INTERVIEW WITH ADAM LERNER
DANIEL FULLER
Photo caption:
MCA Denver. Photo by Michael Vinluan.
Pull Quotes:
It’s insane to me that museums think they are visitor-friendly because they put
interpretive material in the gallery or have an “education” area in the museum.
That’s nothing compared to the very essence of the museum, which works
against all that.
Once we ran a campaign with the slogan, “Borrow your mom’s car and drive out
to Lakewood.” Of course that image was largely fabricated because we had a
facility designed by fancy pants L.A. architect Hagy Belzberg and we were
exhibiting artists like Liam Gillick and Isaac Julien. Still, it is easy to be cool when
you position yourself as the beautiful loser.
Science museums used to have a magic to them but now they are just places to
learn about global warming. It would be terrible if that happened to art museums.
BIO:
Daniel Fuller is the Director of The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of
Art (ICA at MECA).
Since joining the staff of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Adam Lerner has
operated with a quirky job title as both the Director and Chief Animator in the
Department of Structures and Fictions. It is from within this sense of whimsy that Lerner
has developed an extensive list of innovative educational and public programs designed
to engage an array of audiences. His approach stems from an eclectic curiosity that
provides art laymen with smooth entry points into the most in-depth scholarship. I
recently emailed Adam a set of questions and he was kind enough to oblige:
The MCA Denver has billed itself as a “Museum Without a Front Door,” and there
are some unique and distinctive ways that the visitor is invited to utilize your
space and site. For example, there is the library’s Open Shelf Program that
invites exhibiting artists to curate a shelf of objects, books, and music—anything
that inspires their work. There is The Lane: Place for Public Engagement, a
pedestrian walk way beside the museum that is employed as a stage; and the
Idea Box, a room dedicated to relating the museum to visitors’ styles of
engagement. Can you tell us a bit about the Idea Box and about facilitating
openness as your educational model? Were these programs in place before your
appointment?
The website language you are looking at precedes my appointment. However,
the sense of welcome and commitment to ideas are very much a part of my
vision as well. The only difference is my tenure marks a new stage in the
development of MCA Denver, when the building is complete and it is time to
move the institution to its next level.
Our recent museum newsletter Report from the Department of Fabrications is
more representative of the language I have brought to MCA Denver. It functions
as a proper newsletter, letting our audiences know what we’ve done and what
we’re going to do. It has interviews with artists and essays about our exhibitions.
Simple communication and explanation is a way of creating a sense of welcome
to your visitors, however, there are many more interesting and probably more
important strategies at play. A key is to convey a sense of openness through
humor and self-deprecation. With the title, here we are trying to suggest the
magical fiction of art bleeds out into the museum itself.
In the publication there is a cartoon called Report from the Department of
Fabrications. The gag is that a poor, obedient museum fabricator named Higgy is
charged not only with making the artworks on display but also with solving the
theoretical problems associated with the very idea of a museum.
There is a section called “Painful Regrets and Forced Apologies” where we do
things like apologize to the board of L.A. MOCA for stealing their table at a gala
dinner in Mexico City, which we did. We apologize to artist Michael Borremans
for writing on our website that he was from “Belgium, France,” which we didn’t
do, but, who cares? It’s funny.
The jokes are not a major part of the publication, but they are very significant—a
key part of our effort to think through what a museum is and ought to be.
It’s insane to me that museums think they are visitor-friendly because they put
interpretive material in the gallery or have an “education” area in the museum.
That’s nothing compared to the very essence of the museum, which works
against all that.
Art museums are, in their nature, a joke; they prop themselves up to be the
arbiters of artistic taste and they knock themselves down to size to appeal to the
tastes of the public. This is not their failure; it is their essence. To be a museum
an institution needs to elevate itself above ordinary taste, but to be successful, it
needs to speak to ordinary people. The very concept of the museum today is
based on a conflict between commitment to great works and commitment to
great audiences. In fact, museums are at their best when capable of maintaining
both of these positions at their extreme, when they can both present the
masterpieces of culture and also become a part of people’s lives. You can
describe this tension in many different ways, but I suggest it is best described as
a joke. Museums, like jokes, thrive on contradiction.
Enough with the jokes.
The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar was a truly unique alternative space,
operating as a public think tank for a stretch of five years. Can you talk about
translating and replicating the ideas you championed in Belmar into the scale of a
larger institution like the MCA Denver? In the past year have you been able to
maintain a comparable autonomy in your programming or have there been any
instances where an imaginative proposal was not palatable in this institutional
context??
Same tequila, different margarita, and that can make a big difference. The Lab at
Belmar had the benefit of being an underdog and we played up that status. For
god’s sake, we were located in a shopping district in Lakewood, Colorado. If
Denver were Manhattan, Lakewood would be Flushing, Queens. On our website
we advertised, “Conveniently located between Zales and Yankee Candle.” Once
we ran a campaign with the slogan, “Borrow your mom’s car and drive out to
Lakewood.” Of course that image was largely fabricated because we had a
facility designed by fancy pants L.A. architect Hagy Belzberg and we were
exhibiting artists like Liam Gillick and Isaac Julien. Still, it is easy to be cool when
you position yourself as the beautiful loser.
When The Lab at Belmar merged with MCA Denver and I became the director
there it was like the class clown became the class president. I brought all of The
Lab’s programs over but it no longer made any sense to [assume the outsider
stance]. My challenge was to keep the energy of The Lab alive in the context of a
more traditional contemporary art museum, in a downtown setting, with over
3,000 members, a ten year history, and a sparkly new world class building.
Some stakeholders of MCA Denver became involved with it initially because it
signified to them a pure, white space of advanced art. These folks paid Comme
de Garcons prices and didn’t want to end up with a faded retro t-shirt. But
Comme de Garcons makes faded retro t-shirts. My solution has been to maintain
the high fashion but make sure you can always get something comfortable and
casual.
As far as autonomy, I am blessed with a very supportive board of trustees. I
suppose that makes sense because they knew very well what they were getting
when they hired me and merged MCA Denver with The Lab. Still, I often feel that
what I do takes courage. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be interesting.
Museums are competing more and more with other forms of popular culture: the
movies, concerts, a ballgame, and with home entertainment (the internet on big
flat-screens). Through your creative rethinking of the MCA Denver’s
programming, the institution could be seen as an urban adaptation of the
teaching gallery most often found on college campuses. If the museum’s agenda
is to connect and stay intellectually relevant to everyone, how do you retain an
audience when the programming is so eclectic and there are so many competing
demands on potential visitors’ time?
I don’t think I know what a teaching gallery is but it sounds awful to me—at least,
if it’s outside of a formal education institution. I believe strongly that a museum
needs to maintain a sense of magic. Science museums used to have a magic to
them but now they are just places to learn about global warming. It would be
terrible if that happened to art museums. The problem with education is it tends
to demystify everything. Many visitors require assistance accessing the levels of
meaning embedded in a work of art, but the task is to provide that assistance in
order to maintain the allure of the gallery experience. Ultimately, I believe that a
non-intimidating ethos is more important than explanatory techniques. That’s
where I focus my energy.
At MCA Denver, our flagship education program Mixed Taste is completely
unrelated to the gallery exhibitions. Mixed Taste pairs two ridiculously unrelated
lectures back to back in the same evening. This season we have: Big Foot and
Carl Jung, Irrational Engineering and The Birth of the Cocktail, German
Expressionism and India Pale Ale, to name just a few. The rules are simple: one
speaker speaks for 20 minutes, a second speaker speaks for 20 minutes, then,
question and answer for both at the same time. There is magic there because it
is entirely absurd, unexpected, and inevitably, ends up saying something about
the human tragicomedy. That’s why we sell out weeks in advance at our 330person capacity. Traditional education can’t attract that kind of energy.
I never think about how we compete with other forms of culture. I just think about
how we might one day be able to translate our programs to mass media.
Your programming often embraces the intrinsic value of risk. Realizing that the
standard evaluation techniques to judge an educational project’s impact do not
always paint the truest picture, can you give us an example of a success and
how you measured its impact? Tell us about one unconventional idea that didn’t
pan out as you’d hoped, and what you learned from it.
We do audience evaluation but we rely on our own careful observation more than
anything else. We joke that we do things just to amuse ourselves and if our
visitors get something out of it, god bless ‘em. There is some truth to that. When
we develop a program that has adrenaline to it, we know it when the postcard is
at the printers. Sometimes programs don’t work as we planned because the
talent we hire is not appropriate to the task, like when we hired a psychic to
determine which visitors should get in to programs for free.
Once, we tried to participate in the City of Denver’s One-Book-One-Denver
program by hosting what we called a “Power Read” of the book The Milagro
Beanfield War, by John Nichols, where we tried to read the entire book out loud
in one sitting. We quit after a couple of hours. That’s a good example of where
we were skeptical going into it.