Shannyn Schack in Conversation with Iwona Blazwick OBE
Iwona Blazwick OBE is an art critic, tastemaker, and the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, a forward-thinking public art gallery in London’s East End known for premiering artists who have gone on to be Modern masters, such as Mark Rothko and Frida Kahlo. From its inception, the Gallery has also maintained their clear mission of bringing great art to East London and has a plethora of community-oriented programming.
Previously, Blazwick was the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as well as the Commissioning Editor for Phaidon’s Contemporary art books sector. She was also the founding Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern where she created the idea of the Turbine Hall commissions, as well as the permanent collection’s thematic display. She has always been a champion of emerging artists and was the first person to give Damien Hirst a solo show at a public institution.
MADE IN BED contributor Shannyn Schack interviews Iwona Blazwick about her curatorial practice, how 2020 has shaped us, and what art can do for society in this pivotal moment.
Iwona Blazwich OBE.
Shannyn Schack: What has been your lockdown routine, and where have you found inspiration in lockdown?
Iwona Blazwick: Because we have been opening and closing, and opening and closing, it’s meant that all the exhibitions we had planned, in which we invest a great deal of energy, time and money, we’ve had to put on hold. It’s been a very strange experience going into the gallery because there’s all these works of art like sleeping beauties, completely silent, not a soul anywhere, and we’ve had to therefore extend those exhibitions and push back the rest of our program.
Exhibition making is a complex web of relationships because we borrow works - we don’t have a collection. So, we have to ask every single lender for permission to keep their works longer, negotiate with packers and shippers, handle technical stuff and so on. Then we must push the whole program back, and we’ve now had to renegotiate all our exhibitions and displays until 2023. Also, there are a lot of stakeholders in exhibitions - not just the artists and the lenders, but also the people who support the show. So, our teams are busy rescheduling everything; contacting every single participant lender and that is a great deal of work.
The other big thing for us is fundraising. Our economy is based in three ways: a third of our revenue comes from the government, a third we raise (that means sponsorships, members and patrons), and a third we earn ourselves; and our earnings have been decimated. Like our colleagues, we sold tickets for exhibitions, we’re a publishing house, we sell editions, we have a restaurant, we have a book shop - all of which have been badly affected by the pandemic. So, what we’ve had to do, along with everyone else, is find money from other sources because buildings are hungry beasts even when we’re not in them. We still have utilities, maintenance and so on, and that’s a lot of money that we have to spend to keep the building and the works of art safe. We’ve been applying for lots of emergency funding, and I’m very pleased to say that we’ve made it! We are very relieved and that is why, even though nothing is going on, I’ve never worked so hard in my life.
There are two big shows coming up that I am excited about. The first one is called A Century of the Artist’s Studio: From the 1920s to the Present. There’s a little advisory board of curators, and we’re all brainstorming our way through the century. One of the things we’ve set out to do is always have gender balance, and that’s quite tricky to do retrospectively – these women might not have been published or they might have no record of their practices even though we know they’re there. It’s a bit of detective work, but there’s more and more evidence coming out now which we’re very happy to find. Our other group objective is to be global. Up until the 90s, when we (in our little art world) said “international,” what really meant was European and American (or what someone called the NATO alliance). Now, what we’re trying to reflect is that there are multiple Modernisms, and they were happening in every continent. That’s another part of the exciting work that we can do - we shine a spotlight on parts of the world where there were progressive art scenes, but they aren’t part of the canon. It is incredibly exciting.
The second show is called The Women of Abstraction and it’s about the female abstractionist painters working between the 1940s and the 1960s, whose male counterparts tended to eclipse them (like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko). We’re looking at the women who were obscured by these men, but who were equally powerful. And we know it too! Recently there was a fantastic show at the Barbican on Lee Krasner, but of course there’s also Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. We’ve again discovered that there were female artists working in different parts of the world, and we are working to bring all those together. The internet has been invaluable because more and more people are posting information, and that has been great. So that has been another fantastic project to figure out. We’re teasing out the clues.
SS: That all sounds so incredible! Particularly, Women of Abstraction. I just ordered the book “Ninth Street Women” by Mary Gabriel, so I’m also in that same headspace right now.
IB: Oh yes! I was actually thinking about calling the show “Ninth Street,” or something like that. There is a lot of really interesting research there and I think young academics of your generation want to find new territory. There’s some exciting about new scholarship in this area. It’s really an exciting time.
SS: Going off of what you were saying about adding to this global narrative and bringing to light these new stories, what would you say is your mission as a curator?
IW: I would say being a curator is about responding to what the artists do. Some curators do have a much more ideological direction, they are setting out to champion a certain idea or movement, whereas I am more ecumenical. I try to stay open to the next thing and to what the current generation is concerned about. But I’m also very committed to listening to the silences in history and understanding what those gaps in history were and understand that they were mostly female artists. So there’s three goals: being very open to what new generations are thinking about addressing in their work, working very closely with artists to realize their vision, and then at the same time to do this kind of revisionist work of looking at these lacunae, and discovering a very rich scene of work which gives us a different perspective of the world and one’s society, particularly on ethics.
SS: Absolutely, and that has been reflected in your curatorial practice for sure. In fact, you have been described as somebody who perfectly captures the cultural zeitgeist at any given moment. What would you say is the moment right now? How would you describe 2021 especially in light of 2020?
IB: Well, you’ve put your finger on the pulse there because that’s what everyone’s thinking right now especially given 2020 was so cataclysmic. There is certainly the condition of the pandemic, and I think as a consequence of that, a sense of isolation and in some cases, tremendous grief and anxiety, but also boredom. Then, also I think as a consequence of not doing what societies always do, which is working, consuming, and crashing about the world, there is a much more heightened sensitivity to the environment. I was talking to someone from the Financial Times the other day, and she and I discovered we have both been secretly birdwatching because we are suddenly very attuned to it! My guess is that since artists are part of our world, they have probably experienced a similar sensitivity. There’s also what is called hyperlocalism: being aware of one’s immediate surroundings. Because we constantly commute to our jobs, we were very rarely actually at home, and I think there is heightened sensitivity towards neighborhoods and the kind of overlooked treasures of where we all live. There are the day-to-day interactions with shopkeepers, but also, I’ve rediscovered architecture in the part of London where I live that I’ve never really looked at before. This sense of exploring the local, the nearby, it’s the same sense of looking at the overlooked.
Of course, the other huge eruption was the Black Lives Matter Movement, and I think that that has given us real pause because it’s made us question the constitution of our institutions and realized that there’s not nearly enough diversity. At the Whitechapel, we’ve had to take a step back and look at ourselves, and we’ve instigated this program called “Action for Change,” where we’re looking at our workforce, our program, and our audience. Because of those two things we’ve seen a huge appetite and openness towards artists of color. Part of that has certainly been emerging over the last five years, and in particular it’s this interest in figuration. We’ve seen great painters like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (whose show briefly opened at Tate Britain), and she’s had many very significant precursors like Kerry James Marshall. Successive generations of Black artists have really taken a genre of painting, portraiture, and entered its space and I think this is moment for that kind of figuration. That genre was always been affiliated with things like the “swagger portrait,” aristocracy in the 18th century, or just people who could afford to commission a painter, and they’ve taken that space and used it to depict scenes of everyday life. I also think it’s interesting because on the one side, there’s been a long history of polemic against art, which is about activism, raising awareness, protest, and rage. But what’s striking about this seem of painting is how celebratory it is. We did a show last year called Radical Figures which included Tschabalala Self whose works are so exuberant, and I think that’s a dominant trend at the moment. We can see there are artists like Steve McQueen, whose Small Axe series of films are both political and elegiac, and I think what we’ve seen recently is the coming together of those two impulses. So, that I’m very aware of. Of course, there’s the dominance of the digital, but to be honest, I’m getting really sick of the screen!
Artworks by Tschabalala Self.
SS: For sure! I definitely have digital fatigue. Speaking of artists of color and the digital sphere, Yinka Shonibare MBE was just selected as your Art Icon Award winner, however, this is also the first year you’re having a virtual gala. How has it been planning a virtual gala, especially for an artist as important as Shonibare, specifically in this moment?
IW: Well, it’s a steep learning curve for sure, but what we are trying to do is to create an experience that is as rich and exciting as being at a gala event in person. We’ve looked at the Oscars, we’ve looked at other events where people have been able to join from their sitting rooms, and what we’re really looking at is how to be broadcasters. We’ve lined up some amazing people - we have an MC, a wonderful singer, and we have Yinka himself, who is the most charismatic, charming figure, and he will appear on camera. We are also working very closely with Najda Swarovski of the Swarovski Foundation, who have been an important supporter of ours. We also have a great gala committee, and on that committee are people who are not only prominent art collectors, but also art supporters; so, everyone is contributing to the event to make it special. There will also be an amazing auction, and we’ve got some phenomenal lots because there is just so much love for Yinka. His work has been so inspiring for younger generations.
Yinka Shonibare MBE
One of the things about the Art Icon is that we celebrate not only the work, the oeuvre, the figure, but also the impact on other artists. It’s not an emerging artists award, like the Turner Prize, it’s for people who already have an established track record, and you can feel the tangible influence of what they’ve done. Yinka’s very interesting because he attended Goldsmith’s in the 80s, which is when they stopped teaching painting over here, sculpture over there - they stopped the medium-based departments and said ‘you can do whatever you like!’ He came out of that course being as good at photography as he was at print making, or sculpture, or installation, or performance. It gave him the opportunity to try different mediums. When he graduated, he quickly got a reputation for his photographs, where he appears as this 18th century dandy, but he’s also made some beautiful films. However, he’s also a great historian of empire, and the absorption of the famous Indonesian batiks by the Dutch Trading Company, which were then sold back to Africans, who then adopted it as an almost national textile. All of these things have made him very significant.
Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Yinka Shonibare.
The other thing we will be celebrating is Yinka’s foundation. It started with his studio in Hackney. He invited artists to pop curatorial proposals for exhibitions into a letterbox he put outside. Whatever proposals he liked, he would get in touch with that artist and give over his whole studio for that show. His generosity is incredible. But he also decided he wanted to give something back to Nigeria. In Lagos, he’s commissioned a great female architect to build a residency where artists from Britain can meet artists from Lagos and work together. Then, at the same time, he’s also making another foundation in the countryside outside Lagos where he’s bringing together art, design, and farming - together at last! So, I think his influence is profound because it’s not just in his practice, but it’s also what he’s giving back to those communities. It struck me that what he’s doing is overturning that first relationship through colonialism - of the British extracting resources and people for their empire - and he’s turning that into a much more positive bridge between Britain and Nigeria, which is about creativity and giving and nurturing something. He’s my hero!
SS: He is one of mine as well! Kind of pivoting, as you’re someone who leads the British, if not European cultural scene, now that the UK has left the EU, how has your approach to curating changed, and how do you hope to keep London as a center for culture?
IW: Ugh, the Brexit thing is so infuriating. Just with your business hat on, the tariffs and VAT are just a nightmare. As I said earlier, we are also a publishing house, so now the tariffs are going to make everything impossible - it’s really prohibiting. One of our biggest markets is the EU! But we are not deterred, in fact, we’re inspired to work even more with our European colleagues and to find ways to transcend this. I think the danger is that we become very parochial with an inward-looking tendency that I think is very unhealthy.
I am struggling at the moment to find the positives in all this, but it may be that it coincides with our other agenda that is trying to be more sustainable. With the constant travelling and the movement of works of art and so forth, maybe we do need a bit more localism, and I can see the potential in that. But in every other way it’s a disaster; certainly not just for the art world, but also for the performing arts. If a band wants to travel for a European tour, they will have to pay entry visas for every single country they travel to. All 27 of them. It’s just a way of closing down culture. What we are paying for is the decline of rural and post-industrial communities and we need to address that. Why did people vote for that? Why did people vote for Trump? We cannot turn our backs on it but begin to understand it. I wish it hadn’t happened, but we need to learn from it.
SS: Going off that, you have said before that moments after we are finally able to emerge from our homes, it will be this efflorescent period of viewing art with fresh eyes, and with that in mind, how can the art world capitalize on this moment to hopefully bring about some societal healing?
IW: There’s sort of this sense that it could drag on because of the new variants, so I don’t know if people will even feel they can touch each other. There might be a sense of restraint, and I’m not sure if people will feel totally confident going into auditoriums or large spaces again. That might take longer. I had dreamt of a kind of moment of release, but it looks like it’ll be more staggered. It’ll be more cautious, more restrained. I was thinking about this earlier, actually, and I think one of the aspects of healing is for all those who have felt very isolated or who might have lost spouses, or loved ones, or jobs, to try to give them a sense of hope and agency, but also inclusion. That to me, is the overwhelming message of the past year. If we want to engender a feeling of hope, we need to make people feel not just welcome, but also encouraged to come into the art world. We need to embrace them and find ways to reduce the barriers to entry. It may be that we must go out on the street! Of course, it overlaps with the BLM movement by saying if you don’t see yourself in those programs, you’re less likely to relate to them. We need to diversify - and it’s happening everywhere, I can see it, and it’s very exciting. For people to feel like they can participate is very important to me. So, on the one hand, as you said there’s a kind of therapeutic side to this, but also there’s the idea that you can be part of something bigger.
Going back to the business side of things, I think there will be a lot of pent-up spending. I certainly will - I haven’t been out for dinner, or a concert, or anything! I think people will really want to buy stuff, so let’s make things that are worth that moment of exhilaration. Let's make beautiful editions, let’s make fantastic objects about love and craftsmanship that aren’t throw-away, and let’s learn from the environmentalists about throwaway culture. I was very inspired by an issue of Wallpaper magazine last summer, which was called “Recreate.” It focused on lots of startups experimenting with everything from the wasteful sides of fashion, industry and agriculture, and there were amazing ideas! Beautiful as well. There were kids who just graduated from the Royal College of Art working with those who just graduated from Imperial, and I saw science and arts come together. That collaboration is exciting to see on the horizon. In fact, we are planning a conference where we will join forces with the Gallery Climate Coalition on the art world’s sustainability, and what I’d like to do is invite young designers, engineers, architects, and artists to come together and come up with practical solutions. Then, we’ll need someone to invest in it. But we’ll see!
Another thing that may happen has to do with real estate. Because there are always empty offices, and it’s not clear when people will come back or if they will come back. So, I think a lot of companies are going to downscale. It could be as it was in the glorious late 80s-early 90s where Damian Hirst and the YBAs had the pick of all these spaces that developers couldn’t shift. It could be that artists, where they couldn’t get a studio space 2 years ago, now have all these spaces that are available, and they’ll have to be cheaper. So that could be exciting especially in the City of London where all those offices sit empty. I’d love to see them filled with artist studios.
SS: Speaking of Damian Hirst, you were one of the first people to take a chance on him and you’ve said that one of the things that drew you to him was his entrepreneurial spirit. What are some of the other things that you look for in emerging artists?
IW: Form is the first thing - the aesthetic. What do they do? And that’s difficult to quantify or describe. But when you see something that feels beautifully conceived and put together, that’s what first draws you and then the ideas come after that. That draw used to be the shock of the new, something you’d never seen before that stops you in your tracks; or it could be something which you have a deep sense of recognition of, like great painting sometimes, and it could reverberate through the whole history of painting. I’m thinking of someone like Cecily Brown, she has that Baroque aspect and then the whole history of painting bubbles up to the surface. Or someone like Dana Schutz, I feel the same way about her - I think of Picasso, and all this other art history. That competence in terms of aesthetic, as well as confidence in their aesthetic and finding a visual language which is powerful, arresting but has depth. It’s like music, if it’s too immediate, it doesn’t come back. There’s depth of idea but also consistent production over a period of time. We all know great artists who only ever made one great piece, so it’s following people over time and seeing if they can maintain that creative caliber. That’s hugely difficult and it takes immense courage, particularly when you don’t get recognition, and that’s why I’m also drawn to older practitioners. We are about to commission Simone Fattal, who’s in her 70s of Syrian origin, and she’s one of the greatest ceramic artists in the world. She’s totally flown under the radar, but she was shown at MoMA PS1 last year and she’s astonishing; and she never stopped. That’s the mark of a great artist – they don’t have a choice. That drive absorbs them and every day they are back in the studio regardless of whether or not they have a gallery or a show. I have such admiration for that drive, and I stand in awe of it.
SS: Another conversation I’ve been hearing frequently among artists, especially on social media, is this fixation on marketing themselves or having a massive social media following. But there is rarely a focus on the work itself. What can you tell those who are preoccupied in those conversations?
IW: A lot of artists like Instagram because it’s easy to share work and I totally get that, but I don’t go on social media. Because once you’re on, you sort of go down a rabbit hole - hours go past and I don’t have the inclination for it. I know that it is a vast part of the world, but followers and marketing are not a real barometer of value. People were ignored by virtue of their skin pigmentation or by the great critics of their day for any number of reasons, so no, follower count doesn’t influence the intrinsic value of the art. It comes down to the works.
SS: Completely agree! I wanted to do a more fun, rapid-fire round of questions right at the end here. So, number one, what was it like waking up to find that you have received a New Year’s Honor from the Queen?
IW: Well, I thought it was a demand from the Inland Revenue! I thought “Oh my god!” and my heart sank. “Did I forget to pay taxes or something?” But then when I realized, my jaw dropped to the floor. It was astonishing. I was so moved by it because you have to be nominated. So, someone was paying attention, and that was so marvelous. It was also fantastic because we were in the middle of expanding the Whitechapel, so I was busy trying to raise money to acquire that gigantic old library. So having that OBE was not a bad thing when I was asking people to support us. It gave us the staying power and energy to get us through. I’m really grateful to whoever it was that nominated me! I got to meet the Queen and it was a fantastic experience being in Buckingham Palace. The person in front of me in the queue had been given an OBE for services to beekeeping, isn’t that wonderful? And to be in the same company was an honor- curating, beekeeping, it’s all wonderful.
SS: If you could own any piece of art in any collection or institution anywhere, what would it be?
IW: This always changes as I change, but I think I would want Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and the cabin that’s attached to it. Think big, you know? It’s in New Mexico, and he used this pioneer’s cabin and restored it. You have to go there for 24 hours, and it’s a gigantic plateau which he’s seeded with lighting masts. There are all these 16-meter-high lighting masts, and only in August and maybe one day in July do they get actually get hit by lighting - it’s the most sublime place. The quietude and intensity of it is something I’ll never forget. Partly being in the cabin as well, it’s very simple, austere and beautiful. There’s no telephone, nothing. You just listen to the wind and see the sun rise and fall, it’s an astonishing place.
SS: That sounds like such an incredible pilgrimage to make. Good choice! It reminds me that you have previously said you love to go somewhere in Joshua Tree…
IW: Yes! It’s Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum! I’m doing a show out in Joshua Tree soon actually. Noah Purifoy was this artist who left LA and was a trained artist but also a community arts worker, and he felt disillusioned and went out to the desert and created this entire sculpture park. It’s quite extraordinary. It’s one of the most beautiful sculptural installations in the world and it’s made entirely from things that he scavenged on the desert surface. It’s a town too - there’s a theater, stadium and the audience for the stadium is made of legs of jeans that he found. Someone had dumped unsold denim jeans in the desert, and he cut them from the knee to the ankle and attached them to sneakers he also found out there.
He’s passed sadly, but it’s protected by Ed Ruscha and Andrea Zittel, and Andrea has this beautiful project called “The High Desert Test Site.” She runs her studio there, which is called A to Z (for Andrea Zittel). She has residencies for artists there and now she’s a trustee of the Noah Purifoy Museum. If you do go, you have to have dinner at Pappy and Harriet’s. It’s in a stockade in a place called Pioneertown, which was a film set for a Western, and by day, it’s this amazing BBQ restaurant frequented by Hells Angels. But by night it’s a music venue, and everybody’s played there – Bob Dylan, all sorts. It’s a musician’s pilgrimage to play there!
SS: It almost sounds like you have this sort of romance with the American West!
IW: I do! Very much so!
SS: Have you been to Death Valley?
IW: Of course! It’s one of my most beloved places on the planet and I visited every year, for 20 years because my partner’s family would holiday there. I’m a great admirer of Andrea Zittel’s project because of it, and one of the things she does is also support weavers and has a ceramic studio and she has created this microeconomy of creativity. Her work is interesting - it’s become quite a hub for artists.
SS: That is so wonderful, Death Valley a phenomenal place, and I’ve got to check out her work! Really rapid fire now: tea or coffee?
IW: Tea, actually. Earl Grey. Or Lemon Zinger from Celestial Seasonings
SS: Chanel or Schiaparelli?
IW: Oh, that’s hard! Schiaparelli, but I’m partial to Chanel because my mother wore the perfume, so I can’t decide.
SS: Well, thank you so much for your time, it has been so much fun talking to you.
IW: Agreed! Thanks for asking me!
Thank you very much, Iwona Blazwick OBE !
To learn more about the upcoming exhibitions please visit the Whitechapel Gallery website: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/
Shannyn Schack,
Contributor, MADE IN BED