Artists Talk On Art, New York's Panel Series, Celebrates 30 Years of Living Art History
An interview with ATOA Chairman Doug Sheer, by Donna Marxer
"If it's Friday, it must be Artists Talk On Art!" So begins every Friday night meeting from Fall through Spring in downtown Manhattan, and has done for the past 30 years. Here to talk about its success, past, present and in the future is the veteran Chairman of the Board Doug Sheer, who has held this job since he helped create ATOA.
DM: Doug, how about a rundown on what Artists Talk On Art is and who has come to talk.
DS: In brief, it provides a singular forum for artists, collectors, curators, and art writers in meaningful exchanges. Subjects range widely from painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance art, video, computer technology, poetry, criticism, cultural politics, career development--any subject that could interest visual artists.
Forums have featured the famous, the forgotten, the emerging and the yet-unknown. Many artists such as Judy Pfaff, Robert Longo and Elizabeth Murray have participated in ATOA forums before becoming recognized. Dialogue evenings have featured artists such as Larry Rivers, Wolf Kahn, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and art writers such as Arthur Danto, Donald Kuspit and Calvin Tomkins.
DM: Doug, what year did ATOA get started, why, and why Friday nights?
DS: It was conceived in 1974 and started in January 1975, and the first panel was called "Whatever happened to public art?" It featured the venerable Louise Bourgeois. When we first started Artists Talk On Art, people sat on the floor, not even on cushions but just on the floor with their legs crossed. Gradually, over time, we added cushions, we added chairs. People used to bring their own deck or beach chairs.
Why did we start ATOA? Because all of us--and that was myself, the late artist Bob Wiegand and Lori Antonacci--all of us knew about the Artists Club, which was active in the1940s and 50s. The Artists Club met on Friday evenings. so part of our inspiration was to recreate the best aspects of the Artists Club but make it more egalitarian, make it more pluralistic, make it a non-member sort of arrangement where all different points of view could be expressed. The Artists Club had really been mostly about Abstract Expression, and was by its nature very exclusive. Our design was to be inclusive. Nonetheless, the Club was a great inspiration to the three of us. Bob had actually been a member of the Club, participated in the meetings, so he was quite familiar with the comings, goings and the design of it.
DM: To jog peoples' memories, William de Kooning was a very important member of the Club. Who else?
DS: Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Milton Resnick…all the original first wave of Abstract Expressionists and a lot of other artists who came around a little bit later, as well as writers, critics, historians, a lot of people who were active in a much smaller art world. And the original board of directors we pulled together when we started ATOA, were members who had been active in the Club, among them Cynthia Navaretta and Bruce Barton who still serve and critic and art historian Irving Sandler, who is still on our advisory board. Historian Connie Robins was also a member of the first board.
DM: Where was your first public meeting?
DS: The first panel was held at a gallery called "The Open Mind" on Greene Street in Soho and the first money we got was $200 donated by Robert Perlmutter from Pearl Paint. So we were organically homegrown in Soho when it was beginning to become the hot art neighborhood.
I had been running a video facility called The Egg Store with video pioneers as clients--people like choreographers Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp and artists Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. Lori and Bob came in as customers and together we hatched the idea for ATOA. When we started out we ran it by the seat of our pants. We never even had a mission statement.
That was what was charming about the early days. We had no guile, no pretensions. We charged $1 admission. That it went into the second, third year was shock. But we learned that as long as there are artists who want to talk about art there will likely be an ATOA.
DM: You've been the devoted chairman of the board for 30 years. How come?
DS: I like to joke that I’m Chair-man because I've moved more chairs than anyone else. It is why I continued to hold the title. We had always met in borrowed galleries after they closed for the day, which required two hours of set up. In the early days the art world used to be pretty flat, with stuff on the walls or occasional sculpture that would have to be moved. With time and the advent of installation art it got pretty challenging. Finally, we got an auditorium space donated by the School of Visual Arts with theater-style seating. As I slide into geezerhood, I appreciate this.
DM: With the art world having expanded as much as it has since those early days, particularly in New York, there is precious little sense of an artist community these days. It seems to me to get worse and worse and the artists get more and more insular day by day. ATOA provides one of those rare venues for community, a place where you can see other artists and important people you want to meet and are free to chat with. And it's democratic. Would you care to comment on this?
DS: We are proud of what we are and we consider ourselves part of what we call the "connective tissue" that holds the art world together for artists. We are not a membership organization but we do sell season passes that offer up to 24 events free of charge and the opportunity to join a group health plan, very popular with artists who often don't have insurance provided by their day jobs. The annual cost is $50 regular, $30 senior and student, and $65 family.
But there is no matchbook test where you have to draw a horse's head or something to become a pass holder.
DM: How about anybody taking part in ATOA?
DS: I always credit the fact that there are over 50 people actively involved in ATOA at any given time. The program committee, where we usually have anywhere from 15 to 20, is very grass roots and is constantly turning over in terms of its membership. Anybody can join the program committee and anybody can come up with a program idea that may or may not be done. The vast majority of ideas become panels. Here and there we may find something that we find so inappropriate, or unlikely to produce an audience that we will turn it down. That's pretty unusual Normally we would try to reshape something until it seems like it has legs.
DM: And the board runs about 21 - 22 people. How do they get on the board?
DS: Usually they start out as volunteers or interns; then they might be on the programming committee for a while. If it becomes obvious that they are interested and are willing to help, then eventually some of them end up on the board of directors. Nobody gets on the board because of money and everybody is expected to work.
As for democracy, nobody grandstands. No one speaks alone, there are always at least two for a dialogue. The general rule is that no one appears twice during the season.
We've had very few cancellations, which is an interesting sidebar. In the entire history of ATOA I could count on one or maybe two hands the total number of individuals who have just not shown up or had to back out or gotten ill or whatever. We've been remarkably lucky in terms of people who sign up six months ahead of time and donate their services.
DM: Which brings us to money. ATOA has always scrimped along.
DS: Grants are here and there. That's a very discouraging situation today for all not-for-profits, but we augment that with auctions and other fundraising techniques. We've had a few generous angels along the way.
DM: Everything is changing. Talk about how the art world is changing.
DS: OK Harris gallery owner Ivan Karp has put it very aptly. Originally, in the early 40s and 50s, the entire art world, collectors--the three collectors--the five or six critics and all the artists would show up at every opening. So you could actually mingle with the entire art world each time. And of course as we got in the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on the art world kept doubling and doubling and doubling itself until it got to the point now where it is literally hundreds of thousands of individuals scattered in the four corners of the earth. Which brings us to where we think ATOA might be heading. And that is to a more web-oriented type of presence. Of course we have a website; we document audio and video and that has gotten around to a lot of places, but we would like to head to a place where we could be doing the event live with a live audience, but it would be streamed. It would have an appearance on the web live in a way where someone in Berlin or Tokyo, if they were awake at the right hour, could either type in e-mail messages in the way that some of the CNN programs are doing or could be actually interactive with the webcam, and the event could become more truly global than it currently is.
Last November, I answered the phone and spoke to someone in Venice, Italy, who said he and several Italian colleagues were going to attend the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Gates event at ATOA, and could they reserve seats. The point is not that it was a successful night, which it was, it was that people know about us in very distant places. And that's thrilling to us.
DM: ATOA has documented 30 years of contemporary art history. What does that consist of, and what will happen to these records?
DS: From the very beginning, ATOA has made audio--and later video- recordings of each event. Not only that, all the still photographs, flyers and postcards, most of them are intact. We plan to scan those into a relational database and are also saving clippings and everything that could be of historical importance. We have in our archives of materials information, the voices of, the writings of, pictures of artists who are very hard to find early information on. So we believe that we are sitting on something of value and that next to perpetuating ourselves and to widening our audience, the next most important thing is to preserve that archive.
DM: Okay we are sold on how valuable an institution an artists panel series is. What would you tell artists if they wanted to start their own series?
DS: Recently we were visited by a contingent of Chicago artists from the Hyde Park Art Center who wanted to start one in their hometown. I think they could do it exactly the way we've done it or, if they bring in artists from other parts of the country, then they should be prepared to pay some kind of stipend for travel. We simply encourage it to be as grass roots as ours. It is not without effort and it is not without the need to raise funds but I think that's a very rewarding thing for any arts group or art scene to institute. Just, please don’t call it Artists Talk On Art!
Visit ATOA’s New York panels, Fridays at 7pm at the School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd
Street starting October 14, 2005. ATOA's website, complete with calendar for the coming
season, is at www.atoa.ws. Painter and former Executive Director of ATOA
Donna Marxer is to be found at www.donnamarxer.com.
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As we enter the second half of our thirtieth year and happily our second season at SVA,
ATOA has many exciting things planned. First, there are a dynamic series of panels led
off by an evening with Mark Stevens co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography
de Kooning: An American Master, interviewed by artist Donna Marxer (10/7). Then,
Andres Serrano, photographer and art world agent provocateur is interviewed by
Robert Hobbs, visiting Yale professor (10/14). Artists Visions of Imaginary Civilizations
(10/21) explores their unique private world’s. An Open Screening Night (10/28) provides a
rare and really nice experience today, the chance for artists to screen their images to an
audience composed of other artists and get feedback and support. Bring your 5 slides and
get 5 minutes to discuss your work. Faith Ringgold and Nancy Azara , two of feminism’s
leading lights will discuss their opinions and experiences (11/4).
Analog Dreams, Digital World (11/11) organized by John Fischer, showcases some of the
art world’s leading exponents of digital art. PBS Art 21, (on 11/18) features artist
Jessica Stockholder and clips from the magazine format series. Word Art, organized by
artist Richard Lewis Roth, and featuring British artist Nathaniel Mellors, looks at
artists such as Cy Twombley, Kay Rosen, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Wiener, (12/2).
Today’s Sculpture (12/9) features a discussion of the world’s leading 21st Century
sculptors. Then we break for the holiday season. During the break, December 29th,
The Curator’s Choice Winner’s Show opens at the Nix Gallery (104 Reade Street) in
Tribeca. The show stays up through 1/7. You are all invited to attend. On the return
after the break, (1/13) we welcome the Dahesh Museum: Drawing From the Live Model that
brings an old friend of ATOA back, artist Will Barnet. On 1/20 the Curator’s Choice
Winner’s Panel is being held. Get a chance to meet the artists and the judge,
Michael Walls.
