MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach Is So Addicted to Visiting Artists’ Studios That He’s Doing It on Zoom (and Letting the Public Ride Along)

When Klaus Biesenbach took the corner office as director of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he gave up most of the
trappings of his former life as a curator, swapping checklists for
checkbooks. But there was one part of the job he couldn’t let go:
studio visits. Now, even as the museum is closed and contending
with steep, painful budget cuts and layoffs, he is continuing the
practice, and inviting the public to come along.

“I don’t miss objects in my empty warehouse here right now,”
Biesenbach said by phone from Los Angeles last week, “but I miss
studio visits. And I always feel that they are a such a privilege…
and if you have done a thousand of them, you have a routine, and
your service can be to share this access.”

In recent weeks, Biesenbach has hopped on Zoom to speak to
artists he’s known for years, including Shirin Neshat
(speaking to him from her home in upstate New York),
Mary Weatherford (speaking from South Africa, where she
traveled to open an exhibition just before the lockdown hit and has
been forced to stay), Catherine Opie (who is continuing to teach
art virtually from Los Angeles), and Korakrit Arunanondchai
(speaking from a guest house on his parents’ property in Thailand).
Upcoming episodes, going on YouTube weekly, will feature
artists Arthur Jafa, Camille Henrot, and Katharina
Grosse, among others.

The museum is among many that have been hit hard by the
pandemic, now forced to radically transform the way they serve the
public while, at the same time, making sure they can survive the
lockdown era. Within the space of two weeks in March, MOCA laid off all 97 of its
part-time employees, and then implemented pay cuts or
furloughs for almost all the other remaining full-time staffers
(69 people). The only employees unaffected were four members of the
on-site security team.

Biesenbach, who joined the museum in October 2018, is taking the
largest pay cut, although the museum has not specified the size of
the cut or how long it will last. MOCA hopes to rehire the
furloughed and laid-off employees when the museum reopens—but that
may not happen for a while. In the meantime, a group of staffers
from the education, communications, and curatorial departments—some
of whom are on partial furlough—have been tasked with steering the
museum’s online programming.

Biesenbach—who was a medical student in Germany before he became
a curator—would not be drawn out on exactly how much he believes
the pandemic would affect the museum long-term, or how it may need
to adapt, although he did suggest that the closure might last into
the fall.

“There are so many uncertainties,” he said. “How do you go
forward when you want to keep six feet of distance or more from
another person? How do you plan? You have to be nimble and
flexible, and we don’t know when this will end. Will there be a
climate of philanthropy for art or will philanthropy shift to
health or other areas in society?”

The process of shutting down the physical museum and ramping up
online activity has also prompted a reconsideration of what,
exactly, a museum is. Without exhibitions to open or a public to
welcome, what’s left? “I think a museum is two things,” Beisenbach
said. “It’s a collection and it’s a collective. You have your
mission to collect and preserve and make sure for generations to
come that what artists made in their lifetimes and what curators
have identified is safe and at some point made accessible again.
But then, how do you share, how do you not lose your
communities?”

For Biesenbach, the answer to the second question comes from
talking to artists and inviting others along. Watching them work,
he said, offers a comforting window into how creatives structure
their schedules at a moment when many of us are contending with the
challenge for the first time.

“Some of the artists were more concerned and focused on
capturing, memorizing, recording, and understanding the moment than
just being productive,” he said. “I go to the office in the morning
and spend my day on the computer and on the phone. Artists have
their own schedule. I think artists are more in charge of their own
timeline and when they focus on what, and that’s an interesting
aspect to it.”

The post MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach Is So Addicted to
Visiting Artists’ Studios That He’s Doing It on Zoom (and Letting
the Public Ride Along) appeared first on artnet
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