Adam Lerner – TRANSCRIPT
I’ve spent most of my life striving for recognition, for stature. My father, who was a Holocaust refugee, was focused on other things, and he was focused more on the necessities of life.
You see, you could tell that actually by looking at me as a kid. In wintertime, while other kids were wearing mittens, he gave me to wear these brown gardening gloves that he bought three to a pack. “What? You need such nice gloves?”, he would say.
In summertime, while other kids were wearing tube socks, I was wearing these black nylon socks with my sneakers and my shorts, which is why the kids across the street used to call me Jew Socks. So I spent a lot of time trying to elevate myself beyond the Queens immigrant Jewish family that I grew up in.
I had this image of myself wearing tweed jackets, carrying fountain pens, and discussing great leather-bound books of philosophy and poetry written by old British people. I spent 16 years in higher education at places like Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins I studied with the renowned French art historian, Eric Michaud, who spoke as if each word had some some deep philosophical weight to it. I still remember my first seminar with him back in 1991. His first line he said, “Art is our last myth, so that we will not perish of truth.”
I had no idea what it meant. But I had the feeling like it was some invitation to some greater intellectual life. It turns out it was a reference to Nietzsche, and I went to the library, and I read every single book I could from Nietzsche. From morning till night, I would read philosophy, literature, art history. I pursued my graduate studies like I was a medieval monk seeking spiritual enlightenment.
All my graduate school friends were the same way.
We all were striving for this kind of intellectual rigor. I remember once I was at the home of my dear friend, Juliet Glass, along with her boyfriend, Jeff, and my wife, then girlfriend, Elisa. We were all graduate school friends, and we were about to go out to dinner, when Juliet’s father, the famous composer Philip Glass, came running excitedly down the stairs, and wanted to know if he could join us, and we said, “Sure.” At dinner, Phil ordered a beer, which I thought was strange, because he never drank, or rarely drank.
He was so happy because he just finished composing this major symphony, which as he explained it to us, incorporated one piece of text from every one of the world’s major religions. As he was telling it to us, I thought, well isn’t that just “We are the world.” Jeff and I laughed, and we said, “That seems pretty ridiculous Phil.” So he looked at us, and he just said, “Maybe, but you know, anything I’ve ever done that’s been worthwhile, I’ve had to risk looking ridiculous.” Now, here’s a guy who’s arguably changed the history of music in the twentieth century, and me, I had done nothing.
Well, in 1998, I was the Curator at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore and I was spending a lot of time proving just how much I knew. I wrote essays that few people understood on things like the construction of meaning which seemed so important to me at the time. So despite my dedication to art, I was perishing of truth. That is until I moved to Denver in 2001 to work at the Denver Art Museum, and I began to relax, because I think here intellectual pedigree doesn’t matter so much. That wasn’t a laugh line; I think it’s true.
You know, I was actually open to the idea when I was working at the Denver Art Museum and a real estate developer approached the Denver Art Museum about creating a new art space in Lakewood, Colorado, in a shopping district called Belmar. That was actually intriguing to me to go outside the usual realm of the prestigious world of museums. Even before starting this new art space, the marketing director at the real estate developer’s office asked me if I wanted to give a lecture at this new lecture program she was having in the shopping district. She thought I could give a talk on Andy Warhol or Picasso, or something like that. I thought a talk on Andy Warhol, that could be interesting, but how about Andy Warhol, and say, another talk on artificial lighting? So I had this idea for a completely alternative series of lectures.
What if we have a program where we have two lectures on unrelated topics on the same night, with questions and answers of both (Audience) at the same time. At the same time! Thank you. Well, somehow they bought it. And so, I scribbled out the first season.
The first season included video art and migratory birds. Emily Dickinson and Bananas Foster Flower arranging and the Grateful Dead. It was a ridiculous idea, but every time I thought of it, it made me laugh. It seemed smart and fresh. I felt proud of it, and when I gave these ideas to the graphic designer, Ellen Bruss Design, what I got back from her was a postcard design that amplified all of my ideas. It had their whimsey, and it made it look like nothing that any contemporary art space had ever done before. So I got really scared.
You see, in my life up until that point, intellectual stature was the one thing I thought distinguished me. My whole identity was caught up in the idea being a scholar. It was the only thing that prevented me from being Jew Socks, so I felt a certain fear that churns in my stomach and my mind started to race, “What would Eric Michaud think?” What would my graduate school friends think? I ended up sending out the postcard, but I took all of my graduate school friends off the mailing list, all my colleagues. I was afraid that they would think I was ridiculous, and I wasn’t quite yet used to that fear.
So when the program began, about 12 people showed up, then about 20 people, and then 40 people the week after that. And then, by the end of the first season, we had maybe 120 people there. I left my job at the Denver Art Museum and dedicated myself entirely to forming this new art space. I called Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, or The Lab at Belmar.
There was still a part of me that was desperate for stature. My first exhibition I worked on had its world premiere at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and then it had its US premiere in Lakewood, Colorado. Now, I went to Ellen Bruss, and I selected a logo that was commensurate with this important new institution.
It was sans serif, lots of white space, very minimal, kind of classic contemporary art. And I was running programs like Mixed Taste and I added a new one called Mishugas based on interviews with my aunt Miriam. So that very serious logo no longer felt like us. You know, I said we’re a lab. We should have a logo that has a lab in it. You know, a Labrador Retriever. I asked Ellen Bruss Design to come up with a logo like this and she came up with an amazing identity. It was The Lab. The Lab is smart. The Lab makes friends.
But then, Get to Know The Lab. No contemporary art space anywhere in the universe was doing anything like this, so obviously I got scared. I felt that churning feeling in my stomach, my mind starts to race, “People will hate this.” The developer will be disappointed. I left my job in a museum, my whole career in museums. I will never get hired by another museum.
Well, you know, I decided to hedge my bets and I conducted a focus group; we had two groups, and they generally like we did, they were happy with it all, and when we showed them the logos everyone said the same thing: do not run this. They said, “People will hate it, they’ll be confused. You’re not a dog shelter, you’re a laboratory. You should have a test tube or a beaker.” But you know, by that point though, I had to say I had learned to recognize that the most interesting thing I’d ever done I had risked being ridiculous, and I said, “I love it, I’m going to run it anyway.”
And you know what? It became the single most defining aspect of the identity of this new organization. It won national awards. I saw people in a shopping mall wearing t-shirts with the logo on it. It captured the whimsey, the creativity, the smarts of that new organization.
I felt so proud that I went ahead and did it. I work with my creative partner, Sarah Baie, to produce all kinds of programs at the lab and all kinds of playful things. Our motto was, “Because culture is big, like Canada.” We had international art exhibitions, but we also gave away sacks of rubble, free, to new members. Now listen, to me these gags were an essential part of the art.
See, it’s what makes us give up on that relentless search for truth. It’s what makes us break from that entrenched way of doing things, and through humor is what connects us as humans. Well, after a few years, The Lab at Belmar turned out was developing a national reputation. I was invited to speak at museums around the country about how we’re redefining the language of contemporary art museums. I was even invited to a national roundtable at Washington DC along with people like the President of the Smithsonian Institution to talk about the future museums and libraries in America.
Mixed Taste was of course selling out. Well then, in 2009, during the economic crisis, The Lab funding, I was worried about it and I applied for a position as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Denver, and it turns out that after a national search, I was offered that position. So, I finally had the stature that I’d been looking for.
I became the Director of this world class facility, and this was the Great Recession, and I looked out and I worried. I worried about our board members who had contributed a great deal of their personal wealth. Every day I woke up scared that I was violating our donors’ sense of what it means to be a museum with gravitas and intellectual rigor. So it turns out that I continued to run Mixed Taste, which now was selling out at 300 people, but I held back. I held back on a lot of the gags.
For me, all the things that I loved about what I was doing at the beginning, I made sure that we were pulling our punches on them, so as not to offend anybody. So after a year, I was successful, but it wasn’t excited; and I thought, if I’m going to achieve stature without enjoying myself, then it’s not worth it to me. So I decided I’m going to do all the things that I had loved, and so we launched a whole array of programming. Sarah launched the Art Meets Beast program, an outrageous event about sustainability and artfulness of food, and I encouraged the staff to reintroduce gags at our events. So for example at one event, we gave away two free tickets to the King Tut exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, and all the winners of the raffle had to do was summit these two used tires at the museum for their tickets.
We didn’t mention it to the art museum, so we had to end that gag. But we did give away free drinks in the cafe if you redeem this mascot wearing a t-shirt that says redeem for two free drinks and the mascot, our intern, would sit with the winner through the lecture. In the normal course of time, of course, some of our donors pulled back and lessened their support, which happens, but many more stepped forward, and we started getting bigger gifts than ever. Our exhibitions were being written up in national publications, and then just a few months ago, the New York Times wrote a full page story about how what I’m doing MCA Denver is breaking the stale model for contemporary art museums, and it focused on a program called “Nietzsche and Puppies, Puppies, Puppies.” Well, my mom said that she cried as she read it, and my dad’s passed now, but my uncle Barry hung it on the wall of his car dealership in Yonkers and he said, “I can’t believe a Lerner has made it in America.” Thank you.
Related Posts