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Don Celender (1980)

If history can make into art what is now not art, it can also unmake what is now art.

— Harold Rosenberg, “The New as Value” (1964)

Don Celender’s annual OK Harris shows arrive as comic relief in an otherwise earnest art season, and no one in the galleries today is funnier. His recent exhibitions have been horizontal eye-level mountings of the results of cunning questionnaires that he sends to circumscribed groups of people. These responses are sometimes also bound into 8 1/2” by 11” saddle-stitched books published by his gallery.

It is Celender’s ingenious method to submit straightforward and superficially innocuous questions on academic stationery that inform the recipients that he is indeed a chaired professor of art at Macalaster College in St. Paul and a Ph.D. Since his queries look like serious scholarship, most of his respondents answer them solemnly, the process sometimes prompting them unwittingly to reveal their characteristic selves in a concise way.

In the better of his two recent displays, art-scene celebrities were asked, “If reincarnation were available to you, what form would be your preference?” Many of the responses betray assertive bravado, sometimes tinged with irony. Richard Serra: “I’d like to return as a Richard Serra clone.” Arakawa: “You ask too late. I’ve already done.” Ivan Karp: “I have no plans to depart this life.” Others are perhaps self-revealing. John Kacere: “I would like to return as Florenz Ziegfeld.” Mel Ramos: “First-string catcher on the New York Yankees.” Some responses are drowned in picayune digressions that are no less characteristic, or amusing (e.g., Jules Olitski and Clement Greenberg). Celender’s “investigation” must be a work of art, not only because it is exhibited in a gallery, but also since its pleasure must be defined as esthetic because it certainly is not scholarly.

Oddly, it is the other, weaker exhibition piece that Celender chose to bind into his 1979 book. To produce his National Architects Preference Survey, he asked a thousand American architects: “If you were to advise students of architecture to see one significant structure in the world that would be the most inspiring and instructive for their future careers, which structure would you recommend?” For both the exhibition and his book, Celender has retyped their answers, added a photograph of the recipient and the work he or she selected. Not unexpectedly, the Parthenon is recommended more than anything else; the only other structure that is not an idiosyncratic favorite is the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

This Celender survey turns out to be less comic than instructive, especially about the enthusiasms of architects in small-city America. The surprises come from those recipients who refuse to play Celender’s game:

Dear Dr. Calendar [sic]:

I am shocked by the question. It is inconceivable that students should be directed to anyone structure as being able to give them a clue to their future.

The process of developing a design philosophy cannot be reduced to simplistic answers.

Ulrich Franzen

Whereas this architecture survey asks artists to talk about art, most of Celender’s other pieces mix art with something else (e. g., reincarnation). His earliest works of note were two packs of cards, both entitled Artball (1971, 1972). The first was twenty baseball cards with artists’ faces pasted over baseball players’ bodies; on the back were poorly reproduced examples of their works. The second Artball, a slicker production, is a complete pack of 54 playing cards with the faces of art-world celebrities superimposed over football players in action postures and then their names and putative positions also pasted over the originals. Thus, uniform #41 getting ready to pass is “Stella—Running Back,” #74 with a football cupped in her raised hands is “Parsons—Quarterback.” Some of the juxtapositions are funnier than others, it is true; but in both Artballs the wholes represent a bigger joke than the sum of their parts. A third undated box, Holy Cards, puts artists’ faces into paintings of religious figures; on each backside is a religiously suggestive prose passage by or about the featured artist. His Olympics of Art resembles a jokebook in that superlative captions appear under people’s pictures, one to a page. Thus, “The Leading Copycat Artist of an Artist Father” appears under Jamie Wyeth. “Most Over-Celebrated Living Artist” appears under Victor Vasarely. And so forth. Part of the charm of this collection of one-liners is that gossip and art-historical scholarship are posing as each other.

Museum Piece (1975), the second of Celender’s works in the current questionnaire-response form, is still the best, and fortunately it exists as a book as well. Museums around the world received this query: “I am developing a research project dealing with museum architecture. May I request a photograph of your loading dock, or receiving area?” This request was open and yet unprecedented enough to prompt officials of each museum to respond in a revealing manner. One wrote that it has no “loading dock” because its collection is permanent; another asks its staff photographer to comply with the request, while a third begs Celender for funds to hire someone to photograph their dock. A fourth apologizes for the garbage stacked on the photographed platform that he piously assures Celender “looks much better after the garbage men have been here.” The reply from the National Museum of Korea might seem tasteless, did not Celender reprint the accompanying letterhead and signature as well:

We removed new building in 1972. But this museum has not any receiving area. The loading dock is imperfection. Anyway inveloped photos are loading dock from outside to inside. Dock is basement.

As a native New Yorker I still collapse with laughter every time I read the double-spaced response from the Brooklyn Museum: “We are very sorry that due to the Museum’s security policy, we are not permitted to forward a photograph of our loading dock as requested.” Perhaps because I would rather read language on my butt than on my feet, I prefer my Celender compilations between covers, which is to say that I think the most appropriate medium for exhibiting his work is the spine-bound book. (On the other hand, every book artist envies his having an annual wall show at a West Broadway gallery.)

Other recent Celender pieces likewise mix art with non-art. In 1976, he wrote trucking companies that he wanted to ship from North Dakota to New York City, in time for the bicentennial, a giant statue of Myron the Discus Thrower, thirty-five feet high, made entirely of cake. (This one has not yet become a book.) In 1978, he asked travel agents to identify their favorite work of art, and then reprinted their professional mug shots alongside larger reproductions of their selections. (This has not become a book either.) His first book, Political Art Movement (1971), is leaden and needlessly contrived; a later survey, Opinions of Working People Concerning the Arts (1975), suffers from repetitious responses that are limited in range. Observations, Protestations and Lamentations of Museum Guards Throughout the World (1978) is also a middling work, again limited and repetitious, redeemed only by occasional flashes of surprise and revelation, usually from a respondent who objects to the questionnaire. Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers, and Collectors (1977) comes as a multiple-choice exercise book that asks the reader to identify a whole painting from only a rectangular fragment. Four possible choices are given, and the whole paintings (the answers!) are reproduced in the back of the book. What I expected to be funny turned out to be a serious exercise for visual idiot savants. Scrutinizing these books suggests that Celender cannot securely tell in advance the esthetic value of each questionnaire, but some of his results are clearly more successful than others.

Destiny in a Name (1978), also an exhibition that became a book, is a Celender anomaly, for neither the subject nor the respondents are necessarily connected to art. People whose surnames reflect their occupations were asked to comment on the connection. Thus, Mr. Rockwell, then the pop music critic of the New York Times, for instance, received a questionnaire asking, “Did you feel destined by your family name to assume your present occupation?” So did Mr. Reveal the psychologist, Dr. Cure the physician, Mr. Houseworth the architect, Mr. Fangman the dentist, Messers Law and Case the attorneys, Mr. Pieper the plumber, Dr. Butts the colon and rectal surgeon, and Messers Blood, Deer, Eagle and Stear, all veterinarians. However, since everyone is so irately anxious to deny any name-determinism, their responses are rarely funnier than the initial connection of their names and professions.

What Celender has done in these recent projects is construct shrewd response-devices that encourage people (and institutions) to display their uniqueness merely by providing answers that they think are “normal” to them; but by assembling their responses into a single context, Celender not only makes a “found art” that is uniquely identifiable with his name, but he allows his respondents to contrast and augment one another in a burgeoning irony that is obviously marvelous and yet quite unlike anything else I know in either art or literature.