Here comes the judge

By LINDA HERRICK


Like many Americans, Robert Storr has November 2 on his mind. He's wanted to come to New Zealand for many years but such is the tightness of next week's presidential race, his visit Downunder to judge Friday night's Walters Prize has to be fleeting.

"I am very careful to get back in time to vote," says the 54-year-old drily from his offices at New York University.

No prizes for guessing where Storr's ballot will be going, but he's not optimistic. "I think it's very likely we will have Bush in power for another four years and it's going to be a very difficult time.

"He takes such a simplistic view of the realities around him, and he's so antagonistic too, not just towards the people who have declared themselves his enemies but also to the people who have declared themselves his friends."

The subject of Bush has come up because on the day I call him, there has just been a debate on CNN over the Bush team's use of images of 9/11's Ground Zero for the Republican campaign. There seems to be a dichotomy between New York artists' unwillingness to use 9/11 in their work, or very little of it, and the ease with which the Bushites will milk images of that appalling site to catch votes.

"People are just beginning to express their feelings about 9/11 in terms of art," says Storr. "I think people were so shocked by 9/11, and of course it happened in a community where a great many artists live.

"They were so shocked, they didn't know what to say, but also they realised they didn't want to make rhetorical political art out of it. It was too profound, too complicated an experience to do that.

"But Bush's Ground Zero ads - that was to be expected. I think a great many of the families of survivors and victims find this very objectionable."

As anyone who has followed American politics over recent years will know, Bush boasts a black and white, good vs evil worldview, which Storr has critiqued damningly in journals and magazines. The latest, View From the Bridge, in the October issue of Frieze magazine, discusses the "newly calibrated rainbow of fear and anxiety" in a world where politicians' only interest in colour, and diversity, "is in its capacity to stir up and calibrate hysteria".

Art and politics are inseparable but, like many of us, Storr wishes most politicians would refrain from trying to be art critics. Given the hullabaloo (take note, Deborah Coddington) over the choice of et al to go to the Venice Biennale next year, it's ironic that the el al collective is also one of the Walters Prize finalists he'll be perusing at the end of this week.

"Politicians in the United States get involved in debate about art, absolutely. [Former New York] mayor Rudolf Guiliani attacked a show at the Brooklyn Museum he hadn't even seen [the Sensations exhibition]. Politicians of that rabble-rousing kind will never miss an opportunity to make a ruckus but it shouldn't be taken seriously, just as politicians shouldn't be taken seriously as critics either."

Storr says he is coming to the content of the Walters' finalists "pretty green", admitting Auckland Art Gallery has sent him some background material - which he's lost.

"But honestly, I don't think that is crucial because I do an enormous amount of studio visits and I see exhibitions and so on. I look very hard and very intently when I do that.

"Being in the presence of the stuff itself will make the crucial difference - the more I know about the artists is helpful but frankly, it's the work that does it."

The subject of Storr's lecture at the gallery on Thursday is, in part, self-criticism. It seems that aiding understanding and appreciation of contemporary art - a good part of Storr's mission - creates its own problems.

"I'm going to be talking about the increase in art information and the difficulties that poses for artists and galleries and members of the public in particular. How it is that the understanding and appreciation of art is usually a fairly gradual process but surfeits of information have become speeded up to the point where people don't have time to come to terms with the things that bother them.

"The success of art is also its greatest threat. The more art becomes an industry of amusement, entertainment, spectacle, the more distractable people are and they don't really have the chance to let the things that matter sink in.

"As much as I am part of that world, as much as I encourage activity wherever possible, I'm also aware there is a downside ... we sometimes create problems, so there's a little self-criticism in there."

Storr has been selected to curate the Venice Biennale in 2007, and already he's established a theme - but he's not telling.

"In my mind I have, but I'm not saying what it is yet, it may change. Venice is a crazy show in a crazy environment, a circus atmosphere. You could go at it the right way and pick the right artists and still not get it right, it still wouldn't gel. I would rather that it was lively than perfect."

Lively, not perfect. That's clearly what he's hoping to see when he arrives in Auckland and starts engaging with the work of the Walters four.

"I'll try and do a very good job, deal with the work as it is. My view is that it's too bad one of the principal ways of getting money to artists is prizes, but it is one of the ways and it can't be bad altogether.

"One solution might be to just cut the cheque into four quarters and give them all a prize."

Visual Arts

*Who: Walters Prize judge Robert Storr, New York-based curator, critic and lecturer.

Storr's credits include 12 years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he was senior curator, department of sculpture and painting. He is the Rosalie Solow professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Most recently, Storr curated the Fifth International Santa Fe Biennal, Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, which runs until January.

*Where and when: The 2004 Walters Prize Lecture, Auckland Art Gallery, Thursday, 6pm; Walters Prize gala dinner and award announcement, Auckland Art Gallery, Friday. The finalists are Jacqueline Fraser, et al, Daniel von Sturmer, Ronnie van Hout.