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Fragmented memory: William Olander and the exhibition as criticism

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Fragmented memory: William Olander and the exhibition as criticism

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Content FRAGMENTED MEMORY:
WILLIAM OLANDER AND THE EXHIBITION AS CRITICISM
by
Gladys-Katherina Hernando
________________________________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2012
Copyright 2012 Gladys-Katherina Hernando
Acknowledgments
I first encountered William Olander’s text “Fragments” (1985) in a class called
“Methodologies of Art Writing.” Olander’s critical essay was compelling and revelatory
to my thinking about art. I did not anticipate the extent to which William Olander’s work
would inspire and impact my consideration of critical curating. I am indebted to my
professor and mentor, Rhea Anastas, who introduced me to Olander and The Art of
Memory/The Loss of History. Thanks are also due to Anastas for taking the time to direct
the early stages of my research and for her patience in allowing my writing to develop in
the direction that it did.
Thank you to my committee members, John Tain and Gloria Sutton, for helping to
illuminate the important issues of this thesis. Thank you to Noura Wedell for teaching me
to be a more conscientious writer. Thank you to our former director, Joshua Decter, for
fostering a much needed curatorial program in Los Angeles. Special thanks are due to
Lisa Darms at the Fales Library and Moira Ann Fitzgerald at the Beinecke Library for
their assistance with my research process. Thank you to my classmates for their support
and friendship. Thank you to those who helped initiate my return to academia: Jessica
Minckley, Richard Telles, Dana Berman Duff, Richard Hawkins, and Lisa Lapinski.
Thank you to those whose friendships have helped me to continue: Meg Webster, Derick
Lee, and Itza Vilaboy. I am grateful to my family and especially to my parents, Jorge A.
Hernando and Gladys Rustan-Hernando, for teaching me to work hard and to pursue my
goals. Thank you to Joel Woodman for his love and constant presence in my life.
ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. ii
List of Figures.................................................................................................................... iv
Abstract.............................................................................................................................. v
Introduction........................................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One: Fragments of Art and Experience................................................................ 7
Chapter Two: Textual Encounters..................................................................................... 24
Afterword.......................................................................................................................... 47
Bibliography...................................................................................................................... 50
Appendix: Articles, Essays, and Exhibitions by William Olander.................................... 54
iii
List of Figures
Figure 1. Installation view of Martha Rosler, Global Taste: A Meal in Three
Courses, (1985), three-channel video installation. Courtesy of the New Museum
Digital Archive.......................................................................................................... 13
Figure 2. Cover of the catalogue for The Art of Memory/The Loss of History......... 16
Figure 3. Installation view of The Art of Memory/The Loss of History, showing
works by Louise Lawler, one part of Two Wall Displays: Arranged by Mr. and
Mrs. Alfred Atamore Pope or their daughter Theodate, Farmington, Connecticut,
(1985), and Sarah Charlesworth, September 1977 (Modern History), (1979).
Courtesy of the New Museum Digital Archive......................................................... 19
Figure 4. Photo of William Olander in front of Clegg and Gluttman’s Corporate
Music, (1986), on the occasion of his exhibition New New York at the Cleveland
Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, February 21–March 29,1986.
Originally published in the Newsletter for Cleveland Center for Contemporary
Art, April 1986. Photo by Marvin M. Greene. Christopher Cox Papers. Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
New Haven, Connecticut........................................................................................... 23
Figure 5. Installation view of Difference: On Representation and Sexuality,
Curated by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, December 8, 1984–February 10, 1985, showing work by Barbara
Kruger and Sylvia Kolbowski. Courtesy of the New Museum Digital Archive........ 32
Figure 6. Installation view of Let the Record Show the Window on Broadway by
ACT UP at the New Museum, November 20, 1987–January 24, 1988. Courtesy of
the New Museum Digital Archive.............................................................................. 43
Figure 7. William Olander, The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1987– , Photo
from October 1986, photographer unknown. Christopher Cox Papers. Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
New Haven, Connecticut............................................................................................ 46
iv
Abstract
This thesis examines the curatorial practice of William Olander (1950–1989), a
prolific curator, writer, and scholar, over a short but full period of ten years before
Olander’s death from AIDS in 1989. Olander’s work as a contemporary curator in the
visual arts addressed the issues of his day as a form of criticism and even activism.
Specifically, his work directly addressed and acted within a vital field of debate about the
fraught aesthetics and politics of representation within the cultural discourses of
postmodernism and the discourses of the politics of gender and sexual identification and
of gay and queer identity after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. This thesis explores the
exhibitions The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (1985), Homo Video: Where We Are
Now (1986), and Let The Record Show (1987) as a series of responses to now established
ideas and issues in the field of contemporary art history and theory. This thesis seeks to
reinstate Olander as a fearless participant in the complex political reality of the eighties
and as a voice that can inform curatorial practice today.
v
Introduction
During the 1980s, William Olander was the curator of many significant
exhibitions that are today little, if at all, recognized. He was the curator of the Oberlin
College Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio from 1979–1984 and at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art in New York from 1985–1989. He was a prolific writer and scholar
for a short but full ten year career, before his death from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 38.
1

As a contemporary curator, Olander developed a practice that was unique for its
engagement with the social and political conditions of artistic production as they evolved
in the 80s. Olander was involved in the critical discourse of contemporary exhibitions and
in the theoretical language being deployed to challenge dominant systems of thought.
This thesis will examine several instances of Olander’s critical curatorial process as an
outline for organizing exhibitions with an astute awareness of art as connected to social
progress. His exhibition The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (1985) added political
nuance to the theory and practice of postmodern art, an expanding field of artistic
practices after modernism, by presenting artworks with agendas that were socially
reflexive and addressed issues that continue to be relevant in art discourse today. The
second chapter will examine the critical responses that prompted the exhibitions The Art
of Memory/The Loss of History, but also Homo Video: Where We Are Now (1986) and Let
the Record Show (1987), which engaged in an activist critique of subjectivity and
oppression. The latter work took an activist position that sought to expose dominant
ideologies, specifically with regard to homosexual difference, and eventually the AIDS
1
1
Anonymous, “William Olander, 38, Art Curator, Is Dead,” The New York Times, March 21, 1989: B8.
crisis. Olander’s work remains an example of curatorial work that considers how the real
discourse of social culture is inextricably tied to, and impossible to separate from, artistic
production.
Rather than analyzing Olander’s work through the discourse of curatorial practice,
the methodology of this thesis looks specifically at the critical and theoretical responses
produced by Olander in order to reinstate another approach to current curatorial thinking.
The title of this thesis, “Fragmented Memory,” references not just the exhibition The Art
of Memory/The Loss of History, but signifies the interruption of Olander’s work by his
untimely death. As a curator who was well-known in his time, yet is now overlooked in
the consideration of the period of the 80s, what remains of his career are fragments of his
writing, lectures, and notations, pieced together again to form the portrait that follows.
Olander’s practice was inspired by a critical, theoretical outlook, and serves as an
unconventional model to the discourse of curatorial work. In the contemporary context,
Olander’s practice was a response to social and political context, rather than the larger
discourse of curating, a production that would be valuable to the purview of curating
today.
In order to situate William Olander’s participation in the discursive realm of
exhibitions requires an earlier starting point, prior to his arrival in New York. In 1979,
after spending two years in Paris doing field research for his doctoral dissertation in art
history, Olander decided to take the position of Curator of Modern Art at the Oberlin
College Allen Memorial Art Museum. As a small liberal arts college, Oberlin supported
contemporary art and gave Olander the freedom to exhibit young artists and an
2
opportunity to learn, by doing, curatorial work. He was responsible for the revival of the
Young Americans show, an ongoing project series that showcased emerging artists.
Olander’s first event, however, was the production of an early performance by Adrian
Piper called It’ s Just Art (1980), a piece about the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
2

During his time at Oberlin, Olander would simultaneously organize exhibitions and write
his dissertation, titled Pour Transmettre à la Postérité: French Painting and Revolution,
1774–1795, which he completed in 1983. In his dissertation, Olander described how a
“major redefinition of what was appropriate to the field of artistic activity was developed,
and how this new alignment of activity of art and contemporary history occurred and
affected the practice, production, and character of French painting in the late eighteenth
century.”
3
That same year, Olander curated an important exhibition called Art and Social
Change, U.S.A, in which he conceptualized the role of artistic production as social
aesthetics. The exhibition first pronounced Olander’s commitment to politically oriented
artwork, and was one that established a framework for his future exhibitions.
4

3
2
William Olander interviewed by Marcia Tucker, transcript, Christopher Cox Papers, Series VII, Box 43,
Folder 682, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New
Haven, Connecticut.
3
Olander’s dissertation examined the problems surrounding the representation of contemporary events in
late- eighteenth century French painting, and culminates with an examination of the great Concours de l’an
II, (an anonymous competition held by the French government). His discovery was of the full list of entries
and artists who competed, the result of which was “the final and successful attempt of government to
redirect French painting and to enlist all of the arts into its service.” The major chapters from his
dissertation on the Concours was posthumously edited and published by his friend and colleague, Udolpho
van de Sandt for a publication on French Painting. See, Udolpho van de Sandt, “In Memoriam,” and
William Olander, “French Painting and Politics in 1794: The Great ‘Concours de l’an II,” 1789: French Art
During the Revolution, (Colnaghi USA Ltd., 1989), 27 - 45.
4
The exhibition “Art and Social Change, U.S.A” was held on April 19–May 30, 1983. More information
can be found in William Olander. Art & Social Change, U.S.A.. Bulletin 40, 2 (Oberlin, Ohio: Allen
Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1983.)
In his catalogue essay for Art and Social Change, U.S.A., titled “Social
Aesthetics,” Olander formed a synthesis of criticality and representation that meant to
disarm modernist distinctions of “pure” taste and style. Supporting diversity and
heterogeneity, social aesthetics meant to hinder the pluralistic, neutralizing effect of
institutions on that which does not conform. Exuding a strong, almost polemical tone,
Olander’s essay demonstrated the three issues that would preoccupy him for the length of
his career: pluralism, the pseudodiversity maintained under an umbrella of acceptance
within institutions, which flatly stomps out the true nuance of its disparate voices;
oppositional practices aimed at critiquing dominant ideological structures, usually from
within; and ideology, of the fascistic kind, which dictates one’s mind and correct position
in relation to difference. When he arrived at the New Museum two years later, Olander
continued to navigate similar interests and methods of inquiry, solidifying an engagement
with art and politics in his academic writing and curatorial practice. After his death, the
term “social aesthetics” would be repurposed to either positive or negative ends by other
writers to describe a similar type of work.
5

Olander had a particular interest in the group-show curatorial model, an interest
supported by the founder and director of the New Museum, Marcia Tucker. As an
institution, the New Museum was known for its socially conscious exhibitions and for
challenging the paradigm of the traditional museum establishment. In an interview
between Tucker and Olander conducted in January 1989, Tucker complimented Olander’s
unconventional methodology, stating that Olander’s arrival to the museum allowed for
4
5
David Deitcher, “Polarity Rules.” in Alternative Art New York, 1965 - 1985, ed Julie Ault (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 232.
her to “move away from the more conventional ideas [she] had about museum practice.”
6

Not only was Olander a talented art historian, but his awareness of the broad scope of
publics and the multiplicity of social histories brought a sensitivity to the way he
contextualized artworks within institutional space. However complicated, art and
experience were inextricably tied together, and Olander was not afraid to expose the
contradictions, the politics, or the aesthetic development of ideas as they progressed.
5
6
This quotation is from an interview between Marcia Tucker and William Olander that is undated in
archive files at both the Yale Beinecke Library and the Getty Research Institute library. In a Master’s Thesis
written by Gayle Rodda Kurtz in 1991, a former intern for William Olander, Rodda Kurtz states that she
was given personal access to the interview by Marcia Tucker, who dated the interview in January 1989.
After Olander’s death, Rodda Kurtz compiled all of Olander’s written manuscripts and documents for the
New Museum’s Soho library, which later became her thesis. It also included Olander’s curriculum vitae,
which has been partially transcribed in the bibliography portion of this document. See William Olander
interviewed by Marcia Tucker, transcript, Christopher Cox Papers, Series VII, Box 43, Folder 682, Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, Connecticut,
and Gayle Rodda Kurtz, “William Olander: The Practice of an Activist Curator,” (M.A. Thesis, Hunter
College, New York, 1991.)
Chapter One: Fragments of Art and Politics
During Olander’s transition to the New Museum, the New York art scene
experienced substantial changes as artists and curators were informed by the
politicization of culture. By 1985, artists were responding to the visual landscape of
media and television with another layer of saturated imagery. Artistic production came to
be dominated by the use of photography, appropriation of images, and new forms of
technology. A hybridity of aesthetics, historical reference, performance, and language
came to directly replace political work with layers of interpretation reflected back onto
society itself. Early formulations of newly heralded “postmodern art” were categorized as
investigations in the “production of representation” in Douglas Crimp’s Pictures show at
Artists Space (1977), and as an aesthetic “return to allegory,” as explicated by Craig
Owens’s text “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980).
Such interpretations aligned artistic production on two theoretical planes: Crimp’s
Pictures situated representation as grounded in the theatrical strategies present in the
work’s conception, while Owens’s essay theorized a return to historical allegory as a
method for reading art works through a layered effect that inbuilt references to the past
and present in the work’s fundamental form.
7
But by the mid-80s, these theorizations
were problematized by critics such as Hal Foster, who found that the quick associative
qualities of historical and mass-cultural images navigated a fine line “between the
6
7
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75 - 88, and Craig Owens, “The Allegorical
Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture,
ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52 - 69.
exploitative and the critical.”
8
Questioning the strategy of appropriation was the second
turn for postmodern art discourse, and Olander saw the inquiry as a development of a
different kind of social aesthetics, of a different kind of politicized work.
Concerned with oppositional practices, and the dwindling interest in art with a
political message, Olander organized The Art of Memory/The Loss of History. It was a
reaction to the changing field of aesthetic production and the increasingly politicized
language of aesthetic ideology explored in Art & Ideology (1984), an earlier exhibition at
the New Museum which I will discuss in the second part of this document. When Olander
arrived at the New Museum, he immediately sought to reposition the ideas of postmodern
practice circumscribed by Crimp and Owens into more subtle critical context – that of
memory and history. Moreover, Olander sought to distinguish another avenue for
understanding the meaning of postmodern art, aligning its evocative and ambiguous
strategies with the social tissue of culture, and as indeed unable to be disentangled from
its implications.
9

Organized in an ambitious format, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History
exhibited fourteen artists in the New Museum’s main gallery. Among the artists included
were Bruce Barber, Judith Barry, Troy Brauntuch, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler,
Tina Lhotsky, Adrian Piper, Stephen Prina, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, René Santos,
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Christopher Williams, and Reese Williams. An additional eleven
artists/filmmakers were shown in a documentary-style video program titled Re-Viewing
7
8
Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism,” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: The New Press,
1985/1989), 29.
9
William “Bill” Olander, “What is Political Art? What is Political Art Now?,” The Village Voice (October
15, 1985): no pagination.
History: Video Documents with works by Peter Adair, Nancy Buchanan, Downtown
Community Television, Dan Graham, Vanalyn Green, Ulysses Jenkins, Miners Campaign
Tape Project, Paper Tiger Television, Dan Reeves, David Shulman, and El Taller de
Video “Timoteo Velasquez.” A concert by the artist Stephen Prina was held on December
4, 1985 at Symphony Space in New York – Olander represented the performance in the
exhibition with an image of the publicity poster. The exhibition was held from November
23, 1985 to January 19, 1986, and concentrated its scope into a modest but scholarly
catalogue. In an interview with Lynne Tillman recorded prior to the show’s opening,
Olander framed the documentary section of the exhibition as seeking to “attract an
entirely different audience . . . people who might be interested in [political or
documentary] issues but don’t think about going to an art museum. Or who don’t think of
art as a conduit or venue for those issues.”
10
For Olander, activating more public realms
of access and expanding the dialogic reach of the institution was a means to disrupt the
hermetic tendencies of art museums and therefore art’s own discourse with the viewer.
The art and critical theory on display in The Art of Memory/The Loss of History
navigated representation as a space to critique, analyze, and deconstruct culture and
society. Their underlying context took aim at a variety of institutions – media, historical,
artistic, political, and otherwise – that complicated the function of postmodern art as a
shift in political art practices. Realizing that the public’s interest in works of art with a
political message had been exhausted was a cause for Olander to rethink how to engage
with work in a politically meaningful way. In the Tillman interview, Olander framed his
8
10
William Olander interviewed by Lynne Tillman, transcript, Lynne Tillman Papers, Box 27, Folder 43,
Fales Library and Special Collections, Bobst Library, New York University, 7.
motivation for the show as a desire to challenge the whole notion of a political position in
art. By the same token, Olander would not shy from exhibiting oppositional practices and
concepts that sustained an engagement with sociopolitical realities.
11
Prompted by these
changes, Olander interpreted memory and history as points of access between
representation and culture. By weaving the instability of memory as a fragmentation of
human experience, the subjects of memory and history could reside in the individual
consciousness of the viewer. Therefore, memory and history in an artwork could render
meaning through the perceptual space of analysis, as a method of cultural inquiry that
duplicated the urgency of activist or issue-based art.
A close look at the exhibition as a curatorial model can reveal some of the ways in
which Olander attempted to revise concepts of a socially-engaged artwork in its
conceptual approach. Olander’s essay “Fragments” situates the artworks in the exhibition
as representing a departure from the aesthetic values of modernism. The first page of text
in the catalogue is a photograph by Adrian Piper, Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978),
reproduced at nearly a full page. Piper’s photograph was the visual component of a piece
that combined with a taped monologue in the form of an acoustiguide – an interactive
museum guide for visual display. The image depicts a group of mostly black men and
women, descending a staircase, with two central figures looking (one, indeed, pointing)
squarely at the viewer. Although Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma was not itself included
in the exhibition, Olander began his catalogue essay with an excerpt of the image’s
accompanying address:
9
11
Olander, interview; Lynne Tillman Papers, Box 27, Folder 43, Fales Library and Special Collections,
Bobst Library, New York University, 3.
You want to have an aesthetic experience: to be fulfilled, elevated, irritated. You
would like to have your criteria of good art confirmed or disrupted or violated by
the art you see here?
and,
How do the images in this picture relate to each other? Are these the right
questions to ask about this work? What exactly is the aesthetic content of this
work? And what is it trying to tell you?
12

Returning the reader to the notions of aesthetic experience, Olander used Piper’s text to
frame the subjective experience that is carried by the viewer into the work. Piper’s
acoustiguide comments on the viewer’s expectation of having an aesthetic experience
while viewing her photograph, harkening to the classic supposition that an encounter with
art can produce a metaphysical or transcendent experience. Piper’s commentary on such
an aesthetic encounter serves to demonstrate how the ideas in a work could be realized or
challenged by a person’s ideals. Olander uses Piper’s piece to reference the ideology
embedded in the social and institutional structures of the art world. His reference to
Piper’s piece, which itself was absent from the exhibition, directs the viewer into a self-
reflexive space of mediation on their own role in the work.
Focusing on the critical reception of the work, Olander’s text situated memory and
history as a theoretical binary. The two combine into a realm where multiple trajectories
are dispersed: memory as a space to be located, examined, and represented; history as a
space that is constructed, interpreted, and experienced. In Olander’s next example,
Malevich’s black square, memory and history are counterposed to modernism’s pursuit of
sublime, self-referential ecstasy. Olander describes Malevich’s square as “a revolutionary
10
12
William Olander, “Fragments,” in The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (New York: The New
Museum, 1985), 7.
act of forgetting,” that revealed modernism’s autonomy and total separation from
society’s concerns.
13
In their contrasting positions, memory and history make apparent
the fragmentation of art from its fundamental connection to society, one that existed
before modernism’s formal aesthetic break from it. Olander’s theorization of aesthetic
production in these terms ran counter to the notion of a “purely academic” pursuit of a
medium, such as traditional painting. Olander’s argument placed a renewed focus on an
evolved version of social aesthetics, which Olander defined in 1983 as aesthetics that
function to “call a halt to the flow of information which is homogenized as culture.”
14
In
other words, supporting these aesthetic transformations was the return of the artist to the
social fabric in which the art was produced. Attempting to exist outside of that social
fabric would perpetuate a traditionalist, conservative view detached from a forward-
thinking, progressive trajectory of art making. As Olander wrote in both “Social
Aesthetics” and “Fragments,” these shifts in artistic production brought the object into
the foreground – any object that has been previously excluded, repressed, misrepresented,
or rendered invisible. Stating that “what we see today is not what was seen even a decade
ago” and beyond what we can imagine to exist in any artwork, Olander argued that
constant progress in art was movement towards the “future,” and that art should not just
recycle past traditions ad infinitum.
15

11
13
Olander, “Fragments,” 7.
14
William Olander, “Social Aesthetics,” Art & Social Change, U.S.A., Bulletin 40, 2 (Oberlin, Ohio: Allen
Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1983), 63.
15
See, William Olander, “Social Aesthetics,” Art & Social Change, U.S.A., Bulletin 40, 2 (Oberlin, Ohio:
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1983), 69. And, William Olander, “Fragments,” in The Art
of Memory/The Loss of History (New York: The New Museum, 1985), 12.
Perhaps a foray into the physical attributes of the exhibited artworks can clarify
some of the complexity of Olander’s position.
16
To begin, photographic documentation of
the installation shows a clear juxtaposition of work, for instance a horizontal row of eight
paintings by René Santos across from a vertical layout of four large photographs by
Richard Prince. Another area organized a grouping by Hiroshi Sugimoto in dialogue with
a Troy Brauntuch painting. Leading the audience through the space via long pathways of
work, the viewer would have navigated along the walls, around circular columns and
corridors, and up the stairs to a small annex with video installations by Martha Rosler,
Bruce Barber, and Judith Barry.
Martha Rosler’s video installation Global Taste (working title) (1985), later
retitled Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses, was featured prominently in the entry of
the annex. Rosler presented a three-sided structure, each with its own red, blue, or white
geometric shape framing the televisions inside each panel. The structure, with its odd
shape, obscured the viewer from seeing all three videos at once. In her statement on the
work for the exhibition, Rosler stated that the central theme of the piece was the
“colonization of the self and of other countries by media and advertising.” Not only did
the piece seek to reference the homogenization of culture, but it attempted to emphasize
the necessarily composite (i.e., composed of fragments) nature of a world picture, and
thus referenced the disparate forces that keep a viewer removed from the larger context of
12
16
Few photographs of the installation remain but images are available on the New Museum’s web archive.
Visit, http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurence/Show/occurence_id/120
a changing world.
17
In this way, Rosler’s video also made connections to the ideas in the
video program.

Returning to the main gallery, many of the works used photography and textual
elements to unravel the effects of media on the human psyche, what Gary Indiana would
call “the presence and absence of contextualizing language” in a review of the exhibition.
One literal example of this is Sarah Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune, September 1977
(Modern History) (1977). A series of twenty-six photographs, each piece in this work
shows the front page images and corresponding masthead of the International Herald
Tribune newspaper for almost every day of September 1977, with all the copy text
removed. The photographs take on a minimalist appearance, produced by the void of
Figure 1. Installation view of Martha Rosler, Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses, (1985),
three-channel video installation. Courtesy the New Museum Digital Archive.
13
17
Gregg Bordowitz, “Geography Notes: A Survey,” (1986) in Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is
Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003, ed James Meyer (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 7.
Originally published as “Geography Notes,” Real Life Magazine 16 (Autumn 1986): 12 - 17.
absent text consuming each page, alerting the viewer to the images’ contents. Activating
the absence of context, the photographs reveal the way images might exist in one’s own
consciousness – floating in an oblivion of days, weeks, or months, asking what it means
for history to be interpreted for us through the deconstruction and reconstruction of
images as events or memories.
The next example of an artist working with the absence of contextual language
would be Christopher Williams. Williams’s On New York II (1985) consisted of three
photographs, matted and framed with high-quality framing materials. One image was a
glossy, stylized photograph of New York City, a close-up image of skyscrapers with a
blast of red light emanating from within the building’s windows. The other two photos
were duplicate images of a Pulitzer-Prize winning Faas/Laurent photograph depicting the
bayonet execution of Biharis from the Bangladesh War, one printed very large and the
other scaled to a more intimate size. Visually the works do not reveal the complex nature
of their material qualities. Williams did not shoot any of the photos himself, but rather
appropriated the images to be re-presented in the specific context of the museum as
highly aestheticized objects. The tourism photo was selected specifically for the work’s
presentation in New York, positing a site-specific relation that recalled its own
distribution inside the museum. The journalistic photo, removed from its context as an
actual event – an execution that was staged as a photo opportunity for journalists –
becomes a fragmented image that alludes to a recognition of mediation and the political
subversion of its citizenry. As a system of representation, On New York II utilized the
identifiers of “high” art – lavish frames with highly executed photographs – to make the
14
presentation equally as important as the content. Deliberately made to be presented in an
art context, Williams layered techniques that established a critique of photographic
dissemination, distribution, and presentation, while revealing the impulse of institutional
neutralization.
Through deconstruction
18
and recontextualization, the artworks in The Art of
Memory/The Loss of History questioned the authority of images and the language of
representation as they were constructed through culture. Though these images were
highly mediated by the artists, they remained the same images that confronted even the
most unlikely viewer living in a media reality. In her catalogue essay for the exhibition,
Abigail Solomon-Godeau contextualized the terrain of photographic production of the
80s as functioning between Walter Benjamin’s meditations on photography as a form of
historical retrieval, and Guy Debord’s dissection of photography as a spectacle of
consumerism and social control. Solomon-Godeau proposed that the artworks in the
exhibition were involved in a struggle for the “control of meaning, the meaning of
images, and the meaning of the history to which it [related].”
19
For Olander, memory and
history stem from a similarly decentering narrative, established in Robert Smithson’s
multiple sites, one that abstracts the author and the object from a singular trajectory of
meaning to a proliferation of different positions. Where Smithson shifted the site of the
15
18
William Olander referenced Jacques Derrida’s On Grammatology, in his catalogue essay “Fragments” to
discuss the type of inherent construction and deconstruction of the work in The Art of Memory/The Loss of
History. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998.)
19
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Photography at the Dock,” in The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (New
York: The New Museum, 1985), 51. Segments of the essay were later published in Abigail Solomon-
Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.)
artwork away from its origin, Olander proposed a representational method that would
further this distance though the use of mass-culture images. As the origin of the work was
dispersed through language, image, and reference, the investigation of memory and
history as a succession of sites and signifiers activated the interpretation of the present
moment as history while it happened.
Figure 2. Cover of the catalogue for The Art of Memory/The Loss of History.
16
Evidence of Olander’s focus on discourse, and the contextualization of this
shifting moment was built into the catalogue for The Art of Memory/The Loss of History.
The catalogue is a modest sixty-page paperback with two-color printing, images
appearing in black, white, and gray. The front and back cover of the catalogue feature
images by Louise Lawler, two plaster casts of a sculpture of Hermes and a copy of the
Roman Doryphoros undergoing restoration at the Queens Museum. Olander organized
the catalogue to function as both a resource and reference. Under the heading “Selected
Bibliography,” beginning with 1980, one can find an extensive list of books, exhibition
catalogues, and articles collected from the show’s participating artists. The catalogue thus
presents a rich pedagogical resource and history in the space generally reserved for the
promotional space of artist biographies. It also experimented with the publication of texts
by artists Tina Lhotsky, Reese Williams, Louise Lawler, Stephen Prina, René Santos,
Judith Barry, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, disseminating the artists’ writings while
presenting the discursive context that inspired the work. An assortment of reproductions
are scattered throughout the book, including an addendum to the works included in the
show.
For his catalogue entry, the artist Stephen Prina was listed as “arranger” for two
texts superimposed onto a faint gray reproduction of Der Blaue Reiter by Vassily
Kandinsky. In anticipation of the performance, Prina used an untitled short essay by
Franz Liszt from 1865 to declare:
I shall be well satisfied if I have succeeded in my task and proved myself to be an
intelligent collator, conscentions [sic] reproducer and one who has fully grasped
17
the meaning of the composer, and thus helped to popularize the great masters and
inculcated an appreciation of the beautiful.
20

Most likely selected in the early stages of the production of the catalogue, it is as if Prina
was already interpreting his response to the performance. The second text in Prina’s
“arrangement,” a translation of Ode to Joy by Friedrich Schiller and L. van Beethoven,
presented lyrics with a strange conflation of chaotic reference to imperialist arms and
patriotic religiosity.
Another unique inclusion in the catalogue was a photo spread by Louise Lawler
along with a text that directly addressed the show’s title (and was also one of the
installations featured in the exhibit). Lawler pointed to the title of the exhibition,
remarking on its originality, relevance and on the aspects of production involved in its
organization. Lawler’s text revealed the authoritative eye of the institution in the figure of
the curator that selects, thematizes, and connects artists, in what she named a “cumulative
enterprise.”
21
Juxtaposed to this is an interior image of the Rude Museum, a museum
dedicated to the French sculptor, François Rude. Inside the room pictured is a plaster
reproduction of La Marseillaise (1833-36), Rude’s contribution to the Arch of Triumph in
Paris, among myriad other sculptures. In the text that accompanied the image, Lawler
implicated institution, artist, and curator alike as the products and producers of culture,
revealing another layer of mediation that enters the detailed curatorial selection process.
Further, Lawler stated that her “desired history depends on a new literacy,”
18
20
The title of the essay is “Excerpts from the 9 Symphonies of L. Van Beethoven, für zwei pianoforte zu
vier händen, transcription pour piano a 2 mains, and für klavier zu 4 händen,” and lists that the performance
premiered as part of the program for “An evening of 19th- and 20th- Century Piano Music,” featuring Trina
Dye-Ballinger and Gaylord Mowrey as pianists, on December 4, 1985 at Symphony Space in New York.
William Olander, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (New York: The New Museum, 1985), 36 - 37.
21
William Olander, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (New York: The New Museum, 1985), 32.
acknowledging or perhaps implicating herself in discussing The Art of Memory, and thus
revealing a rare instance in which the artist engaged in the reception of her work.
22

Olander’s second essay, “Point of View,” written for the video portion of the
exhibition, situates the importance of documentary approaches. Re-Viewing History:
Video Documents shared a similar title with another exhibition, Re-viewing Television:
Interpretations of the Mass Media, Parts I and II at the Whitney Museum of America
Figure 3. Installation view of The Art of Memory/The Loss of History, showing works by Louise
Lawler, one part of Two Wall Displays: Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Atamore Pope or their
daughter Theodate, Farmington, Connecticut, (1985), and Sarah Charlesworth, September 1977
(Modern History), (1979). Courtesy the New Museum Digital Archive.
19
22
In a conversation between Andrea Fraser and George Baker, they discuss how Lawler has chosen to not
write about her own work as a strategy towards a more open interpretation of the work’s reception. George
Baker and Andrea Fraser, “Displacement and Condensation: A Conversation on the Work of Louise
Lawler,” in George Baker, et al. Louise Lawler and Others (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 117.
Art.
23
Olander’s video program focused on the importance of documentary approaches to
the retelling of events through memory and as records of history. Videos by Paper Tiger
Television, Peter Adair, Dan Reeves, Nancy Buchanan, and Dan Graham, among others,
were situated as socially invested and more socially productive in their subjective
narratives and storytelling functions, particularly because they were either originally
aired on television, or simply due to their documentary format. As documentary-styled
videotapes, not all necessarily artworks, they were selected for their forceful ability to
express a point of view in a way that countered the loss of history produced by corporate
media. Acknowledging the construction of history in the medium of video and disrupting
the conventions inherent in it allowed for the work to be retrieved from the neutralization
of television. Olander’s work thus attempted to re-inscribe documentary as a retelling of
history and as a participant in the “remains of the consciousness industry rather than the
culture industry of the late twentieth century.”
24
This sentiment would soon define the
shifting discourse of documentary practices as they developed as part of the culture
industry.
As the show navigated many realms of aesthetic production and distribution – the
exhibition, video program, performance and catalogue – all its elements served to extend
the show beyond the walls of the museum, to indicate as Robert Nickas noted in his
20
23
This exhibition is listed in the bibliography at the end of Olander’s catalogue. Re-viewing Television:
Interpretations of the Mass Media, Parts I and II was held on December 14–30, 1984 and January 15–
February 17, 1985 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
24
William Olander, “Point of View,” in William Olander, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (New
York: The New Museum, 1985), 55.
review of the exhibition, “the limits of the museum-as-container.”
25
The various levels of
discourse engaged in the space of The Art of Memory/The Loss of History contextualized
what David Deitcher, a contributor to the catalogue, described as a “departure from the
aesthetic and curatorial practices that coincided with modernist art,”
26
into a space now
recognized to extend outside the museum. Though the show only received two critical
reviews, its reception was later noted to have had a lasting effect, for Olander was an
early champion of the artists who would later come to be heralded as formative image
artists.
27

William Olander’s curatorial work during this period was attempting to return the
audience to an artistic production born from mediation. In his expansion of the discourse
of art back into society, Olander advocated for art that realized aesthetic progress and
challenged art institutions to be motivated by the production that exists in the world. But
his insistence on the image retaining its social function was connected to history as a
subject seeking to progress. To set a wider context for Olander’s reaction, a brief
reference to another exhibition from 1984, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of
the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, shows just how
distinctly divided the trajectory of aesthetic production was becoming at the time.
28
With
memory and history as his subjects, Olander was attempting to reveal and also unbind
21
25
Robert Nickas, “The Art of Memory/The Loss of History,” The New Art Examiner, (April 1986): 61.
26
David Deitcher, “Drawing from Memory,” in William Olander, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History
(New York: The New Museum, 1985), 15.
27
Ann Goldstein, “Acknowledgements,” in Mary Jane Jacob and Ann Goldstein, A Forest of Signs: Art in
the Crisis of Representation, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1989), 13.
28
‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was exhibited at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in August of 1984.
what Walter Benjamin notably described in his “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” as
a retrogression of society:
Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly
appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects
both the content of the tradition and its receivers... The same threat hangs over
both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must
be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower
it.
29
The fragments of art and experience detailed in The Art of Memory/The Loss of History
were the stepping stones on a path of divergent views on art that strengthened as the 80s
continued. What remains significant is not just Olander’s unique framing of artistic
production as integrally linked to its own culture, but also that many of these issues are
still relevant in the art world today.
22
29
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. Leon
Wieseltier and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 2007), 255.
Figure 4. Photo of William Olander in front of Clegg and Gluttman’s Corporate Music, (1986), on
the occasion of his exhibition New New York at at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art,
Cleveland, Ohio, February 21–March 29,1986. Originally published in the Newsletter for
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, April 1986. Photo by Marvin M. Greene. Christopher
Cox Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
New Haven, Connecticut.
23
Chapter Two: Textual Encounters
The Art of Memory/The Loss of History demonstrates the extent to which William
Olander’s curatorial work was developing into a critical – and eventually an activist –
practice. Prior to joining the New Museum as a curator, Olander wrote a review of the
exhibition Art & Ideology in reaction to the narrow frame of aesthetic ideologies
unfolding in various levels of discourse in the field. Art & Ideology took place on
February 4–March 18, 1984 at the New Museum in New York, and showcased five guest
curators/critics, including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Donald Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard,
Nilda Peraza, and Lowery Sims, who each selected two artists whose work was
politically motivated or held an ideological point of view. Aiming to renew the discourse
with the ideological debate on art making, the exhibition thematic examined how works
of art with social, cultural, and political dynamics could be perceived, especially with
regard to race, class, and gender.
30
But in its actual execution, the framing of ideology
was complicated by the exhibition format: the curator’s pairing of established artists,
dealing with the specificity of 70s activist practice, with one younger artist, exposed a
changing field of production around issue-based work.
In a pair of texts written during 1984–1985, “What’s Wrong with Criticism” and
the review “Art-as-Ideology at The New Museum,” Olander positioned himself to define
the conditions of artistic production in relation to this ideological frame. In these texts,
Olander took an active stake in defending his core value that art should have a position in
24
30
Marcia Tucker, “Preface and Acknowledgements,” Art & Ideology (New York: The New Museum, 1984),
4.
society and that its capacity to speak about meaningful issues should not be smothered by
producers of aesthetic ideology. One of Olander’s phrases, the “producers of aesthetic
ideology,” implicated the supposed authorities of art, whose championing influence of
traditional aesthetic production became increasingly contentious at the midpoint of the
1980s. A prominent term in this section, ideology was the concept that came to define the
decade as a pernicious battle between opposing visions of what constituted “appropriate”
versions of traditional values. With the firm grasp of conservatism in society under
President Reagan, the ideology in question was aptly described by Adrian Piper in 1981,
as the kind that treated all its own conservative “pronouncements as imparting genuine
information but treating those of other people as mere symptoms of some moral or
psychological defect.”
31
Though Piper’s phrase could accurately describe a variety of
contemporary dynamics, her words were a comment on the tone of the debate around
practices with any complexity of content – and specifically political content. The critical
territory of aesthetic ideology lay in determining the “pure” subject and content of art,
guided by the belief that one could possibly be an objective fact, or exist apart from
society.
In his review, “Art-as-Ideology at The New Museum,” Olander thought that
several elements factored into the narrow failure of the Art & Ideology exhibition. To
start, the combination of politically-oriented works from different ideological periods of
art making – the middle to late 70s and the 80s – problematized their specific reactions to
and relations with the issues of the period. The works in the show represented a wide
25
31
Adrian Piper, “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness,” (1981) in Charles Esche and Will
Bradley, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 243.
range of topics and viewpoints, including feminism (Hannah Wilke and Kaylynn
Sullivan), factographic art, a term used by curator Benjamin Buchloh (Fred Lonidier and
Allan Sekula), socio-conceptual art (Alfredo Jaar and Ismael Frigerio), and community-
based practices (Suzanne Lacy and Jerry Kearns), among others.
32
Olander stated that the
categorization of all the artworks under the single term “ideology” flattened their
disparate meanings into a contradiction. For Olander, locating the work under the rubric
of “ideology” allowed for almost any artistic practice, from Neo-Expressionism to “meta-
art,” to be deemed as ideological based on the viewpoint of its organizers and viewers.
33

This logic manifested the subjective component of ideology as inherently immersed in all
art. By association, Olander condemned even the venerated abstract expressionist
movement for its relation to American imperialism in the 1950s, as well as Pop art’s
relation to the postindustrial consumer society of the 1960s.
34
By Olander’s account, even
advocates of such modernist aesthetics were implicated in aligning with the ideologies
these styles were complicit with. In his conclusion, Olander proposed that the ultimate
outcome of the exhibition was that it provided a space to rethink and examine the
specificity of social, ideological issues, and their changing relations to art.
This critique of Art & Ideology, while negative towards the curatorial and
theoretical methodology of the exhibition, was intended to counter the language of
another review from April of the same year. Olander was responding to the critic Hilton
26
32
The full list of artists was Fred Lonidier, Allan Sekula, Nancy Spero, Francesc Torres, Jerry Kearns,
Suzanne Lacy, Ismael Frigerio, Alfredo Jaar, Kaylynn Sullivan, and Hannah Wilke. See, Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, et al. Art and Ideology (New York: The New Museum, 1984.)
33
Olander, “Art-as-Ideology,” 392.
34
Olander, “Art-as-Ideology,” 392.
Kramer and a larger context of discourse around these issue-based practices. Kramer,
who resigned from his role as art critic of the New York Times in 1982, had eagerly
attacked Art & Ideology and several other “politically oriented” exhibitions in the pages
of his new publication, the New Criterion. According to Kramer, the exhibition hinged on
a statement made by one of the curators whom he described as a militant activist, Lucy
Lippard. Lippard had begun her catalogue essay with the statement that “all art is
ideological and all art is used politically by the right and the left.”
35
Kramer countered
that this “abandon[ed] artistic criteria and aesthetic considerations in favor of ideological
tests that would. . . reduce the whole notion of art to little more than a facile,
preprogrammed exercise in political propaganda.”
36
Kramer further disparaged the
participants in the exhibition by calling them “a dedicated alliance of artists, academics
and so-called ‘activists’ [seeking] to politicize life in this country.” With a swift mention,
Kramer predicted the early stages of the culture wars when he stated that
a sizable part of this blatant political activity is funded, precisely because it claims
to speak in the name of art, by such public agencies as the National Endowment
for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of
Cultural Affairs of the City of New York – yet another example, I suppose, of
supplying the rope to those who are eager to see us hanged.
37

With his review, Olander was attempting to diffuse this extreme characterization of a
liberal art world and its “ideological” art as working in opposition to political
conservatism. For Olander, the presentation of work under these terms exposed the
27
35
Lucy Lippard, “Give and Take: Ideology in the Art of Suzanne Lacy and Jerry Kearns,” in Benjamin H.
D. Buchloh, et al, Art & Ideology (New York: The New Museum, 1984), 29.
36
Hilton Kramer, “Turning back the clock: Art and politics in 1984,” The New Criterion 2 (April 1984):
68.
37
Kramer, “Turning back the clock,” 68.
rigidity in which “political” practices could be quickly labeled or dismissed as such, for it
shut down the possibility of the work speaking on its own terms. In the context of
Kramer’s aggression, the critic’s distaste confused the reality that other ideologies and
other ideas of aesthetic quality existed in an ambiguously defined and increasingly
diversified American culture.
Olander’s own review, written in August before Reagan was reelected to his
second term, states that his concerns were related to the potential of another four years
under the president. Olander added his own call for artists, critics, historians, and curators
to “promote, encourage and provide a sympathetic and coherent context for the
production and distribution of alternative and oppositional artistic production,” and also
to “attempt to change the institutional structure so as to defuse its own ideological
power . . . and to abandon the liberal notion of pluralism” supported by even the most
“avant garde” institutions. This was an agenda that Olander himself would realize in his
next curatorial project, The Art of Memory/The Loss of History.
In 1984, before Kramer’s review had appeared, the editor of the Ohio-based
journal Dialogue asked Olander to write a commentary on “art and social issues.” This
vague request was answered by Olander with an essay titled “What’s Wrong With
Criticism,” in which he addressed the “current idea of ‘political art” through the
authoritative position art history and criticism played in restraining politics in art. Using a
similar rhetoric to the one he later deployed to disarm the discourse between Lippard and
28
Kramer, Olander stated that his desire to improve how art was read in relation to art
history was to encourage a critical art history:
To recognize not that all art is political (an equivalently skewed aesthetic version
of the equally misleading 70s credo of the personal is political) but that all art is a
carrier of political ideology and, that by labeling certain art ‘political,’ we then
imply that there exists an art which is apolitical (impossible and untrue). An
abstract or figurative painting hanging silently and complacently on the walls of
the museum is as much a construct of ideological decisions as a street
performance invading our space, disrupting our daily lives, and confronting us
with information that we might prefer to ignore.
38
While Olander’s critique of criticism recognized the continuing object-based approach to
evaluating works of art, it exemplified the subtle nuance of political content. Placing
value on certain types of artistic production and securing them as commodities to be
objectified was a process that Olander problematized by considering the social conditions
inherent in all art.
39

Moreover, these critical texts and exhibitions corresponded with a sea change in
the art market: the 1980s were a moment when art reached a new level of commodity
status. As economic conditions shifted during the Reagan years, the art market began to
benefit, and the institutional structures of art were transformed. Private collections began
to outpace the traditionally slow collections of museums with hot new art, while galleries
positioned themselves to sell art, a financial decision that became more popular than
supporting art that was making statements about the world.
40
These economic conditions
supported a return to painting and simultaneously, a break with practices like the
29
38
William Olander, “What’s Wrong with Criticism,” Dialogue 7, 1 (January - February 1984): 6.
39
Olander, “What’s Wrong with Criticism,” 6.
40
An overview of the art world in 1980s can be found in Mary Jane Jacob, “Art in the Age of Reagan:
1980-1988,” in Mary Jane Jacob and Ann Goldstein, A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 15 - 20.
minimalism and conceptualism of the 60s and 70s that were considered to represent
radical progress. In the same interview with Lynne Tillman cited in the first part of this
thesis, Olander described this moment as a shift “that changed the nature of artistic
production back to a much more conventional mode of buying and trafficking in art.”
41

For Olander, the economic shifts of the 80s art market represented a return to convention
that manifested a rejection of progressive practices – most notably, progressive modes of
presentation and distribution that intervened in art’s social and institutional environments,
the making of work aware of its social and political contexts, and the exploration of
works that were ephemeral to the point of being unsaleable.
42

To lend more context to this tumultuous polarization of artistic practice, another
article from 1984 serves to situate the moment. In a scathing response to the burgeoning
East Village art scene in New York, Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan published
their article “The Fine Art of Gentrification” in the winter edition of the journal October.
It implicated a litany of art world players for rejecting radical artistic practices in favor of
30
41
This interview is dated approximately in spring 1985 based on two articles referenced within it, an article
of a conversation between Stephen Prina, Christopher Williams, Lynne Tillman, and Sheila McLauglin
dated Spring 1985, and the interview’s outcome as a short piece in Time Out New York in October 1985.
See, Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams, “A Conversation with Lynne Tillman and Sheila
McLaughlin,” Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art L.A.I.C.A. Journal: A Contemporary Art
Magazine, no. 41 (Spring 1985): 40 - 45. See, “What is Political Art? What is Political Art Now?,” in The
Village Voice, (October 15, 1985): no pagination. (Published as Bill Olander) See, William Olander,
interviewed by Lynne Tillman, Lynne Tillman Papers, Box 27, Folder 43, Fales Library and Special
Collections, Bobst Library, New York University, New York, 10.
42
Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification,” October 31 (Winter 1984):
105.
commercialism and opportunism in alliance with the art market.
43
Deutsche and Ryan’s
sentiment was echoed in Lucy Lippard’s essay “Intersections” of the same year, in which
Lippard reflected on the historical importance of the 1960s and 70s for radical
institutional opposition. Lippard noted that despite the “expansionism” of the minimalists
and conceptualists, the progress of art led “not to change but back to the artworld, from
which bastion artists [could] remain safely ‘critical’ of society without having to worry
about being heard.”
44
The retreat from political art practice manifested itself as part of a
larger picture of sociopolitical conservatism of the eighties.
All of these events transpired previous to Olander’s move to the New Museum.
Olander’s response to these circumstances was not just to address them with tactical
reviews, but to incorporate his ideas into action. The discourse of his curatorial work at
the New Museum would attempt to convey the shifts taking place in artistic practices by
relating them to a broader background. Olander’s exhibition The Art of Memory/The Loss
of History opened one year after his review of Art & Ideology and his commentary piece
“What’s Wrong with Criticism.” The same sense of call-and-response timing would
motivate his work over the course of the next four years.
31
43
The full quotation describes the turn from radical artistic practices: “Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s
significant art, beginning with minimalism, was oriented towards an awareness of context. Among the
radical results of this orientation were art practices that intervened directly in their institutional and social
environments. While a number of artists today continue contextualist practices that demonstrate an
understanding of the material bases of cultural production, they are a minority in a period of reaction. The
specific form this reaction takes in the art world is an unapologetic embrace of commercialism,
opportunism, and a concomitant rejection of the radical art practices of the past twenty years.” Deutsche
and Ryan, “Gentrification," 105.
44
Lucy Lippard, “Intersections,” in Flyktpunkter/Vanishing Points, ed. Olle Granath (Stockholm: Moderna
Museet, 1984), 29.
The next dialectical response that Olander would pursue was motivated by the
major international exhibition, Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, held on
December 8, 1984–February 10, 1985 and organized by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock
at the New Museum. Olander’s response defined a personal investment in the critical
language of homosexuality and its representations in art that were developing a critical
discourse. Its catalogue contained important essays by Craig Owens, Lisa Tickner,
Jacqueline Rose, Peter Wollen, as well as the curators. The traveling show included
twenty artists with works in all media that centered on representational practices that
engaged with the complex issues of sexual difference. Significant for its use of
poststructuralist theory, the exhibition espoused a curatorial framework that revised the
Figure 5. Installation view of Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, Curated by Kate
Linker and Jane Weinstock at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, December 8,
1984 – February 10, 1985, showing work by Barbara Kruger and Sylvia Kolbowski. Courtesy the
New Museum Digital Archive.
32
conventional biological categories of masculinity and femininity.
45
The Difference
exhibition was exemplary of the trans-Atlantic impact of psychoanalytic theory and its
entrenchment into academia. This theoretical writing had been activated by pioneering
feminists of the 70s for its critique of the sexual difference inscribed in ideological
structures. Second-wave feminists of the 80s continued to draw upon Continental theory,
using Lacan’s rereading of Freud to analyze and negate the ordering of “woman” as the
negative of man.
The Difference exhibition found much traction in such feminist territory. In his
catalogue essay “Posing,” Craig Owens described this critical artwork as driving a wedge
into the cracks of psychoanalytic discourse. Charting what he called “the discourse of the
Other,” Owens explained how the mimetic strategies of art and theory cast doubt onto the
authoritative model of official discourse.
46
Similarly, a review by Aimee Rankin in the
Australian journal Art-Network reiterated the slippage of female representation as an
extension of the feminist movement. She described this position as a “splitting of
subjectivity” that failed to articulate the diverse forms of representation and spectatorship
that comprised the visual arts, calling for new strategies and new theories.
47
Jacqueline
Rose, in her own essay, was one of the few to acknowledge the desire to discover “an
artistic practice which sets itself the dual task of disrupting visual form and questioning
33
45
The exhibition began at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, then traveled to The Renaissance
Society at the University of Chicago, Illinois, March 3–April 7, 1985, and to the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London, July 19–September 1, 1985.
46
Craig Owens, “Posing,” Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 201 - 217. Originally published in Kate Linker,
Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, Max Almy, et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1985), 7 - 17.
47
Aimee Rankin, “Difference & Deference: Theorizing the Representation of Sexuality at the New
Museum, New York,” Art-Network (August 1985): 15.
the sexual certainties and stereotypes of our culture.”
48
Moreover, the “difference”
represented in the exhibition, or the “other” in Owens’s essay, reveals the patriarchal
order through the use of the constrained terms of “sexuality,” “sexual difference,”
“masculinity,” and “femininity.” It was precisely the specificity of its critical
interpretation that exposed an exclusionary fact for Olander, the absence of homosexual
difference.
Three months after the Difference exhibition closed, in a letter dated May 28,
1985, Olander detailed an intense frustration with the exhibition stemming from its lack
of homosexual presence and criticized the six participating critics and historians for the
marked exclusion of the term “homosexual.”
49
According to Olander, the organizers
made only a partial reference not to homosexuality itself, but to AIDS – a disease Olander
described as “having assumed representational status with regards to male
homosexuals.”
50
Olander’s letter proposed a symposium titled The Politics of Exclusion:
On Difference, and outlined a plan not simply to critique Difference, but to recast the
absence of gay presence in the exhibition as the basis for a new set of problems. The
issue for Olander fundamentally pivoted on an insufficiency of appropriate critical
language and understanding of homosexuality as a state of difference requiring its own
set of distinctions and meanings.
34
48
Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in the Field of Vision,” in Kate Linker, Difference: on representation and
sexuality, Max Almy, et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 31.
49
Letter from William Olander to James Saslow. William Olander Papers, Series VIII, Box 40, Folder 614,
Christopher Cox Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. New Haven, Connecticut, 1.
50
Olander writes that the mention to AIDS came in a one sentence description of Stuart Marshall’s video,
A Journey of the Plague Year (1984). William Olander, “Letter to James Saslow,” 1.
Olander’s letter described three points which served as the springboard of his
critique. The first was the failure of poststructuralist, feminist-psychoanalytic
contemporary criticism to account for radical sexual difference (homosexuality) in favor
of a singularly-constructed male-female, masculine-feminine sexuality. Second was the
problem of a scarcity of a “gay/lesbian meta-critical art,” acknowledging what did exist
labored with representation in culturally-constructed ways that were similar to those used
by artists in Difference. Citing Michel Foucault, Olander advocated for discourse
conceived
as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform or
stable. . . [not] a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and
excluded discourse, or between the dominant and the dominated one; but as a
multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.
51
He went on to argue that contemporary attitudes towards homosexual sensibilities were
distorted by images of gay life that were deployed as graphic symbols of so-called gay
liberation (Olander’s emphasis) by the entertainment and the media industries. He argued
that the art world was also guilty in perpetuating those stereotypes – symbols he referred
to as “closer to camp than to critique.” Olander stated that even the hypothetical inclusion
of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work had disrupted the visual field in its
perverse power, would not suffice for its lack of theoretical and political content. Work
like Mapplethorpe’s could only replace the notion of difference with the fetishization of it
– sexuality as a luxurious or expensive commodity.
52
Olander’s final point was a call to
find artistic production made by gay men and lesbians that contained the same rigor and
35
51
Quote and citation from Michel Foucault, “History of Sexuality,” (1980), 100, in William Olander,
“Letter to James Saslow,” 3.
52
Olander, “Letter to James Saslow,” 2.
intensity of the work presented in Difference. These criticisms became a stake for
Olander to locate artwork that would imply a rejection of the representation founded by
earlier countercultural sexual-liberation movements. At the least, the work would begin to
distinguish the margins within difference, which for Olander meant a “search [for]
politics that [could] more efficiently link gay and lesbian concerns with the broader issues
of patriarchy, discrimination and ideology.”
53

The proposal outlined in Olander’s letter was not realized as a symposium, but
came to be an exhibition one year later, titled Homo Video: Where We Are Now and
subtitled A program of Videotapes by Gay Men and Lesbians, which ran in the New
Museum’s Workspace gallery from December 11, 1986–February 15, 1987.
54
Much of
the core content from the three-page letter to Saslow anchors the exhibition essay, which
in lieu of a proper catalogue, was printed on the exhibition brochure. Amplifying the
ideas from his letter, Olander illuminated the specific subtleties of difference located in
homosexuality as the basis for his exhibition. He also disclosed that in fact he was
responding to two exhibitions by the New Museum, critiquing his own institution from
within, a radical position to take even now. Though Difference was Olander’s main
concern, he also pinpointed a 1982 exhibition titled Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual
Presence in Contemporary Art, organized by Dan Cameron. His trouble with Extended
Sensibilities was its emphasis on a “gay sensibility,” notably of camp, kitsch, and gay
cult; all representations that figured homosexual life as a “sordid underworld.” Extended
36
53
Olander, “Letter to James Saslow,” 3.
54
Images of works from the exhibition, Homo Video: Where We Are Now can be found on the New
Museum’s digital archive. http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/
occurrence_id/141
Sensibilities had been the first exhibition on homosexuality in art, and its framework had
already become dated. For Olander, Homo Video: Where We Are Now was a reclamation
of homosexuality on critical terms, a concept that Olander attempted to literally translate
into its almost vulgar title, perhaps by imbuing a certain amount of shock value meant to
state this specific difference.
55

The show of thirteen videotapes, two of which were independently produced for
broadcast television, presented new artistic production by artists such as Gregg
Bordowitz, Jerri Allyn, and Suzanne Silver, along with public service announcements on
AIDS and documentary-style films by Stuart Marshall, Peter Adair and Robert Epstein,
John Greyson, and Lyn Blumenthal.
56
Structurally, Homo Video did not attempt to
articulate the reductive gesture of a “homosexual aesthetic,” conflating an aesthetic style
as typical of gay or lesbian art, but recognized the value of the work through its stake in
politics and history, and its engagement with theory. But Olander’s comments were not
taken lightly, and his deriding of the Difference show as a “stunning failure” would be
quoted back to him on several occasions, including in a review by Martha Gever. Gever,
a lesbian artist, criticized the show for not effectively linking gay and lesbian concerns to
each other. The show was oriented too heavily on gay men talking openly about sex and
relationships, while their lesbian counterparts were represented as still dealing with their
37
55
William Olander, actually claims responsibility for the title as “so bluntly, almost vulgarly called
“HOMO VIDEO”(in capital letters). William Olander, “Homo Video: Where We Are Now,” exhibition
brochure, no pagination. William Olander Papers, Series VIII, Box 43, Folder 655, Christopher Cox Papers.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven,
Connecticut.
56
The complete program included: Three public service announcements produced by the Gay Men’s Health
Crisis’s AIDS Project, Suzanne Silver, John Goss, Lyn Blumenthal, Gregg Bordowitz, Richard Fung, Joyan
Saunders, Jerri Allyn, Heramedia (Toni Dickerson, Abigail Norman, Lydia Dean Pilcher, Robin Omata,
Afua Kafi Akna, and Dare Daresha Kyi), John Greyson, Rick “X,” Peter Adair and Robert Epstein, David
Meieran, and Stuart Marshall.
own female images in the same structural way as “straight” women. However, Gever did
concede that the “stubborn contradiction surrounding sexual identity need not forestall
intelligent analysis of sexual politics or disallow representations of the body . . . rather it
makes them all the more urgent.”
57
Olander’s exhibition was successful in its ability to
expose issues of homosexual representation that revealed an even greater division and
distinction of gender between gay men and lesbians.
58
Another text that showed Olander’s contextual motivation for this exhibition
began in the form of another letter, this time addressed to Olander from Stephen Prina
and Christopher Williams, dated August 21, 1986. Prina and Williams invited Olander to
contribute to an issue of New Observations that the two artists were editing, on the topic
of “The Construction and Maintenance of Our Enemies.”
59
Olander’s response again
recapitulated much of the theoretical language espoused in his essay for Homo Video, and
added context to his sense of an increased need to defend homosexuality.
Olander submitted an essay titled “‘We Are Unwilling to Start Down that Road’: 3
Vignettes” to New Observations, taking its title from Associate Justice Byron R. White’s
Supreme Court decision on Bowers v. Hardwick of June 30, 1986, ruling against
38
57
Martha Gever, “Where We Are Now,” Art in America (July 1987): 49.
58
Olander first addresses gay issues, specifically “coming out” in an article from 1981 titled “A New Kind
of Art,” a review about "Out Art" at C.A.G.E, (Cincinnati Artists Group Effort). See William Olander, “A
New Kind of Art,” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal 4, 1 (September–October 1981): 7-8.
59
Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams, Letter to William Olander, dated August 21, 1986, William
Olander Papers, Series VIII, Box 43, Folder 659, Christopher Cox Papers. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, Connecticut.
homosexuals’ right to privacy, specifically with regard to sexual acts.
60
Olander’s
vignettes presented three “straight” views of homosexuality that translated as acts of
censorship, charlatanism, ignorance, and intense discrimination.
61
More biographically
candid than Olander’s other writings, the first vignette of his essay recalled a
contradictory encounter with an exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in
1986 titled Social Distortion. The show included the work of the artist Tom of Finland
and many other artists working with sex, violence, rebellion, and conformity.
62
Outside
the small interior gallery space created to house the racy illustrations was a sign that
stated “Adults Only,” alerting the parents of minors under the age of twenty-one to the
unsuitable nature of the work for younger viewers. However, just adjacent to this
boundary was fifteen paintings by Robert Williams, a Zap comics artist, which by
Olander’s description, showed “a female nude being fucked in as many ways as there
were paintings.”
63
Olander’s second vignette told the story of a group of friends who
attended a Louise Hay seminar after reading her book You Can Heal Your Life. Hay had
claimed that people were developing AIDS because they felt guilty about being gay, and
encouraged men – whom she called boys – to bring teddy bears to seminars for when
they got “scared.” The last vignette was of a peaceful demonstration against the Bowers v.
39
60
The majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, written by Justice Byron White, framed the legal question
as whether the constitution confers "a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." Justice
White's opinion for the majority answered this question in the negative, stating that "to claim that a right to
engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of
ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious." The ruling was later overturned as unconstitutional in Lawrence v.
Texas in 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick, Accessed January 30, 2012.
61
William Olander, “ ‘We Are Unwilling to Start Down that Road,’: 3 Vignettes,” New Observations 44
(1987): 4 - 6.
62
Wilson, William. “Art Review: ‘Social Distortion’ exhibition.” Los Angeles Times, (July 11, 1986.) http://
articles.latimes.com/1986-07-11/entertainment/ca-20122_1_social-distortion. Accessed February 28, 2012.
63
Olander, “We Are Unwilling to Start Down that Road,” 5.
Hardwick decision, near the historic site of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York.
The event was picked up by the tabloid media press Weekly World News, who cast it with
the headline: “Peeved Pansies Predict Revolt. Hordes of howling homosexuals are in a
foot-stomping snit because the Supreme Court won’t okay their bizarre bedtime practices
– and they’re threatening to prance out of the closet and scratch our eyes out.”
64
Clearly
there was humor in Olander’s examples of his “enemies,” but these three scenes revealed
the discrimination and homophobia rooted deep within the cultural mind.
Despite the number of gays and lesbians “coming out” on an unprecedented scale,
the political and social conditions for homosexuals were becoming worse. Under
President Reagan, the Bowers ruling and Attorney General Edwin Meese’s “Commission
on Pornography” in July of 1986 were directed to harass, contain, and suppress activity
that fell outside “traditional” views of American life. Nonetheless, these repressive acts
precipitated more collective concerns from within the gay community. For Olander,
assuming a more activist position to clarify and defend gay difference in aesthetic
judgement and in critical discourse was essential. Homo Video: Where We Are Now was
an example of an activist exhibition in its mining of an institutional problem and steady
dismantling of it through a multiplicity of discursive elements. Olander was clearly aware
that the issues of gay and lesbian individuals were beginning to boil into a more complex
reality. His exhibition marked an early recognition of this urgency, one that would
eventually be realized in 1990 with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, in the development
of queer theory. Butler’s text would begin to uncover the political possibilities that could
40
64
Olander, “We Are Unwilling to Start Down that Road,” 2.
come from the radical critique of the categories of identity, through a convergence of
feminist, gay, and lesbian perspectives on gender.
65
Olander’s curatorial challenge to the
ideological apparatus was to develop an ongoing conversation with the politics of gay
and lesbian concerns.
As the 1980s progressed, Olander continued to produce complex exhibitions. He
also continued to support oppositional work that pushed against aesthetic and critical
expectations. One of Olander’s most critically well-received shows was Let the Record
Show, The Window on Broadway by ACT UP , which ran from November 20, 1987–
January 24, 1988. Organized just four months after the formation of ACT UP (AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power), Olander invited the group to install an artwork in the New
Museum’s arched Broadway window. In an article from January 1988, Olander recalled
that his first encounter with ACT UP was seeing their poster which proclaimed the
equation: “SILENCE = DEATH.” The poster (designed by the collective Silence = Death
and lent to ACT UP), with its pink triangle and black background was designed to
promote awareness of the AIDS crisis, and to fight what Olander described as “the often
uninformed and negligent response of federal, state, and local governments to AIDS.”
66

Olander distinguished the artistic significance of the “Silence = Death” logo as an activist
response inspired and produced in the arms of the crisis. The title of the installation was
41
65
Judith Butler, “Preface (1990),” Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990/2008), xxxiv.
66
William Olander, “ACT UP at The New Museum,” Art and Artists XVI (December 1987/January 1988):
9.
taken from Olander’s exhibition brochure, which stated, "Let the record show that there
are many in the community of art and artists who chose not to be silent in the 1980s.”
67

Detailed extensively in Douglas Crimp’s article, “AIDS Cultural Analysis/
Cultural Activism,” the complex installation provided current information on the AIDS
epidemic and attempted to depict it with historical perspective. The installation was
divided into three sections: a large photo of the Nuremberg trials, and below it, six life-
sized photos of “AIDS Criminals” whose words were inscribed onto a slab of concrete,
then the neon sign, “Silence = Death,” and strikingly, “no word from the President.” A
light would illuminate a series of boxes, highlighting quotes by Jesse Helms, Jerry
Falwell, William F. Buckley, and others, stating the positions taken by each on the
epidemic. US Senator Jesse Helms, for example, was represented by his statement that,
“The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected.” Above these images
and texts was an electronic display that scrolled through passages that read as follows:
“Let the record show . . . William F. Buckley deflects criticism of the government’s slow
response to the epidemic through calculations”; “At most three years were lost . . . Those
three years have killed approximately 15,000 people; if we are talking about 50 million
dead, then the cost of delay is not heavy . . .” The display then proceeded to state the
increasing death toll for each year, until it finally read: “By Thanksgiving 1987, 25,644
known dead . . . AIDS . . . President Reagan: ‘I have asked the Department of Health and
Human Services to determine as soon as possible the extent to which the AIDS virus has
42
67
William Olander, Let the Record Show exhibition brochure. Visit http://archive.newmuseum.org/
index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/158, Accessed February 2, 2012.
penetrated our society.’” The final element of the installation was a neon sign flashing the
ACT UP slogan after each element, “Act Up, Fight Back, Fight AIDS.”
68

Olander’s text for the brochure was reprinted in the December 1987/January 1988
issue of Art & Artists, detailing the original text of the installation for an audience beyond
Figure 6. Installation view of Let the Record Show the Window on Broadway by ACT UP at the
New Museum, November 20, 1987 – January 24, 1988. Courtesy the New Museum Digital
Archive.
43
68
For a detailed description of the installation, Let the Record Show, see, Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism,” Melancholia and Moralism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 27 - 41.
Originally published in October 43 (Winter 1987): 3 - 16.
those who saw it in New York. In the essay, Olander stated that the intention of the work
was to “make the viewer realize the depth of the problem and understand that history
[would] judge our society by how we responded to [the] calamity,” including those
national figures who used the AIDS epidemic to promote their political agendas. When
asked if this type of work was art, Olander pointed to the many works of art throughout
history that were inspired by periods of crisis, while acknowledging their propagandistic
power. Olander referenced Jacques-Louis David’s La Mort de Marat, painted in 1793 to
serve as a rallying point for the popular and middle classes sympathetic to Jean-Paul
Marat’s radical vision of revolution, and as a more recent example cited Hans Haacke’s
U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 (1983). The point for Olander was simple: “not all
works of art are as ‘disinterested’ as others, and some of the greatest have been created in
the midst, or as a result, of a crisis. Many of us believe we are in the midst of a crisis
today.”
69

The execution of the ACT UP installation at the New Museum was the first time
that an activist work was presented in the context of an art institution, showing the
museum’s fundamental support of socially and politically engaged work. Another result
of this moment was the formation of the artist collective Gran Fury, who would go on to
continue making activist and informative works in public space, such as Kissing Doesn’t
Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989). Olander’s involvement in ACT UP inaugurated
44
69
Olander, “Act Up,” 9.
the beginning of a movement that continued to grow into more than eighty chapters in the
United States and thirty chapters internationally, into the mid-90s.
70

Looking back at this moment, thirty years later, it is relevant to elaborate on the
importance of this work. It was one of the last projects that Olander realized towards the
end of his life. This project, recognized for its urgent call to action, inscribed Olander’s
curatorial work into the realm of cultural practice. For better or worse, his commitment to
the political struggle of homosexuality, and eventually AIDS, may have positioned his
work as essentially activist, but the breadth and scope of his interests opened out into the
larger world.
The last few years of Olander’s life were occupied by many lectures, panels,
symposia, and cultural activities. To name a few, he lectured at the High Museum of Art,
Atlanta; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Center for Photographic
Studies, Los Angeles; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; University of
Southern California, Los Angeles; he also served as a panelist for the Gay/Lesbian
Studies Conference at Yale University; a panelist for the Public Art Fund Spectacolor
Board, and panelist for symposium on Rudolf Baranik, among several others. His
unconventional views were respected by many in the field, and his prominence as a
curator was just beginning to reach outside the confines of the New Museum. As is noted
in the several books that were dedicated to him after his death, not only was Olander a
brilliant art historian, curator, and scholar, but he had a charismatic way of presenting his
45
70
Deborah Gould’s book Moving Politics is an analysis of the emergence, development and decline of
ACT UP. Summary from Deborah B. Gould, “Introduction,” Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’ s Fight
Against AIDS (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4.
ideas that kept people open and interested. Olander’s accomplishments, his concentrated
ten-year legacy begs the question of what would have come next, leaving a melancholy
feeling over this brilliant life cut short.
Figure 7. William Olander, The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1987–, Photo from October
1986, photographer unknown. Christopher Cox Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, Connecticut.
46
Afterword
At present, the multiplicity of artistic practices, discourses, and activist
interventions of the 80s is being reevaluated with its first retrospective exhibition. The
curator of the exhibition, Helen Molesworth, has positioned the delayed reflection upon
the decade as complicated by the prevailing silence surrounding the AIDS crisis.
71
The
absence of a figure such as William Olander in the discourse of the 1980s can only be
partially understood by the insurmountable loss of the AIDS epidemic. Olander’s
resistance to the professed ideology of a conservative agenda and the suppression of
diverse aesthetic production tells an alternate history of a complex political reality.
Moreover, Olander’s practices document a contradiction of postmodern discourse, one
that is generally whitewashed by the elegant façade of poststructuralism. His career and
thought cannot be summed up as stylistically “postmodern,” or through reference to
Continental theories popular in his time. Olander’s voice, and his active interest in art and
politics, divulge the highly politicized context of postmodern art in the 1980s from within
the structure of the art world itself.
The reconsideration of exhibitions such as The Art of Memory/The Loss of
History, Homo Video: Where We Are Now, and Let The Record Show brings into focus the
important discursive and conceptual considerations in curatorial work that can activate art
production, distribution, and reception. Olander’s exhibitions, in conjunction with the
critique of social and cultural histories immanent in his writing, show a fearless address
47
71
Helen Molesworth, This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, February 11–June 3, 2012. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.)
of contemporary issues. Rather than waiting for history to write itself, Olander’s
curatorial work was alive and participatory in its own moment. Revealing the layers of
difference in an exhibition such as Homo Video: Where We Are Now, or making
distinctions from similar aesthetic practices such as in The Art of Memory/The Loss of
History, evinced an astute awareness on Olander’s part of his own historical
circumstances. What I hope translates from the examination of this critically active
curatorial practice is a return to the notion of an exhibition as a space to talk about things
in public that perhaps are not always so easy to contend with in private. Olander’s work
illuminated issues that are still relevant to today’s cultural practices.
Today, the integration of art as part of a larger culture industry is perhaps not
always is in the best interest of a field that aspires for independence of thought and
methodology. The majority of art institutions and galleries have continued to enforce a
state of pluralism that blankets distinctions of social conditions or the possibility of
multiple, parallel histories within artistic production. Viewing art is, in and of itself, a
special task, and one that should remain open, aware, and fearless of its unique place in
culture. As David Deitcher, a close friend and colleague of William Olander described it:
For like the larger market economy of which it is part, the cultural economy
shapes, and in many ways disfigures, us and the art we create and interact with as
we try to make sense of the lives that we lead.
72
The long-term ideological results of the eighties continue to impact how art is
produced and distributed, and the contemporary situation has only come to be
complicated further by the way art is consumed. Paintings still sell better than any other
48
72
David Deitcher, “Death and the Marketplace,” Frieze 29 (June - August 1996), 1. http://www.frieze.com/
issue/article/death_and_the_marketplace/ Accessed October 12, 2011.
art form, and one can’t help but wonder how art will continue to evolve in a world
saturated by images. William Olander allows us to understand, with a renewed interest in
curatorial practice, how the role of the curator can either amplify or silence the meaning
of art and its discourse within institutional space.
49
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Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984/1985.
Wilson, William. “Art Review: ‘Social Distortion’ exhibition.” Los Angeles Times, July
11, 1986. Accessed February 28, 2012. http://articles.latimes.com/1986-07-11/
entertainment/ca-20122_1_social-distortion

53
Appendix: Articles, Essays and Exhibitions by William Olander*
*The information listed in the following appendices was originally compiled by Gayle
Rodda Kurtz in her Master’s Thesis from 1991 titled “William Olander: The Practice of
an Activist Curator.” Since her thesis remains unpublished, for the reader and for the
purpose of accessibility, I have reprinted Rodda Kurtz’s detailed bibliography here. For
more information, see Gayle Rodda Kurtz, “William Olander: The Practice of an Activist
Curator,” (M.A. Thesis, Hunter College, New York, 1991.)
Articles by William Olander
–. “The Birth of Modern Allegory.” (planned by not executed)
–. “Video, Television and Popular Art: On the Work of Bruce and Norman
Yonemoto.” (unfinished)
–. “Video.” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes, 1372 - 73. Garland:
New York, 1990.
–. “Material World.” Art in America 77, 1 (January 1989): 122 - 130, 167.
–. “ACT UP at The New Museum.” Art and Artists XVI (December 1987/January 1988):
9.
–. “ ‘I undertook this project as a personal exploration of the human components of an
alarming situation’: 3 Vignettes (2).” New Observations 61 (1988): 5.
–. “Group Material: Anti-Baudrillard, A Panel Discussion.” File 28 (1987): 109 - 199.
–. “Made in the U.S.A.” Beaux Arts 46 (May 1987): 52 -57.
–. “When Memory Becomes History.” Psychcritique II, 1 (1987): 107.
–. “ ‘We Are Unwilling to Start Down that Road’: 3 Vignettes.” New Observations 44
(1987): 4 - 6.
–. “Which Brand is for You?.” Upfront 12/13 (Winter 1985–86): 16 - 18, 71.
–. “Out of the Boudoir and Into the Streets.” The New York Times Book Review (March 9,
1986): 21.
–. “Art and Politics: Of Arms and the Artist.” Art in America 73, 6 (June 1985): 59 - 63.
54
–. “What is Political Art? What is Political Art Now?.” The Village Voice (October 15,
1985): no pagination. (Published as Bill Olander)
–. “Art-as-Ideology at the New Museum.” Art Journal 44, No. 4 (Winter 1984): 392 -
393.
–. “The Regionalist Revival.” Dialogue (September 1984): 6.
–. “What’s Wrong with Criticism.” Dialogue 7, 1 (January–February 1984): 6 -7.
–. “Missing Person.” Artnews 82, 7 (February 1983): 112 - 115.
–. “Red Grooms.” Artnews 81, 7 (September 1982): 120 - 121.
–. “This is Not a Review.” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal 4, 5 (May–June 1982): 13 -
14.
–. “Artists View the World Around Them.” Museum Magazine (November–December
1981): 58 - 61.
–. “A New Kind of Art.” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal 4, 1 (September–October
1981): 7 - 8.
–. “Sign Language.” Northern Ohio Live (September 1981): 12 - 15.
–. “An Extraordinary Talent: Eno.” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal 3, 4 (March - April
1981): 5 - 6.
–. “French Painting and Politics: The Great Concours de l’An II.” Proceedings of the
Consortium on Revolutionary Europe II, Athens, GA. (1980): 19 - 27.
–. “What’s a Doing in New York.” Northern Ohio Live (December 1980): 20 - 22.
–. “Painting’s Back and Fischl’s Got it.” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal (November–
December 1980): 7 - 8.
–. “The Spirit of Surrealism.” Dialogue: The Ohio Arts Journal (January–February
1980): 34 - 35.
–. “Gosta Claesson.” Arts Magazine 52, 8 (April 1978): 22.
–. “Jean-Paul Chambas.” Arts Magazine 52, 5 (January 1978): 19.
55
–. “Claes Oldenburg.” Arts Magazine 52, 2 (October 1977): 2.
–. “Fernand Khnopff’s ‘Art or the Caresses.’” Arts Magazine 51, 10 (June 1977): 116 -
121.
–. “Gregoire Muller: Painting, Again.” Arts Magazine 51, 1 (September 1976): 118 - 120.
Essays by William Olander
Olander, William. “French Painting and Politics in 1794: The Great Concours de l’an II.”
in 1789: French Art During the Revolution, 27 - 45. Colnaghi USA Ltd., n.p., 1989.
–. “Edgar Franceschi: A Painter for the Next Decade.” in Edgar Franceschi: In Dreams
Begin Responsibilities, n.p. New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988.
–. “One Plus or Minus One.” in One Plus or Minus One, n.p. New York: The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988.
–. “An Artistic Agenda.” in LACE 10 Years Documented, 16 - 17. Los Angeles: Los
Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1988.
–. “Art-as-Ideology at the New Museum.” Art Journal 44, 4 (Winter 1984): 392 - 393.
–. “Janet Cooling: A Painter of Modern Life.” in Janet Cooling, A Retrospective, 3 - 4.
Chicago: Beacon Street Gallery, 1987.
–. “Social Studies: Recent Work on Video and Film.” in Social Studies, n.p. New York:
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987.
–. “A Meditation on Authenticity.” in F AKE, 6 - 44. New York: The New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1987.
–. “The Death of Painting and the Painting of Death.” Rudolf Baranik Elegies: Sleep/
Napalm/Night Sky, 98 - 100. Columbus: Ohio State University Gallery of Fine Art, 1987.
–. “Homo Video: Where We Are Now - A Program of Videotapes by Gay Men and
Lesbians.” Homo Video: Where We Art Now. New York: The New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1986.
56
–. “Fragments.” and “Point of View.” in William Olander. The Art of Memory/The Loss of
History, 6 - 12, 53 - 56. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985.
–. “Robert Mapplethorpe.” Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. Evanston, IL.: Northwestern
University, 1985.
–. “Re-Coding the Codes: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince.” Jenny Holzer/
Barbara Kruger/Richard Prince. Knight Gallery, Charlotte, N.C.: Spirit Square Arts
Center, 1984.
–. “Drawing, After Photography.” Drawings: After Photography, n.p. New York:
Independent Curators, Inc., 1984.
–. “Women and the Media: New Video.” Bulletin, 3 - 13. Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art
Museum, 1983–84.
–. “Introduction,” Contemporary Afro-American Photography, 4 - 7. Oberlin: Allen
Memorial Art Museum, 1983.
–. “Social Aesthetics,” Art and Social Change, U.S.A., Bulletin, 61 - 69. Oberlin: Allen
Memorial Art Museum, 1983.
–. “Red Grooms’ Alternative Reality.” Red Grooms’ Welcome to Cleveland, 11 - 16.
Cleveland: The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1983.
–. “Introduction,” Quintessence, 2 - 5. Dayton: Dayton City Beautiful Project, 1982.
–. “Face It.” Face It: Ten Contemporary Artists, n.p. Columbus: Ohio Foundation on the
Arts, 1982.
–. “6 Photographers: Concepts/Theatre/Fiction.” Bulletin, 1 - 6. Oberlin: Allen Memorial
Art Museum, 1981.
–. “Introduction.” and “David Saunders: Nature Redefined.” David Wells: Gleaning and
Hudson: An Interview, 70 - 71, 91 - 115. Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1980–81.
–. “Cynthia Carlson’s Insideout Oberlin,” 1 - 8. Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art Museum,
1980–81.
57
Exhibitions by William Olander
Survival Research Laboratories, Misfortunes of Desire Acted Out at an Imaginary
Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having, Co-organized by the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, and Creative Time, May 19, 1988.
nitelife, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, April 7–9, 1988. Performances by Bill
Callihan, Kimati Dinizulu and the Kotoko Society, Jeffrey Essmann, Foreign Legion,
Mary Hestand and Associates, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Maxine Lapidus, Robbie
McCauley, Reno, Nicky Paraiso, Mary Schultz, Doug Skinner, Carmelita Tropicana, Jim
Turner, and Guy Yarden.
One Plus or Minus One, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, February 19–April 3,
1988. Installation by May Stevens; coordinated by William Olander.
Selections from the Semi-Permanent Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
February 3–April 3, 1988. Works by Hans Haacke, John Hull, Louise Lawler, Sherrie
Levine, Michael Lucero, Aimee Rankin, René Santos, Andres Serrano, Jan Staller,
Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Jan Vercruysse.
Jerri Allyn, American Dining: A Working Woman’ s Moment, Geffens Dairy Restaurant,
New York, November 20, 1987–January 9, 1988. Travelling installation.
Social Studies: Recent Work on Video and Film, The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
November 20, 1987–January 24, 1988. Works by Andre Burke, Ayoka Chenzira, Sharon
Greytak, Todd Haynes, Aron Ranen, Daniel Reeves, Caroline Sheldon, Rea Tajiri, and
Testing the Limits.
On View: Two Painters, Charles Clough and Mimi Thompson, and Let the Record Show,
The Window on Broadway by ACT UP , The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
November 20, 1987–January 24, 1988.
Fake, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, May 7–July 12, 1987. Works by Dennis
Balk, Nancy Burson, David Cabrera, Laurel Chiten and Cheryl Qamar, Clegg &
Guttmann, Mark Dion and Jason Simon, Duvet Brothers, Tim Ebner, John Glascock,
Gorilla Tapes, Day Gleeson/Dennis Thomas, Fariba Hajamadi, Reginald Hudlin, Joan
Jubela and Stanton Davis, Annette Lemieux, MICA-TV , Paul McMahon, Branda Miller,
Peter Nagy, David Robbins, John Scarlett-Davis, Andres Serrano, Shelly Silver, Michael
Smith and Sarah Tuft; contributions to the catalogue by Phil Mariani and Lynne Tillman.
One Night Only, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, March 20, 1987. Performances
by Dancenoise, Ethyl Eichelberger, Danny Mydlack, Pat Oleszko, and Danita Vance.
58
Homo Video: Where We Are Now, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, December 11,
1986–February 15, 1987. Tapes by Peter Adair and Robert Epstein, Jerri Allyn, Lyn
Blumenthal, Gregg Bordowitz, Richard Fung, John Goss, John Greyson, Heramedia,
Stuart Marshall, David Meieran, Rick “X,” Joyan Saunders, and Suzanne Silver.
On View: Three Photographers, The Body and The Window on Broadway by Richard
Baim, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, December 11, 1986–February 15, 1987.
Works by Dorit Cypus, Monique Safford, and Lorna Simpson.
Group Material, MASS, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, April 12–June 8, 1986.
New New York, The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, February
21–March 29, 1986. Works by Vikky Alexander, Clegg & Guttmann, Nancy Chunn,
Barbara Ess, Peter Halley, Kevin Larson, Annette Lemieux, Marcus Leatherdale, Andres
Serrano, and Haim Steinbach. (no catalogue)
New York Foundation for the Arts Video Fellows 1985, The New Museum of
Contemporary Art, February 1–March 30, 1986. Tapes by Richard Bloes, Maxie Cohen,
Dee Dee Halleck, Kathryn High, Jill Kroesen, Shigeko Kubota, Michael Marton, Tony
Oursler, Martha Rosler, Tomiyo Sasaki, and Matthew Schlanger.
The Art of Memory/The Loss of History, The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
November 23, 1985–January 19, 1986. Works by Bruce Barber, Judith Barry, Troy
Brauntuch, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Tina Lhotsky, Adrian Piper, Stephen
Prina, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, René Santos, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Christopher
Williams, and Renee Williams. Tapes by Peter Adair, Nancy Buchanan, Vanalyne Green,
Ulysees Jenikins, the Miners Campaign Tape Project, Paper Tiger Television, Dan
Reeves, David Shulman, and El Taller de Video “Timoteo Velasquez.” Contributions to
the catalogue by David Deitcher and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Performance of Stephen
Prina’s An Evening of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Piano Music, Symphony Space,
New York, December 4, 1985.

On View: Three Painters, and The Window on Broadway by Aimee Rankin, The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, November 23, 1985–January 19, 1986. Works by Nancy
Chunn, Michael Corris, and Olivier Mosset.
On View: TV Picture and The Window on Broadway by Ellen Brooks, The New Museum
of Contemporary Art, April 26–June 30, 1985. Works by Diana Formisano, John
Glascock, and René Santos.
Drawings: After Photography, travelling exhibition for Independent Curators Inc., New
York, 1984–1986; opened August 29, 1984, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
College, Oberlin, OH. Works by Donald Baechler, Troy Brauntuch, Nancy Chunn, Janet
59
Cooling, Jane Dickson, Nancy Dwyer, Eric Fischl, Mike Glier, Jack Goldstein, Lee
Gordon, Mark Innerat, Jane Kaplowitz, Christof Kohlhofer, Thomas Lawson, Sherrie
Levine, Robert Longo, M.M. Lum, David Middaugh, Richard Prince, Walter Robinson,
David Salle, René Santos, David Saunders, Kenneth Schorr, Gregg Smith, Mark Tansey,
and Michael Zwack.
New Voices 4: Women and the Media, New Video, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
College, Oberlin, April 18–May 27, 1984. Tapes by Max Almy, Anna-Marie Arnold,
Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Lyn Blumenthal, Nancy Buchanan, Cecilia Condit, Margia
Kramer, Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, Lisa Steele, and Janice Tanaka.
Beth Lapides, Having Fun in the Dark, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College,
Oberlin, April 16, 1984.
Rachel Rosenthal, Traps, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin,
November 7, 1983.
Neo-Narratives, The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, October 8,
November 4, and 18, 1983. Performances by Ceclia Condit, Jill Krosen, and Michael
Smith.
Robert Ashley, Atalanta (Acts of God), Allen Memorial Art Museum, in association with
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, October 13, 1983.
Contemporary Afro-American Photography, co-organized with Deba P. Patnaik;
travelling exhibition for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin,
1984–1986; opened October 6, 1983, Oberlin. Works by Jules Allen, Anthony Barboza,
Albert V . Chong, Adger W. Cowans, Louis Draper, Roland L. Freeman, John
Pinderhughes, Wayne Providence, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank
Stewart, Shawn Walker, and Daniel Williams.
Eric Bogosian, Voice of America and Funhouse, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
College, Oberlin, April 23, 1983.
Art and Social Change, U.S.A., Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin,
April 19–May 30, 1983. Works by John Ahearn, Eric Bogosian, Nancy Buchanan, Sarah
Charlesworth, John Fekner, Mike Glier, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Jenny Holzer, Peter
Huttinger, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine. Contributions to the catalogue by David
Deitcher, Lucy Lippard, Jerry Kearns, and Craig Owens.
Paul McMahon, Song Paintings and Rock ‘n’ Roll Psychiatrist, Allen Memorial Art
Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, February 21, 1983.
60
F ACE IT: Ten Contemporary Artists, travelling exhibition for the Ohio Foundation on the
Arts, Columbus, OH, 1982–1984; opened July 9, 1982, Contemporary Arts Center,
Cincinnati, OH. Works by John Ahearn, Janet Cooling, Nancy Dwyer, Mike Glier,
Richard Prince, René Santos, David Saunders, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Way, and Michael
Zwack.
Eva Hesse: A Retrospective of the Drawings, organized by Ellen H. Johnson, assisted by
William Olander; travelling exhibition for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1982–1983;
opened April 20, 1982, Oberlin.
New Voices 3: Performance, Live!, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College,
Oberlin, March 1982. Works by Guyettes, Lorraine O’Grady, Martha Rosler, and Michael
Smith.
New Voices 2: 6 Photographers, Concept/Theatre/Fiction, Allen Memorial Art Museum,
Oberlin College, Oberlin, October 13–November 22, 1981. Works by Ellen Brooks,
Eileen Cowin, Jimmy de Sana, Richard Prince, Don Rodan, and René Santos.
Hudson, The Greek and French Arts, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College,
Oberlin, April 13, 1981.
Young Americans, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, April 1–May
3, 1981. Works by Janet Cooling, Hudson, David Salle, David Saunders, Cindy Sherman,
and David Wells.
New Voices 1: Cynthia Carlson, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin,
OH, September 16–October 19, 1980.
Adrian Piper, It’ s Just Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, April
23, 1980.
61

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis examines the curatorial practice of William Olander (1950–1989), a prolific curator, writer, and scholar, over a short but full period of ten years before Olander’s death from AIDS in 1989. Olander’s work as a contemporary curator in the visual arts addressed the issues of his day as a form of criticism and even activism. Specifically, his work directly addressed and acted within a vital field of debate about the fraught aesthetics and politics of representation within the cultural discourses of postmodernism and the discourses of the politics of gender and sexual identification and of gay and queer identity after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. This thesis explores the exhibitions The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (1985), Homo Video: Where We Are Now (1986), and Let The Record Show (1987) as a series of responses to now established ideas and issues in the field of contemporary art history and theory. This thesis seeks to reinstate Olander as a fearless participant in the complex political reality of the eighties and as a voice that can inform curatorial practice today.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hernando, Gladys-Katherina (author)

Core Title Fragmented memory: William Olander and the exhibition as criticism

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/27/2012

Defense Date 03/22/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag AIDS activism,curatorial studies,exhibition histories,gender politics,Homovideo: Where we are now,Let the record show...,OAI-PMH Harvest,postmodern art,The art of memory/The loss of history,The new museum in the 1980s,William Olander

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Sutton, Gloria (committee member), Tain, John (committee member)

Creator Email gladyskatherina@gmail.com,grhernan@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-15441

Unique identifier UC11289921

Identifier usctheses-c3-15441 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HernandoGl-674.pdf

Dmrecord 15441

Document Type Thesis

Rights Hernando, Gladys-Katherina

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA