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A Short Life Of Trouble: Forty Years In The New York Art World (2008)

by Marcia Tucker(Favorite Author)

4.16 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0520257006 (ISBN13: 9780520257009)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

University of California Press

review 1: Marcia Tucker’s memoir reveals the experience, strength, and hope of one of the art world’s most influential trailblazers. Tucker, founder of the New Museum of Art, worked her way from secretarial work for art world honchos to a position as the first woman curator for the Whitney Museum. The work begins with Tuckers’ recreation of her childhood and adolescence in Montclair, New Jersey and other locations. I felt a special affinity with Tucker as I, too grew up in Montclair. Her early life was incredibly difficult; her mother died of breast cancer in her teens and her father in early adulthood; she was in a devastating motorcycle accident with her first husband, breaking her leg in five places; her first love Henri, a young man she met in France, died in Algeria as a ... moremember of the French foreign legion; and she lost her hearing in one ear in her early twenties due to a kidney infection. Despite tragic circumstances, Tucker was propelled by her innate love of the arts, as well as an uncanny gift for being in the right place at the right time. Her first job in the museum world began in July 1961 as the secretary for William Lieberman, head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art; Tucker was 21. Her second job in the art world was as the secretary for Norma and William Copley, an eccentric and well-connected artist couple. They took her under their wing, and gave her the title “Curator of the Copley Collection.” The Copleys would help Tucker in her various endeavors for many years, proving an invaluable source of support when she was attempting to do new work in the art world. Through the Copleys, she met Margaret Scolari Barr, legendary wife of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. It was while working for Barr that Jack Baur hired Tucker to work as a curator for the Whitney Museum. Tucker was the first woman curator at the Whitney. She loved her work, but chafed at the restrictions of the institution. Tucker’s first show was called Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. The reception by the art world was mixed, but Tucker was ecstatic about the opportunity to explore new ways of making and exhibiting art. However, when her boss Jack Baur retired, and Tom Armstrong was hired in his place, the atmosphere changed. Growing out of her position, and eager to pursue different work, Tucker was offered an interview for the job of Dean at the School of Art and Design at the California Institute for the Arts. Armstrong told her to remain, promising her a job change from Curator of Painting and Sculpture to Curator of Contemporary Art. Three months later, he fired her. Tucker, fed up with the politics and intolerance for contemporary art of the traditional museum world, decided to begin her own institution. Tucker used her severance pay from the Whitney to rent a space, and the New Museum of Art was born. Tucker notes that she referred to the New Museum at first as “The Museum in the Sky,” because it seemed like an impossible task to create the museum she visualized. Tucker wanted to avoid hierarchies of all kinds – vertical power structures, inverted-pyramid salary distributions, race, gender, and class segregation. Tucker used revolutionary methods to achieve these goals. Each staff member at the New Museum was paid the same salary, and the staff utilized democratic methods to make decisions collectively. From the beginning, the New Museum was unusual. Tucker came up with the idea of the “Semi-Permanent Collection” in line with the museum’s mission to show contemporary art. The museum would keep artworks in its collection for at least ten years, and no more than twenty years. For Tucker, the idea of the Semi-Permanent Collection ensured “It would be a contemporary collection that stayed contemporary” (134). The memoir is organized chronologically, with each chapter representing a five-year span in Tucker’s life. Her personal life is woven with her work life; anecdotes about her lovers, illnesses, family life, and emotional growth alternate with accounts of where she was working, how the museum developed, and the exhibitions she put on. The most tangible structure of the work is found in its discussion of Tucker’s (and the New Museum’s) most significant exhibitions. These exhibitions represent Tucker’s core values and goals. The most significant of these are the following: Early Works by Five Contemporary Artists (1978), Bad Painting (1978), Minority Dialogues (1980), Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art (1982), Art and Ideology (1984), SILENCE = DEATH (1988), The Decade Show (1990), Bad Girls (1994), Visiting Hours: An Installation by Bob Flanagan in Collaboration with Sheree Rose (1994), and Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection (1995). Some of the main themes Tucker engaged in her work include the following: What is “good” art? What is the place of the museum in the larger culture? How can art and the museum engage with politics and activism? How do art museums create taste and culture? How can museums create and facilitate social change? Tucker’s untimely death at sixty-six was a tragedy in the art world. However, her pioneering efforts, as well as the family she started late in life, show that her short life was filled with love, invention, and an incredible energy for change. Her work advanced the cause of women and those seeking a more innovative and just world, not just in the art world, but everywhere in popular culture.
review 2: I don't know her but I love her. The writing in this book is at times abrupt, but the story fascinates nonetheless.I'm so glad there was such a person as Marcia Tucker. And I'm even more glad that she has written a book about herself. Is it possible in this world of chasing after status and money to live deliberately? Yes. She did. And maybe we can learn how from her story.Kudos to Liza Lou for putting in the hard work to bring us this story. Kudos to Marcia Tucker for living it. less

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