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The Itinerary of a Collector and his Collection
Pierre Huber
I lived two full lives before becoming interested in contemporary art, opening my gallery, and becoming a collector. In the fifty years of my professional life, I have never needed an alarm clock to wake me up; I am too impatient to see what each day will bring. My engagement in each of these lives has been passion-filled, as I strove to find answers to questions raised along the way.
In my first life, I succeeded at the test of will which is the world of sports and athletics, and I taught my students how to win. In my second life, I opened several restaurants in Geneva, one of which became very well-known, in the 1970s, for its nouvelle cuisine.
My third life, in contemporary art, came next. I had no predisposition toward it, nor did I have any formal training in art, nor any academic preparation in the field. I nonetheless had some idea of what makes an artist, as my father was a musical conductor. My adventures in art began in one of my restaurants, the Escapade, in Cartigny, where we hung the work of local artists on the walls. Eventually, the hang became an exhibition program that changed every month, and I worked directly with the artists. My customers could also purchase the art, and that is how it all began. I had contracted the collecting virus, and began to accumulate works of art, and to think about how they interacted. My third life as both dealer and collector was born of this duality, and the sale of paintings in the restaurant allowing me to make art purchases of my own.
I began to do some research, to visit shows. One is not born a collector, one becomes one, bit by bit, enbarking on a journey during which one's sensibility and knowledge develop and sharpen over time.
Was I predisposed to this journey by my personality and life experience? I often refer to the instance of my grandfather, a stamp collector, from whom I may have inherited the collecting virus. I spent each summer as a child with him, and slept in a small room filled with his stamp boxes and albums, which I furtively and compulsively studied every night instead of sleeping.
When my collecting began, I was essentially accumulating works. I did not have the knowledge required to make exacting choices, and I was worried that I might miss something important. But I already knew that a work of art was something complex and unique because it could not be reduced to the sum of its parts. I intuited that a work of art is something that needs to be examined and understood over time, and that part of its pleasure derives from delectation and intellectual investigation. A visit to a John Armleder exhibition was vital. Honestly, I did not get what I was seeing, but I was intrigued and determined to understand the work. Thus began my personal art history course, in direct contact with works of art.
In addition to being judged by its unique properties, a work of art can be evaluated within a historical context, outside of the dictates of the market and fashion. I had conceived my own riddle, one in which very new work could be judged next to contemporary classics by Christopher Wool or On Kawara. At the onset of my collecting, I naively assumed that a good artist necessarily creates good work, but I quickly found out differently. Not only must a work stand on its own two feet, it must also survive confrontation with other works and other practices. Put a Sherman next to a Picabia, for instance: if the works are strong enough, they will survive the face-off. Alongside this discovery, I progressively acquired a faculty which is best described as instinct. I literally looked at thousands of works: paintings, sculpture, video, all of which minted my sensibilities and purchasing practices.
Where did I see most of these works? In various places, many of which contributed to my education, but the Basel Art Fair in particular, to which I made an annual pilgrimage, played an important role. I felt good there, more relaxed than in a museum. I could freely spend hours at the fair, checking out the booths and chatting with the dealers who were forthcoming with information. I immersed myself completely in their knowledge. By contrast, my first visit to a Parisian gallery was a disaster: the dealer ignored me and made the snap judgment that I wasn't a buyer.
At the Halle fur neue Kunst in Schaffhausen, which is deemed a temple of Minimalism and Arte Povera, I was very impressed with, and explored in depth, the work of Carl Andre and Donald Judd. The work of John Armleder, Olivier Mosset, Helmut Federle, and the other '80s artists who were called neo-geo, and which I was buying, seemed to me to belong to the exalted tradition of modernism and the avant-garde. I made a purchase every year at the Basel Art Fair, and in 1984, I acquired a "furniture sculpture" by John Armleder. It had taken me years to get there, like a sort of therapy, and I had finally crossed the threshold. Like the late Geneva collector Andre L'Huillier, for whom I felt a special affinity, I experience a physical and emotional rapport so strongly with art that I sometimes come down with a fever.
I listened to and learned from various art personalities along the journey, as I honed my taste and redirected my collection. What I learned from these mentors help me form my own judgment. I often say that I opened my ears in order to open my eyes, on the way to becoming an independent thinker. And I also believe that it is better to fool oneself than to be fooled by others.
John Armleder is among those who influenced me the most, as an artist, as a producer and as the impresario of the alternative space Ecart, and my purchase of his furniture/sculpture painted with a neo-Suprematist motif was a real turning point in my journey. I am convinced that he is one of the greats of his generation.
In 1995, when the art market was in the doldrums, I commissioned Armleder to make a work of art out of my stand at the Basel Art Fair, and the result was A Pudding Overdose. I gave him complete access to all the works in my storage and elsewhere so that he could realize a work based on the concepts of "too much" and "overdone," which were dominant themes in his work of the time. The project was roundly criticized, but it accurately reflected the state of the market. Art wasn't selling, and storages were bursting. On my stand, works leaned against the wall, overlapping one another, in direct opposition to notions of taste and the classical gallery presentations. A Pudding Overdose cemented my convictions about the importance of context and exhibition, even in an art fair. I also foresaw that we were on the cusp of change and that art fairs would no longer be the province of a few sophisticated collectors, but would become more populist and spectacular.
Bob Nickas was also a vital presence on my journey, and was my initial guide to New York's young galleries and artists. He introduced me to what was happening at the time, and I invited him to curate an exhibition in Geneva, called Art of the Real, inspired by MoMA's 1968 show of the same title (we even adopted the same typeface). It was with Bob that I discovered the work of Jeff Koons, Steven Parrino, Allan McCollum, and Sherrie Levine, among others. We commissioned new work for the show, almost all of which I decided to keep for my collection, including some by artists who have now completely disappeared from the scene and the market.
Works of art, side by side, should constitute a veritable pedagogy of art, should speak to one another, and of their creation, as well as say something about the person who collected them. One should seek to collect artists in depth, as I have done with Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and On Kawara, who is, for me, one of the most important artists of all time. He is as important for me as Piet Mondrian, whom I consider number one in all things.
This focus on concept within the collection has developed in concert with my meeting certain art world personalities, like Lionel Bovier, who is rapidly becoming the art editor of his generation. Or the curator Yves Aupetitallot, who inspired me to concentrate with renewed vigor on the work of California artists such as Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Paul McCarthy, and European artists such as Franz West. Yves also helped foster my decision to go for institutionally-scaled, outsized work which is beyond the scope of everyone except the most ambitious collector. And it is thanks to him that I was able to acquire major statements by these artists, and to participate in their creation.
As of the early 80s, this is move toward large scale work inspired me to help reorganize the Basel Art Fair with my fellow committee members Felix Buchmann and Gianfranco Verna. Together we applied stringent quality criteria which resulted in a 70 percent turnover in the participating galleries. We also invited prestigious American galleries, as well as Australian and Chinese galleries to exhibit, with the express aim of making it an event with an impact beyond the market. After several tries, we also created Art Unlimited, which was an invitation to artists to create museum-scale works. Art Unlimited became just as important as the biennials, almost interchangeable with them.
In the past 10 years, the boundaries between various art forms have collapsed including the literal and geographic ones--which have been virtually abolished. I have made a priority of introducing of Asian artists, particularly Chinese artists, to the international scene as well as those from India, Russia, and South America. Always intrigued by new challenges, I am financing a new technology program and attendant prize at the Art School of Huangzhou. Most of all, I am co-organizing the first important contemporary art fair in Asia, Shanghai Contemporary, which will open its doors on September 5, 2007. This brand new fair will benefit from my experiences as a committee member of the Basel Art Fair, and from my reflections since I left.
To focus on this new project, I need to be completely available. For this reason I have decided to sell a part of my collection. I dreamed of finding a permanent institutional home for the collection in the region of Geneva and Lausanne, but had to face the fact that no museums in the area were up to the task. I had so hoped to show my Ruffs at the MAMCO, and my experience there exemplifies the failure of a collector's interaction with an institution.
As a result, I began to ask myself about the future of my collection. I am very attached to Geneva, and had really hoped to make my collection accessible to the public. It is, after all, the city in which I made my life and where I have nurtured some of the more gutsy contemporary collections in Europe.
By holding this sale in New York, I am coming back to where it all began. This holds symbolic meaning for me as my first journey into the New York art world was almost 30 years ago: it represents the closing of the loop.
I conceive of this sale as a thoughtful and demanding art project, which, like Art Unlimited, will open up new practices in the marketplace, but this time in the context of the auction salesroom. The sale is composed of works that are both conventional to the format of auction and others which are not (I refer to those as so-called institutionally scaled works). Deliberately I have included some artists who are presently underrated by the market but whom I believe to have important potential ahead. John Miller, for instance, is every bit as significant for me as his peers Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.
This unusual and innovative event is right in line with the projects I have realized to date. I could have sold a work here and there from my collection, but my gallery work is separate from my collection, and I am specifically adhering to a transparent sales process in which the selection of works for sale represents more than a conga line of works. BEYOND represents a concentrated version of my collection, its spirit, and its criteria. Certain works, like Mike Kelley's Test Room, are essential works in the career of the artist, and are not commercially easy. These are demanding and radical works, and are destined to be owned by collectors who seek artistic and intellectual challenge. The challenge is vital. This sale is conceived, first and foremost, as an exhibition, and together with Christie's, we are excited by this ambitious project which promises to shift boundaries.
In going to public auction, I have sought to give every collector an equal opportunity to collect. It has become clear that, on the primary market, buying power belongs to an elite group of private and public collectors, and the beauty of the auction process is its democratic format. I have suffered from the restrictive practices of the primary market, and my lack of access has sometimes caused me to doubt my own collection. I am hereby offering everyone the opportunity to make a purchase!
My collection will nevertheless continue.
As I turn 65 years old, my wish is to share my passion for art with as large an audience as possible. This is the start of my fourth life.
Glamorous and Violent, Self-sufficient yet Historically-charged:
Pierre Huber and Art after Minimalism
Michael Ned Holte
Dual Roles
Curator, collector, dealer, commissioner, advisor, passionate lover of--these are all accurate descriptions of the roles Pierre Huber has played in the art world over the last thirty years. In this time and through these various roles, Huber assembled a remarkable collection that is a testimony to his insight into the global cultural condition of artists and art-making in this contemporary moment. Like the period of time it represents, the collection contains paradoxes--works of art made in various international locales by artists with pluralistic (if not downright oppositional) goals and somewhat different senses of art history. These paradoxes are ultimately reconciled by the moxie of the person who brought this amazing work together, as a gallery owner and as a collector. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Huber began his dual role as exhibitor and collector of contemporary art in the late 1970s--after a brief, but promising career as restaurateur--and opened his influential Art & Public gallery in 1984. Since then, he has proven to be an adept and prescient dealer and collector of contemporary art.
Huber's evolution coincides with the period, beginning in the mid-1960s, that critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as "the first symptom of the crisis of Modernism as much as its apotheosis." In other words, the Huber collection coincides with the period defined, however problematically, by the term "Postmodernism" and the question of what comes next. By the mid-1960s, many artists concerned with some notion of the avant-garde or "advanced art"--both implying some notion of progress--had unceremoniously arrived at an awkward impasse wherein many of the supposed goals of Modernism had been achieved--or at least imagined, if not executed. The teleological imperatives assigned to Modernism by powerful critics such as Clement Greenberg had seemingly found their way to the dead end of progress and a perceived "dematerialization" of the object of art, if not its actual obsolescence.
Of course art did not go away. It turns out that the tidy lineage of Modernism was actually filled with false promises and missing pieces. Important characters were erased from the narrative and complex scenes deleted. Art didn't reach its endpoint so much as a new beginning. And this is where Pierre Huber enters the story.
Journey of the Self-Taught
I've followed a very personal apprenticeship in the history of art. I've constructed my knowledge in the field, in direct contact with the works and their relationship to one another. I've understood, it seems to me, the importance of situating a work, of trying to know what it is worth in a larger arena than the immediacy of the market or fashion--that of history. It's like a puzzle. The circumstances, the meetings, and the conception of a whole that is worth more than the sum of its parts have fed my collection. --Pierre Huber
Huber, as a collector, was educated in public, over time, with his eyes (and ears) wide open. Unlike many collectors who operate quietly behind the scenes, through his gallery, Huber made his tastes and inclinations visible. When he first became interested in contemporary art, Huber visited galleries in Paris--a much larger art scene than the one in his native Geneva--but found his groove in the more fast-paced and transparent world of art fairs, where capital and ideas freely mingle. It should come as no surprise that Huber saw the promise of art fairs years before they became, for better or worse, the grease in the engine of the art world. When the art market went sour in the early 1990s, Huber was instrumental in reinventing the Basel Art Fair as a merit-based exposition intended for the best and brightest galleries rather than the old, familiar faces. By drawing American galleries and works by younger artists to the Fair, and by presenting an ambitious series of programmed events and showcase installations, Huber helped to transform the art fair model in a way that transcended its stale, "trade-show" antecedent. He continues to rework the role of art fairs and the role they can play in emerging markets and is currently organizing the first international art fair in Shanghai, scheduled to open in September 2007.
Beyond the Visible
In the 1980s, when Huber began collecting in earnest, the market was largely dominated by Neo-Expressionist work from Italy, Germany, and the United States. Huber's collection does not reflect that fashionable moment in time. Instead, whether intentionally avoiding that work or not (remember that Huber was early on a persona non grata at the blue-chip galleries)--his early purchases have held up remarkably well in the marketplace of ideas. Many of Huber's favorites, John McCracken, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, and Richard Prince, to name a few, were unkown or even invisible in the early 1980s and have since become major artists despite enormous resistance or indifference by an often-fickle art world.
The logic of Huber's collection is personal, but hardly inevitable, as he worked diligently to draw connections between works acquired and works desired (he has admitted being slow in making some of his favorite purchases). In other words, the thing that holds together the collection is Huber's prescient ability to selectively choose the best artists at a particular moment in time. At its epicenter, indelibly marked by Minimalism and the movement's residual effects on contemporary art.
Ideal Structures
So what has Minimal art become 25 years later? An abyss separates us from the time of its appearance: it is the art of the 1980s, to a large degree reliant on minimal forms, which allows us to see most clearly what has changed and clearly shows us that this generation was the first symptom of the crisis of modernism as much as its apotheosis.
--Nicolas Bourriaud, "Ideal Structures"
This question about the fate of Minimalism--and its preliminary answer--was set forth by Bourriaud in his catalogue essay for the exhibition Ideal Structures at Huber's gallery in 1989. While Bourriaud's above statement was written to accompany an exhibition of work by significant U.S. Minimalist artists such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd, along with their European counterparts including Bernard Venet and Franz-Erhard Walther, it quietly stands as a telling assessment of the figure behind the scenes of Ideal Structures: Pierre Huber.
Huber began buying works by significant American Minimalists, notably Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt (many of whom, it should be said, have explicitly rejected the term) in the late 1970s, when that work was no longer considered radical or even interesting. Carl Andre's Bar, 1981, a gangplank comprised of 36 units of Douglas Fir, and Sixteen Steel Cardinal, 1974, a square grid of 16 plates of hot-rolled steel, are strong examples of the artist's floor-bound arrangements of repeating, unattached, off-the-shelf units of industrial goods in wood, metal, or stone. Andre's notion of sculpture was radical in the early 1960s and in the intervening years he has continued to investigate the surprising range of possibilities opened by his initial discovery.
Like Andre, Dan Flavin built his career around the use of readymade, industrial objects that call attention to the architectural container. Each of Flavin's works is typically deployed as a simple series or arrangement of units. His Untitled (To Ksenija), 1985, pairs a long vertical blue fluorescent tube with a stack of four short tubes of blue, green, yellow, and pink, and achieves maximum phenomenological effect by juxtaposing colored light from a few mundane, industrial objects.
Donald Judd's wall-mounted Untitled (DSS 89), 1966, also makes use of industrial materials, but unlike his peers Flavin and Andre, he had his "specific objects" fabricated according to shop drawings. Untitled (DSS 89) consists of a shallow stainless steel box cantilevered from the wall and inset with a plane of amber Plexiglas, which casts a warmly colored shadow on the wall. Its elegance and simplicity is emblematic of the late, self-assured artist's enormously influential career.
John McCracken represents a significant West Coast counterpoint to Judd, Andre, and Flavin, who were all based in New York. The smooth, luminous, resin-coated Yellow Cube, 1971, and Galaxy, 1998, are paradigmatic works by McCracken, who was surely more inspired by Los Angeles' surf and custom-car cultures (not to mention otherworldly concerns) than cold, industrial fabrication. McCracken who now lives and works in New Mexico has rarely been accorded the respect given his East Coast peers, but his glossy take on "ideal structures" was important in fostering Huber's interest in the southern California art world.
The Anxiety of Influence
Significantly, Huber began buying Minimalist art alongside works by artists who had emerged in that movement's wake and those who had actively worked to undermine its purity and finality. As Bourriaud writes in "Ideal Structures," "Each generation of artists marks their epoch by leaving a shock wave behind them, a movement that becomes more complex as it widens. First intentions are superceded by new implications in response to current phenomena." Huber's shock wave is Minimalism, which anchors everything else in the collection, and much of what follows chronologically was created as either an extension of Minimalism's relentlessness or "theatricality," made in hopes of deferring the finality of Minimalism's victory, if not violently tearing open the seams of its "ideal" (and idealized) structures, or some combination of the above. Even the earliest work in the collection, Francis Picabia's Femme sur Fond Vert, was understood by Huber as a masterful late work by the artist, one which went against the consensus of connoisseurship for the artist's work. With the new wave of figurative American painters interested in beauty and its convulsive qualities, notably John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, Picabia's late work can be seen as profoundly influential.
John Miller's Mirror Maze, 2000-2005, is a smart if ambivalent homage to Minimalism and it's influence. Composed of a symmetrical hall of mirrors, the installation work directly recalls prototypical "labyrinths" by Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman--works that caused critic and historian Michael Fried, in his famous 1967 Artforum essay "Art and Objecthood," to condemn Minimalist work as "theatrical" because it overly depended upon a viewer to activate or complete the work. Miller exploits this sense of theatricality to the point of absurdity by placing a column composed of plastic fruit as a stand-in for the viewer in front of the mirrors, which is then reflected infinitely outward.
In his series of 60 Portraits, made between 1983 and 1986, Düsseldorf-based artist Thomas Ruff applies Minimalist-derived serial repetition and cold precision to photograph a diverse group of individuals, creating palpable tension between the rationality of Minimal art and the emotional residue of human experience. Working in a wide variety of media, London-based artist Martin Creed frequently uses materials and methods associated with Minimalism but does so in an anti-Minimalist way. His neon installation Small Things, 2001, recalls Flavin, but ironically uses enormous letters to spell out the title of the work.
Symbolic Exchange
A number of works in Huber's collection might formally recall historical Minimalism, but they instead challenge the purity or self-sufficiency of minimal form by suggesting their own exchange value or symbolic meaning. Düsseldorf-based artist Thomas Demand takes "realistic" photographs of elaborate tableaux constructed from colored paper and then destroys the sculptural construction in favor of the final image. His photograph, Bullion, 2003, seemingly depicts multiple stacks of standard units of pure gold, recalling the repeating metal units of Carl Andre, but while Andre's materials are always meant to appear as humble, Demand's "gold" is ironically made of paper. Geneva-based Sylvie Fleury's chrome Kelly Bag, 1998, and Ford Cosworth DFV, 2000, are as elegant and "specific" as any object produced by Donald Judd, but unlike her forebears, Fleury's objects point to specific things in the real world and, by casting them in chromed bronze, she exponentially heightens their glamour.
In a different way, On Kawara's paintings follow from the serial logic of Minimal art with which they are more or less contemporaneous but implicate time as an item of symbolic exchange. The ten signature canvases that comprise The 90s represent a significant group of work from the ongoing "Today Series", which Kawara initiated in the 1960s. Following a number of self-imposed rules, Kawara coolly, carefully hand paints the date on which the painting was made, using the language and syntax of the place in which the painting was made, using white Liquitex acrylic on a black or darkly-colored monochrome background. If Kawara fails to complete a painting on the day it is started, he destroys it (on occasion, he has made two paintings in a single day). Each painting is paired with a simple box lined with a local newspaper from the place Kawara is located at the time. The repetitive nature of his intermittent endeavor brings the empathetic weight of passing time--with a sense of mortality and a human connection to the contingency of world events--to the serial, machine-like logic of Minimal art.
Regional Conflicts
In the wake of Minimalism and its clear teleological imperatives, the contemporary art world has essentially adopted a common language with a decidedly international reach. The dramatic increase in number and influence of art fairs and biennials in formerly remote artworld "outposts" is indicative of contemporary art's global assimilation. While positioned in the small art world of Geneva, Pierre Huber developed his collection by traveling extensively--or, conversely, by bringing artists from various bases to exhibit at Art & Public--and, as a result, his collection successfully reconciles seemingly disparate regional movements and provincial tendencies.
His holdings of work by American artists who emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s reflect a smart, bi-coastal purview. They also finds the shadowy influence of Pop Art--Minimalism's fraternal twin in the 1960s --revealing itself in Huber's collection, which is largely devoid of works by canonical Pop artists. Still, in the works produced in the 1980s to the present, references to popular culture emerge--and often in a dark or humorous manner. The collection includes a strong group of works by New York artists--Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler--who appropriated existing images by earlier artists (Levine and Lawler) or images from advertising (Prince), or looked to Hollywood and its semiotic codes for richly loaded subject matter. At the same time, Huber began investigating the work of artists in southern California--Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, and Jim Shaw--many of whom were still flying below the international (and even national) radar of critical acclaim at the time of Huber's initial interest. Over the years, Huber acquired several key installations from these artists, including Kelley's Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity (...), 1999, inspired by avant-garde dance and psychological testing, Jason Rhoades' Sound Piece (Duet for Hammond and Hamond), 1999, and Shaw's raucous The Donner Party, 2003, as well as a large number of Raymond Pettibon's dark, lyrical ink drawings, which are often shown in groupings.
Among the most impressive installations in Huber's collection is Mike Kelley's Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, 1999, which was initially used as a stage set for a dance performance that spawned two videos and a series of photographs. Test Room is inspired by Kelley's research into the psychological experiments of Dr. Harry F. Harlow and the high modern choreography of Martha Graham. The remaining installation of compelling sculptures is seemingly absurd, but surprisingly resonant. Since graduating from Cal Arts in the late 1970s, Kelly has consistently exploited art's potential for "theatricality," as suggested by Michael Fried, accepting the risks and reward of crossing the boundaries between media including sculpture, dance, photography, and noise music while also finding unexpected intersections between art history and popular culture.
Of course, Huber found many works closer to home, in Europe. In particular, his collection contains significant works--primarily photographs and abstract paintings--by many German artists, including Thomas Demand, Gunther Förg, Eberhard Havekost, Jonathan Meese, Albert Oehlen, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Schütte. Huber's own "backyard" of Geneva and nearby Zurich have emerged as a significant wellspring for a number of influential contemporary artists including John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, and the collaborative duo Peter Fischli/David Weiss--all of whom are well represented in the Huber collection.
Sex and Humor
Two of the major motifs that emerge in Huber's collection are sex and humor, which further suggests that the generation of artists in the wake of Minimalism are undoing the purged subject matter and purity of that movement. And of course it almost goes without saying that sex and humor are two of art's most enduring themes. With her sculpture Penis with Eggs, 1993, London-based artist Sarah Lucas depicts a generously-scaled, freestanding phallus composed of bent wire and broken egg shells, offering an ambivalent totem to masculinity and its often fractious relationship to femininity. Among the significant photographs by Cindy Sherman included in Huber's collection is Untitled #264, an aggressively vulgar picture in which a masked female figure--apparently the artist, heavily costumed and modified with props including a fake vagina--spreads her legs for the camera, recalling Gustave Courbet's notorious painting The Origin of the World.
The humor found in Huber's collection is often every bit as aggressive. In addition to a suite of lovingly rendered drawings based on his oddball dreams, Los Angeles-based Jim Shaw's installation The Donner Party acts as a showy, disturbing memorial for an infamous group of stranded American pioneers who resorted to cannibalism while crossing the continent westward. Adding to the delirium is Shaw's irreverent (and linguistic) nod to Judy Chicago's well-known feminist installation, The Dinner Party. Motifs of sex and humor are frequently paired in Huber's collection, as evidenced by Paul McCarthy's Bear and Rabbit on a Rock, 1992. The work puts a darkly humorous twist--in typical fashion--on two cartoonish animal characters enjoying a cross-species romp on an idealized fragment of nature. Adding to the perverse charm of the piece, the two anthropomorphic characters appear to actually be people in costumes, or mechanized animatronic figures, both of which point to Disneyland--a recurring source of naughty inspiration and allegorical potential in McCarthy's darkly all-American art.
Ahead of the Curve
If, in retrospect, Huber's collection seems remarkably familiar, it is because this collection could fill the galleries of any serious contemporary art museum with confidence. And if his collection looks like a "conventional" textbook model of art's recent past, it is only as a result of being ahead of the institutional curve. Many of his favorite artists--Steven Parrino, Cady Noland, and John Armleder (a valued friend and advisor)--are well known but still seem below the radar, enjoying cult status rather than a popular following. Still, if Huber's collection works it is as a weathervane for the winds of the not-so-distant future--and it probably does--then these artists are likely to achieve full critical acclaim soon. Huber's hand-picked collection is dedicated to works at once glamorous and violent, self-sufficient and historically charged, hand-picked with all significant symbols of the paradoxical present. Collectors who make choices in the face of mainstream opinion sometimes struggle, at first, for recognition among their peers. But history looks favorably on those who act bravely in their moment, and history will show the value of Pierre Huber's collecting instincts in ways beyond those we already know and can predict.
LOUISE LAWLER (b. 1947)
Michael
Details
LOUISE LAWLER (b. 1947)
Michael
signed, numbered and dated 'Louise Lawler 2001 1/5' (on the reverse)
Cibachrome print mounted on aluminum
60 x 46 in. (152.3 x 116.8 cm.)
Executed in 2001. This work is number one from an edition of five.
Michael
signed, numbered and dated 'Louise Lawler 2001 1/5' (on the reverse)
Cibachrome print mounted on aluminum
60 x 46 in. (152.3 x 116.8 cm.)
Executed in 2001. This work is number one from an edition of five.
Provenance
Metro Pictures, New York
Exhibited
Geneva, Art & Public, Controlled Temperature, September-October 2001.
Kunstmuseum Basel, Louise Lawler and Others, May-August 2004, pp. 99-100 (illustrated; another from the edition exhibited).
Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Private View 1980-2000: Collection Pierre Huber, June-September 2005, p. 68 (illustrated).
Columbus, Wexner Center, Louise Lawler, Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back), September-December 2006, p. 87 (illustrated; another from the edition exhibited).
Kunstmuseum Basel, Louise Lawler and Others, May-August 2004, pp. 99-100 (illustrated; another from the edition exhibited).
Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Private View 1980-2000: Collection Pierre Huber, June-September 2005, p. 68 (illustrated).
Columbus, Wexner Center, Louise Lawler, Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back), September-December 2006, p. 87 (illustrated; another from the edition exhibited).