. The larger space is this kind of salon-style hanging storage of the 45 works. Then, inside the space, it changes every week, giving people a sense of what it's really like to be in Lulu, which I believe is Mexico’s smallest space.
MOH: Finally, what do you wish you had known prior to taking on your first curatorial assignment?
CS: I would say the importance of saying no. Which is a rare power, especially as an independent practitioner. In the beginning, you feel like you just have to say yes to everything. But sometimes, the most important thing you can do is to say no and just… eat out less. (laughs) That and the importance of sticking to your vision.
Prince.sse.s des villes, featuring a retrospective of Lulu, is on at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until September 8.
Dane Mitchell’s Post hoc – New Zealand’s pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale – continues until November 24.
Tom Allen at Lulu, Mexico City