Bruce D. Kurtz, Curator And Critic Focused On Video Art, 59
DGH
Bruce D. Kurtz, an influential art critic and curator who explored the
complex intersection of high art and popular culture and was an early
champion of video art, died Saturday, March 22, 2003, in Phoenix,
Arizona, of complications from AIDS, at the age of 59.
Kurtz had been an outspoken activist in the fight against the disease.
In 1990, he founded a Phoenix chapter of the organization ACT UP. His
position as curator of 20th century art at the Phoenix Art Museum
helped lend credibility to ACT UP's consciousness-raising efforts in
the largely conservative city.
"In a world populated by institutional drones, Bruce was a lively
maverick," said Lisa Lyons, independent curator and former director of
the Lannan Foundation, where Kurtz served as an advisor in the 1990s
during the organization's tenure in Los Angeles. "Passionately
dedicated to both art and social justice, and never afraid to speak
his exceptionally active mind, he made an incalculable contribution to
the foundation."
Gregarious and urbane, Kurtz typically wore his love of art on an
extravagantly attired sleeve.
He began his career in 1966 as an artist who took inspiration from
Andy Warhol's work. Kurtz made geometric floor sculptures of laminated
Formica -- an inspired choice of material that infused the industrial
forms then emerging in Minimalist abstraction with the glamorous yet
domestic aura of Pop art.
It was as a critic, however, that Kurtz became widely known. He wrote
for numerous publications, especially Arts Magazine and Art in
America, where his subjects included such younger artists as Robert
Smithson, Nam June Paik, Richard Serra and Peter Campus. He also
conducted the first published interview with Giuseppe Panza di Biumo,
the Italian collector of American avant-garde art, which appeared in
Arts Magazine in 1972. The article discussed Panza's extensive
holdings of landmark works by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and
others, which later formed the basis of the permanent collection at
Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.
Within a few years of the 1965 introduction of portable television
technology, video art exploded as an adventurous new medium for
artists. Kurtz became one of its most effective critical analysts and
spokesmen. His essay "The Present Tense" is featured in "Video Art"
(1976), a standard resource book.
His 1973 essay "Video Is Being Invented" summarized two directions
early video had taken.
One was its unprecedented use by artists for perceptual exploration.
The other was community television, in which a powerful communications
tool previously restricted to corporate control was made available to
ordinary people. Blurred boundaries of art, society and pop culture
resonated in video art.
Kurtz was in a good position to witness the birth and growth of these
dual strains. He was teaching in upstate New York, an epicenter of
activity for these new video formats, as well as in proximity to
Manhattan, where art publishing was centered. Binghamton's
Experimental Television Center, founded in 1971, was the home of
perhaps the first video synthesizer, which Paik, Shuya Abe, Charlotte
Moorman and other artists used to create eye-bending works of art. The
nearby Everson Museum in Syracuse had established a groundbreaking
video program.
With Campus, Kurtz also appeared in Hermine Freed's comically incisive
1974 video classic "Art Herstory," which had feminist fun with the
male-dominated history of Western art. Kurtz's image was spliced into
a Renaissance painting of a Madonna and Child, where he assumed the
role of a complaining angel who bemoans the tedium of posing for the
unhurried artist.
A native of Bozeman, Montana, Kurtz received a bachelor's degree from
the San Francisco Art Institute in 1964 and two master's degrees from
the University of Iowa in 1966.
He taught art and art history at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y.,
from 1969 to 1985. That year he left academe to enter the museum
world, assuming his position in Phoenix.
"Bruce was our first long-term curator of modern art," said James
Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum, "and a decade later his
impact is still felt daily."
Because of the proximity of Phoenix to Los Angeles, Kurtz became a
fixture in the late 1980s L.A. art scene. "I've always had a great
affinity for the West," he told the Arizona Republic, "and I wanted to
be in a situation where I could make a difference."
In 1992, Kurtz was guest curator for the annual invitational show at
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. He also inaugurated the Phoenix
Triennial, a survey of contemporary art from Southern California and
the Southwest. It featured such prominent Los Angeles artists as John
Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Jill Giegerich and Judie Bamber, while major
works by Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman and other artists were acquired for
the Phoenix Museum's collection. The 1993 edition, which launched
careers for Texans Rick Lowe and Michael Ray Charles, was described by
a reviewer for the Arizona Daily Star as "among the most daring shows
mounted in the state in years."
Perhaps the most widely known traveling exhibition Kurtz organized was
1992's "Haring-Warhol-Disney," which traced the legacy of mass-media
cartoon imagery from Walt Disney in the 1930s through Andy Warhol in
the 1960s and on to Keith Haring, a leading graffiti and post-Pop
artist of the 1980s. The show built on several ideas that had
originated in slightly different form nearly 20 years before in
Kurtz's first book. "Spots: The Popular Art of American Television
Commercials" examined its pop culture subject through methods of art
historical analysis.
Kurtz was also the author of two college textbooks for Prentice Hall:
"Visual Imagination: An Introduction to Art," and "Contemporary Art:
1965-1990," the first of its kind to incorporate a large number of Los
Angeles artists into the narrative of postwar art.
Kurtz left the Phoenix in 1994 and moved to Paris, where he had taught
American students in the 1970s under the auspices of the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts. He returned to Phoenix last summer.