A Statement-As-Question From A Panel on Painting

No one's really sending them to me, and so these are still not easy to collect. And this statement-as-question by Phong Bui at Hunter College's recent panel on painting maybe doesn't count, because The Brooklyn Rail co-sponsored the panel.

But it's still good. And the two tall uncomfortable guys asking questions after Bui are interesting to listen to, too, the latter mostly for his strained, uncomfortable language, but both kind of get shut down by Amei Wallach, who I ended up finding pretty disagreeable. Anyway, Bui starts around 1:04:00. As previously, line breaks in the transcriptions map to pauses by the speaker.

You know what the best show at MoMA recently?
that we tend to forget?
Is the Robert Gober retrospective.
That is--
And why do I say this?
Because years ago, I think it must have been in
early September
2007
-6, actually,
Rob Storr and I came to interview Elizabeth Murray
for her retrospective there.
In the course of talking to Elizabeth
about the way in which she created her structure
and she emphatically said that it came from Ron Gorchov's
early
paintings
that she had, you know--
exposed to
in the early 70s when she first came to New York
Travel back to Bob Gober's show
He used to work for Elizabeth
building those structures but that's not the point the point is
that show was so great partly because he
featured
artists
who influenced him
who he admired
and I don't remember--
do you remember
not long ago
the previous Whitney
where the whole
room
was dedicated to Forrest Bess?
That was an amazing significant event
Why?
Because it brings back to the way why MoMA
have forgotten
since
I think the last show they ever
allowed to happen was Morris Hirshfield
Irving, could you correct me on the date?
'47, maybe?
Irving Sandler, everyone.

You're very close.

I was close. Well, alright. That was Alfred Barr, essentially being fired.

They fired him because of that

Yes, but, Outsider Art, or what you call Self-Taught Art
has been the essential
synthesis
integrated with
Early Modernism
and you go back to Barr's chronology? It's all there
and you go back to Rousseau and other early Modernists like Kandinsky, Klee they collected children's art
mentally ill patients' art all kind of Outsider Art was being embraced
and integrated into their pictorial thinking
To mediate from the constraints of Western
you know
pictorial history I think that's exactly what it's about. Going further back about reproduction
I have a question about that. Well
maybe you provided an answer to?
On top of it?
It was uh
Francis Bacon
actually
who
first saw the reproduction of
Velasquez's Pope Innocent
and he'd been
obsessed with that image
painted over
a series of several paintings
until
this is my humorous
sensibility came to play here
He finally came to the Prado
for the first time
he never saw the painting and you know
he died in Spain
He died soon after seeing the real Velasquez.
So reproduction has a certain resistance toward a certain romance it's like going to a date, someone you met two weeks ago
in a party
that you were delighted to have a great time talking and you go to a dinner
a kind of a
romance
you take them out to a very fancy restaurant
and you start talking a while
and you realize not going anywhere.
So you go to the bathroom
and you
you don't want to come out.
Why? Because that person looks at you very seriously and, "I love you."
And I think that kind of romance can kill you.
OK.