My career defies easy categorization.
I have published in prestigious academic journals as well as the New York Post.
My doctoral and post-doctoral education bear the finest pedigrees and yet it took me five years to land a tenure-track job.
I have written about traditional African art and elite American arts institutions; analyzed Barbie, as well as artists who incorporate bodily waste—self-produced, or that of other species—into their work.
And I come from the most unlikely of backgrounds to have done any of this: I was raised in a working-class, multi-generational household that included maternal grandparents who were both immigrants, as was my father. Neither my mother nor my father completed high school, and I am the anomaly in my family—including my brother and my first cousins—to receive college education, let alone pursue graduate studies.
I attended a multi-racial, central city public high school in the Midwest (“the heart of America”), and my state university as an undergrad. My earliest experiences have endowed me with a perceptive eye for social contradictions and a predilection for irony.
My interest in examining the interplay between the arts, ideology and power; the tension between creative freedom and social control; organizational features that either expedite or impede creative activity; the arts as a vehicle of expression for otherwise socially marginalized people; and the quest for social equity through symbolic expression.
The work I’ve done is socially engaged, theoretically grounded yet broadly accessible, sociologically based yet humanistically informed.
I have published four books: Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker (Chicago, 1987); Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (Routledge, 1992; paperback edition, 1994); Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (NYU, 1999; expanded paperback edition, Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from Enola Gay to Sensation, 2000); and Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006; paperback edition, Mounting Queen Victoria: Curating Cultural Change, Jacana, 2009).
Bureaucratizing the Muse is based upon research I conducted while working in the Artists-in-Residence Program (1978-‘80), sponsored by the Chicago Council on Fine Arts, and funded by CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. It was the second largest such project in the country (trailing only New York City), and represented part of the most major commitment of government funds directly to artists since the Depression-era projects of the 1930-‘40s.
Bureaucratizing the Muse examines what happens when government becomes the patron, and when art is produced for a broad public, i.e., the nexus of art and politics. It explores the attempt to address the structural disarticulation of artists in contemporary Western societies and the outcomes when they confront the constraints of government regulations. This study extends Max Weber’s classic observations about the pervasiveness of bureaucratization, spreading even into those realms that would seem most resistant to its incursion. It afforded me firsthand knowledge of how cultural policy is developed, and the ways in which it succeeds and fails in the real world.
Arresting Images is a study of the “culture wars” that erupted in the late 1980s, into the early ‘90s. This book analyzes transgressive artists, the attempts to control them, and their resistance to such efforts. It focuses upon art that addresses “hot button” issues such as race, identity, sex, religion and politics, especially art produced by artists representing previously-marginalized groups of people such as African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians. In particular, it examines how individuals who have been excluded from mainstream politics have become entwined within what Michel Foucault describes as “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure,” a complex dance that includes challenges by the disenfranchised to established authority, and countervailing efforts to force them back into inequitable positions.
This book demonstrates how battles over symbols and artistic expression represent reactions to the social changes that have occurred as a consequence of the various American civil rights movements which gathered strength during the last half off the twentieth century. At its heart, Arresting Images dissects censorship as a social process, a topic which I have eagerly pursued as it surfaces in commercial culture (“How I Got Screwed by Barbie”), and at the point of production rather than distribution (“Pressed to the Limit: Printers and the Problematics of Censorship”). Moreover, I have demonstrated how the tactics of a censor supersede traditional political distinctions such as conservative or liberal (“Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me”).
Arresting Images was a 1992 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and also the recipient of the Gustavus Meyers Award for Outstanding Book in the Study of Human Rights.
It is widely quoted as an authoritative text on arts censorship; has been cited in legal briefs; has become embroiled in controversy itself; and has afforded me countless opportunities for public talks, and being sought for media interviews.
Displays of Power chronicles a shift in the culture wars from marginalized artists to arts institutions during the mid-1990s. It examines museums as contested sites as they have evolved from temples into forums (to borrow a well-known formulation). Displays of Power dissects controversial exhibitions, thus highlighting museum practice, social memory and collective identities, social representation, and community accountability. This book reveals how museums reflect dominant ideologies, to be sure. But museums defy them as well. Displays of Power examines the culturally constructed nature of exhibitions and the vested interests that dominate knowledge production. In line with Bureaucratizing the Muse, it examines the complexities of artistic organizations and the web of constraints within which they operate.
Displays of Power has also become a seminal work in its field, and both it and Arresting Images were featured as the lead books of their respective seasons, at NYU Press and Routledge.
Mounting Queen Victoria is a study of the transformation of South African museums and historical sites, post-apartheid. In particular it examines the changes initiated in collection and exhibition policy, and the makeup of staffs and audiences, to create more inclusive institutions. These “makeovers” range from relatively minor adjustments to more comprehensive conversions that have transformed bastions of extremely myopic, official ideology, into places of reinterpretation, reconciliation and multiculturalism.
Prior to the inauguration of democracy in 1994, European settler cultures were represented in such places; black indigenous cultures were not. In general, the colonial legacy has been felt most acutely in art museums, where ideology was directly incorporated into traditional works of painting and sculpture, and fortified by collections constructed along doctrinaire lines. The apartheid legacy is most apparent in cultural history, natural science and natural history museums, where the ideology was interwoven into the narratives that their curators composed, and it dictated the decisions they made about what to highlight, and how they determined which phenomena “innately” belonged where. But it also becomes clear that these legacies often overlapped, coalesced and mutually fortified one another.
Mounting Queen Victoria is the most comprehensive study of the changes that have occurred in this domain during the first decade of majority rule.
Conflict and negotiation habitually occur over museums and what they do. Rival claims are validated or rejected at these sites; contradictory narratives are confirmed or nullified; different publics are inspired or humiliated or overlooked. Above all, diverse parties use these places to persuade others to endorse their ideas, manifest in revival, or reawakening dormant beliefs and values; in reaffirmation, asserting the importance of particular principles and standards; in recommitment, directing energies toward communal goals; in reclamation, asserting ownership over objects or knowledge that has been forbidden or denied; in repatriation, procuring what was seized by outsiders in the past; in recuperation, reinscribing personal narratives that have been suppressed or erased; in re-sanctification, restoring what has been profaned; and in reconciliation, developing new relationships between the past, the present, and alternative visions of the future.
This project demonstrates continuity with my previous books, drawing from and extending this body of work. Mounting Queen Victoria benefits from my past experience analyzing civic conflict, my understanding of cultural institutions and expressive culture, and my ability to untangle and comprehend a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.
It also enabled me to integrate a cross-cultural component into my long-standing interests in a fundamental way.
My most recent book is tentatively entitled Past Imperfect/Future Conditional: South Africans at War with Themselves. Under apartheid, racial and ethnic groups competed or coalesced to various degrees, depending upon the particularities of any situation. In the post apartheid era—the rhetoric of a “rainbow nation” notwithstanding—the amplification of group identities has enlarged critical fault lines within civil society that lie beneath a multiplicity of conflicts; I therefore analyze controversies over art and media, to the clash between traditional law and contemporary human rights, to same-sex marriage. The irony, of course, is that the expansion of freedom in South Africa has also brought increased opportunities for overt expressions of hatred and the outbreak of internecine struggles. This is a book about the culture wars in South Africa.
I write the following in the manuscript: “Culture wars are inherently protean. Long before the ‘war on terror’ became a household phrase, culture wars were shapeshifting, oscillating in intensity, striking without warning, breaking out anywhere. They are indomitable as well; rumors of their demise have invariably been premature.”
Throughout the past two decades “culture wars” has been the foremost paradigm employed in America to analyze such localized conflicts about values, identities, and rights. And while this rubric is continually invoked in the media, popular discourse, and scholarship in this country, it is relatively unknown in South Africa. This book will change that. I anticipate its publication in 2010.
I have regularly incorporated visual evidence into the purview of my work, and several investigations in particular, “Visual Onomatopoeia,” “Bodies of Thought, Bodies of Evidence,” and “Symbolic Slavery” interrogate questions regarding social inequality, community, and social control in regard to popular culture. “Symbolic Slavery” in particular addresses my concerns about how categories of racist thought are reinforced through common figurative representations. On the other hand, “Peace and Art,” “Sholom Asch: The God of Vengeance,” “Harlem Still on Our Minds,” and “The Trials of Robert Mapplethorpe” demonstrate how the visual and performing arts can also critique and thus challenge established social power.
I have written and lectured widely on censorship, controversial art and museum exhibitions, the culture wars, government funding of the arts, popular culture, and mass media. I was also one of the curators of the controversial exhibition “Art, Design, and Barbie: The Evolution of a Cultural Icon” (1995). Moreover, I spearheaded the American Sociological Association’s official condemnation of the prosecution of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center and its director for the exhibition of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe when the ASA held its annual meeting in Cincinnati in 1991.
Since 2006 I have published half a dozen articles in Art in America, on subjects ranging from an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs in Havana, to a variety of South African-related topics such as the work of William Kentridge, the exhibition Africa Remix, and AIDS, art and activism. My article on Liza Lou, an American artist living and working in Durban, became the cover story in November 2008. I have also contributed regularly to Art South Africa. I am serious about addressing both a specialized and more universal public audience.
I taught at Purchase College, State University of New York for 19 years, where I was Professor of Sociology, and directed the Media, Society and the Arts Program [MSA], and the Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts Program [BALA]. I was the primary architect of the MSA curriculum, an interdisciplinary major linking the five arts conservatories with the Liberal Arts Division. The BALA program allows students to design their own distinctive majors, combining at least two fields of study in order to create a program that is not addressed by an established one. Under my direction the Media, Society and the Arts program became one of the most popular and high profile courses of study on campus. In 2005 more students were awarded degrees in this major than any other in the social sciences at Purchase.
I simultaneously taught in the Columbia University summer session for 19 years.
And since 2005 I have been Professor of Arts Administration at Teachers College—Columbia University; I am also a Research Affiliate of the Columbia Institute of African Studies. Working in a graduate program with students coming from a variety of art and arts-related backgrounds continues to provide me the unique opportunity to combine my own interests in the arts with my social science background.
I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, and additional post-doctoral work at both Chicago and Yale. My dissertation was one of the first to be written in the field of the sociology of culture, and the bulk of my research has centered on arts institutions, artists, and artistic expression, transnationally.
My areas of graduate specialization were the sociology of art and culture, and deviance and social control. My interests have expanded globally as well as topically; they now include the culture and politics of Southern Africa, cultural studies, visual culture, museum studies, material culture studies, mass media, and collective memory as well.
Among my honors have been The Lady Davis Fellowship Trust Visiting Professorship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2001-2002 and 2008-2009, and a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship to South Africa in 2003.
I have visited Southern Africa (Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa) 15 times since 2000, for a total stay of over 3 1/2 years. My Fulbright allowed me to live and travel throughout South Africa for 13 months, during which time I conducted over 100 interviews with museum directors and curators, government officials, artists and others, and also carried out extensive archival research, providing the basis for Mounting Queen Victoria.
I anticipate that the bulk of my research in the future will continue to be based in South Africa. I remain interested in the intersection of culture and politics; the evolution of the arts from providing ideological support as well social resistance during the apartheid era, to becoming a force in building and critiquing democracy; and the struggle by artists and arts institutions for sponsorship and legitimacy in a society facing immense social problems, and where the arts may be dismissed as a “luxury.”
On my first trip to South Africa I was delighted to discover that many of the themes I had explored previously were evident there as well. But what stood out in particular in South Africa was the sense of urgency on the part of individuals to engage these issues in meaningful ways. Nine years later, this country remains an incredibly fertile research site for me. And, a beloved second home.
So welcome to my website. Do what you like here: read something serious, sample something less serious, or simply look at pictures.
