The Bureau of Inquiries (second draft)

The Bureau of Inquiries was an exhibition I curated in August of 1990.

August?

There are many more reasons to avoid staging an exhibition in August and only one to support it. The advisability of producing an exhibition during a Philadelphia August is questionable. It is the month when the temperature and the humidity replicate a jungle ambience, albeit light on the flora but heavy on the fauna. The weather in Philadelphia during August is stereotypical of that of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It does little to inspire one to leave their air-conditioned homes.

The weather during August inspires the citizenry to go on vacation in droves to escape it. Very few exhibitions open in August. The summer months are used for galleries and museums to trot out group shows, air out work condemned to storage areas and for the exhibition of loss leaders.Typically the exhibition season begins in September and increases dramatically in October.

There is only one reason to stage an exhibition in August and that reason is free rent. Although I have no clear memory to support this, I think that the owners of the building, Mark and Elena Salz, gave us access to the space rent free. If it wasn't for negative publicity and scandal the exhibition might not have an audience at all.

The basic premise of the exhibition was the presentation of the work of Philadelphia artists that were influenced by the Surrealist movement. Surrealism influenced a large contingent of the artist community here and I thought it an appropriate subject to investigate and to present in a group exhibition.

The empty storefront below the Salz' apartment was transformed into gallery. Instead of the Minimalist look of most contemporary galleries, the Bureau of Inquiries was fitted with an antique desk, a very old and heavy rotary phone and other objects from the period that Surrealism flourished. There was a bookcase that contained literature written by Surrealist writers and monographs on artists connected to and influenced by the movement. A professionally manufactured blue metal sign with Bureau of Inquiries in white lettering was hung in the window. It had the name of the exhibition on it but nothing pertaining to the fact that it was an exhibition. There were a number of paintings on the wall but the inclusion of the desk, phone and bookcase gave the place a domestic atmosphere that an uniformed observer might find confusing regarding the purpose of the business in the space. All of the works were small and there were a few sculptures on pedestals arranged throughout the gallery.

A mutiny began before the opening of the exhibition. There were 80 paintings available for hanging in the store area in the back room of the space and a limited space to hang them. To solve this problem I had the works wired so that any four paintings could be hung in a designated spot at a 60" center. There were 20 such spots. My plan was for Kevin and another art handler to don white lab coats and switch paintings throughout the entire opening, him moving clockwise and the other moving counterclockwise. It took 45 minutes for two people at a leisurely pace to change every painting in the gallery, thus creating an entirely different exhibition on view every 45 minutes. This seemed to me as a great solution to the problem of exhibiting a maximum amount of work in a minimum amount of space. This strategy was later used by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for an exhibition about the influence of John Cage but no one from that organization ever acknowledged that the Bureau of Inquiries had invented the scheme. This was typical of their position regarding Philadelphia artists at the time. They ignored them.

I expected a certain amount of opposition to this idea from the exhibiting artists so I waited until a couple of days before the opening to alert everyone. Kevin was vehemently opposed to the idea. Switching paintings in theory was fine with him as long as he wasn't the person switching the paintings. He did not want to be that visible to the audience and he had no interest in being involved in what he saw as performance art. He refused to wear a lab coat. That was not negotiable as far as he was concerned. He saw no reason for us to wear lab coats since we could switch the paintings without them. I wanted the people that switched the paintings to wear lab coats to separate them visually from the audience and give them a professional look that might inspire people to get out of their damn way as they moved artwork through a crowded opening. Frankly if it helped it didn't help much, people either were oblivious to the people moving the paintings or they considered them a nuisance. I had hoped not to be involved in handling the art work, in part because I did that all day five days a week at Philadelphia Museum of Art. We also needed someone to open and close the door to the storage area for us since our hands would be occupied with paintings. I assigned Martha Masiello this duty because she had been an active participant in all of the MEAT, ART AT THE BROILING POINT exhibitions, she had high energy levels and she was always cooperative with putting in more effort than other artists toward the staging of the independent exhibitions. This time was the exception. She thought that the whole idea of switching paintings was unnecessary theater. She absolutely refused to be the person opening and closing the door to the storage area on the grounds that she would be viewed as Vanna White, the bimbo that turned the letters on the television show Jeopardy. I thought that the opposition would be over sooner than it was. My negotiating skills were negated by my temper. I was fed up with the negativity and the bitching. As the doors to the exhibition were opened public, the three of us were still arguing in stage whispers. I had not found a second art handler to work with Kevin. As a concession to Kevin, I agreed to be the second art handler, he agreed to wear the lab coat and Martha reluctantly agreed to help with the door although she was plenty pissed off about it. Although the logistical issues were solved in theory the hour before the opening, all three of us were still fuming when people started coming in the door to see the exhibition.

The room began to fill with visitors and we started switching the paintings. At first no one took notice that works were being changed. The audience seemed to think that we were making last minute changes regarding which works would be hung. Midway through the first rotation people began to see the pattern of the strategy. Some people were amused by the diversion. Other people were thoroughly annoyed that paintings hanging in one location a moment before were now missing when they went back for a second look. Certain artists exhibiting work became angry when they realized that their work would not remain up for the entire exhibition. They also felt that moving the pantings through a roomful of people that were drinking was endangering the art and certainly did have the potential for disaster. A large percentage of both exhibitors and the audience was visibly upset.

Kevin, by nature a misanthrope, thought their anger was funny. There was a level of absurdity in trying to view a continually changing exhibition. It was successful on a level that probably owed a debt to the Theater of Cruelty championed by Antonin Artaud. The more sophisticated viewers were capable of enjoying an exhibition in constant flux.

The exhibition was later reviewed in The Welcomat, a free weekly newspaper now known as The Philadelphia Weekly by a writer Jim Knipfel, who later would have a successful career as columnist that wrote Slackjaw for the New York Press. He combined his review of The Bureau of Inquiries with an exhibition elsewhere of clown paintings by the serial killer, miscreant and pederast John Wayne Gacy. I had recently quit drinking and was running five miles a day. I had gone from 230 pounds down to 165. He described my appearance as resembling that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and panned the exhibition as being too "New Age." He did not understand the Surrealist reference. Shortly after he reviewed this exhibition he went fucking blind.

Daniel Gehringer, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and an enthusiastic supporter of MEAT, ART AT THE BROILING POINT, wanted to interview me and some of the other artists in the exhibition. Hank MacNeil owned MacNeil Gallery where I exhibited my work after leaving the MEAT group. He wasn't really an artist but he had taken these beautiful Polaroids that appeared to be small Impressionistic landscapes of tree lines along the edges of open fields. They were quite beautiful. In reality they were blurry close ups of his much younger girlfriend's vagina and pubic hair. Hank was very excited about the Daily News reviewing the exhibition. He was insistent on speaking to Dan Gehringer, who he had met during the MEAT show at McNeil or my solo exhibition there. Dan was a good guy, always supportive of my work, my pit bull terriers and my curatorial efforts. I suspect that Hank thought that the article would be ultimately good publicity for his gallery and the sale of my work which would also benefit him. Hank McNeil was very supportive of my art career during this time period. He made it clear that he didn't want anyone to know what the real subject of his Polaroids were. I owed quite a lot to Hank and I swore myself to secrecy. Unfortunately Hank didn't follow his own advice. During their lengthy conversation with the reporter, Hank revealed the modus operandi behind the photographs and the identity of his muse. In a conversation that lasted several hours, Hank revealed a great deal of information about the struggle he had with his family, his position as the black sheep, his exclusion from his father's will and the difficulties he had with his mother. His mother was opposed to altering his inheritance since it would go against her husband's wishes. Hank asked Dan not to reveal any of these secrets. I can't imagine what material Dan had to work with after talking to Hank for the better part of an afternoon. The subject of every topic was a secret. The story must have been too much of a temptation to Gehringer to mainstay his oath of secrecy. The McNeil family were very well known in Philadelphia society. In 1961 Hank's father traded the entire McNeil Pharmaceutical company (they had created Tylenol) for 51% of Johnson & Johnson stock. His father also owned the land that the Blue Route was constructed on (a major extension of an existing highway that was years in the planning) and made an enormous profit selling it. The McNeil family was rich beyond the comprehension of the average working-class reader of the Daily News. What they did understand was scandal and the Daily News provided it. Gehringer wrote a full page article about the McNeil saga with a title along the lines of "WHAT HANK MCNEIL IS AFRAID THAT HIS MOTHER WILL FIND OUT" or something similar to that and proceeded to reveal what exactly that was. There was an accompanying blurb on the front page of the paper announcing this sordid tale of sex, wealth and betrayal. Apparently a worker on the McNeil estate showed the article to Mrs. McNeil. The Daily News is a blue-collar tabloid. Perhaps if this person had not come forth with the article it is possible that Hank's mother might have never seen it. The Ruling Class has little time for such a publication, they read the more upscale Philadelphia Inquirer. But they did show her and she did read it. Hank received a phone call from his estranged mother's lawyers which resulted in Hank calling me. He was furious. He wanted Gehringer to retract the story and he wanted me to make sure that he did. There was no way that Dan would retract a true story, particularly one that may have been the biggest story of his career and sold newspapers. I called Dan to see if anything could be done, knowing that it wouldn't. Dan confirmed my fears. I informed Hank that he was fucked and he found some way to blame me for his misfortune, if nothing else for introducing him to the traitorous columnist. The story had large implications for his lawsuit with his family but there was fuck-all nothing I could do about it. Prior to the interview I explicitly warned Hank to be careful speaking to the press, having been burnt in print on several occasions myself. He didn't take my advice and suddenly the exhibition was involved in a very public (or pubic given the subject of Hank's work) scandal. The scandal probably contributed to enlarging the exhibition's audience but they tended to come and gawk rather than buy artwork.

My daughter Maura was six years old at the time. She was raised around the independent art scene and she was proud that her father's curatorial efforts always attracted so much attention. I left a pile of the exhibition posters (an 8 1/2" X 11" Xerox that I designed and ran off at work) in the living room. Without my knowledge, Maura snagged a bunch of them on her way to summer school and handed them out to her classmates. That evening I received at least a dozen calls from concerned parents wondering why my petite and innocent-looking daughter was handing out ransom notes (which the poster resembles somewhat) at school. Apparently these parents were successful enough to send their children to one of the more expensive and prestigious grade schools in the city but not bright enough to actually read the poster to understand that it was the announcement for an art exhibition. I was ranting and raving after the third call. From the forth through twelfth calls I am sure that they wished they never had dialed the number on the poster. I had lost my patience with these bourgeois fuck-heads entirely. Although I had an unlisted number, I always put it on posters for the press to call. Outside of the media no one ever called the number to ask about an exhibition. I thought it was funny to have an unlisted number posted in public, so certain was I that no one would ever call it. After Bureau of Inquiries I could no longer trust this theory.

Never have I seen such a positive effort explode with such negative results. This exhibition had a great deal to do with my withdrawal from participation in the art system. Looking back on it know it seems pretty funny but it was nothing but a complete pain in my ass at the time. It was unfathomable to think in advance that an attempt to help other artists and myself could backfire on me in such a spectacular way. It was unprecedented. I only curated one exhibition after this, a great sculpture show at the old Vox Populi space called COLD SCULPTURE, my favorite and most adventurous curatorial effort. This show resulted in being the only time a piece of my work was stolen from an exhibition. The theft was the last straw for me. I refused to exhibit my work. I made a few exceptions just a few times for inclusion in unremarkable group shows. In 2008 I exhibited my Trading Card series at the Rosewald/Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in an exhibition entitled HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE MIKE.

To my knowledge, at least two of the artists that exhibited work in this exhibition are dead but unfortunately not the two artists that I would have picked for execution, given the choice.

Done