 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Warhol director exhorts city to strut its stuff Tom Sokolowski, director of the Warhol Museum, has resolved to snap Pittsburgh out of its preoccupation with the past Sunday, November 19, 2000 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
LIKE A STREET PREACHER on a soap box -- this one in Prada shoes -- Tom Sokolowski exhorts everyone he meets in Pittsburgh to take an unflinching look at themselves and their changing city.
Are you willing to look? Sokolowski, who moved here from New York City four years ago, believes that some self-reflection -- and maybe a visit to The Andy Warhol Museum -- will open your mind to new ways of thinking.
And, like a street preacher, he'd like to share some thoughts with you -- about art, about lifestyles and certainly about Pittsburgh.
He's been doing just that with civic leaders, arts managers, museum donors and reporters since becoming director of the Warhol four years ago. In that short time, he's become Pittsburgh's self-appointed agitator, its consummate contrarian, a political aesthete eager to open minds through art and rhetoric.
On Pittsburgh's quality of life: "The city needs stores that don't close at 4 in the afternoon. It needs good restaurants that deliver. A good bookstore. A good record store. I mean, where do you buy records here? So I buy my books on Amazon.com, and I buy my records in New York."
On Pittsburgh's leaders: "They don't necessarily want the city to change because they remember the old times and for them the times haven't really changed. But for people who weren't privileged or weren't here or were too young, something needs to happen. It's the 'Oh, that's the way we've always done things' roadblock. I just find that so grizzly and boring, so annoying."
On Pittsburgh's negative self-image: "I've come to accept that this is not New York, and there are good things here. But what makes me angry -- and I do get angry sometimes -- is that there are quality people here and quality institutions but not enough people know about them. Strutting is something we need more of here. I mean, this is not a repressed town. It's a constipated town, but it's not a repressed town. So speak out!"
Sokolowski has been doing that for most of his life. As a gay man and AIDS activist, he advanced AIDS awareness in New York City in the 1980s through exhibitions he curated at the gallery he ran. He also was a founding member of the grass-roots organization that launched "Day Without Art" and the commemorative red ribbon.
Now he is using the Warhol as a platform for social change in Pittsburgh, having turned the North Side museum into a hub of contemporary arts activity, a place known for taking artistic risks -- a salon, of sorts, for the city.
But is he expecting too much, too soon, from a place that is slow to change and bristles at the slightest criticism?
Whatever the verdict, numerous people -- from the few who know him well to the ones who read his fiery comments in the newspaper about the Pittsburgh Pirates' planned "pirate ship" -- say the same thing about the witty 50-year-old with the sparkling eyes and the slight, permanent grin: "He doesn't mince words, does he?"
Sokolowski is leaning back in his chair at the Warhol, obscured by a pile of books stacked precariously on his desk. Books and papers are strewn across his office floor, and dusty art catalogs and novels clamor for space on his book shelf. Empty boxes from Amazon.com lay kicked off to the side.
Sokolowski is on the phone, scolding his insurance company for not covering his allergy medication. As usual, his door is open, allowing staff members to hear his conversation. On another morning, they might have heard their boss singing opera. Another morning, he might have been hollering a sudden idea at them from behind his desk.
"He makes things lively here," says Melissa McSwigan, the Warhol's development director. "I'm usually smiling or laughing throughout the day. He also sings in the galleries sometimes. You'll hear him give it a good wail, and with the acoustics of the warehouse space, you'll really hear it."
Soon Margery King, the Warhol's associate curator, walks in with Mary Catherine Johnson, manager of the International Sculpture Conference. As they chat about the conference, which will be held here next summer, Sokolowski tells Johnson -- in a typical tangent -- about the time he was at a Riverlife Task Force meeting and responded to someone who wondered why Pittsburgh has no "Central Park."
"I said, 'Because our leaders are brainless!'"
"You really speak your mind, don't you?" Johnson replies.
But coming from Tom, that was nothing, according to King.
"People can't believe our meetings are so free and open," she says. "They say, 'God, that's incredible.' They think we're putting on a show for them. But we say, 'No, it's worse when we're alone.'"
Indeed, staff members report a free-wheeling give-and-take that supports the exchange of even the most outrageous ideas. It's an environment fostered not only by the edgy nature of the museum but by Sokolowski's energy, his willingness to consider any possibility and his penchant for saying what he means.
"I appreciate it when he tells me what he thinks because then I know where he stands," King says. "And he doesn't just say, 'Oh, that's stupid.' He says, 'I don't like that idea because ...'"
If the staff have a complaint about their director, it's that he tends to shun details in favor of the big picture. And they struggle to keep up with all of his plans. Sokolowski acknowledges that he runs his museum "like a bat out of hell," but he loathes the word "process."
"I think it's totally repellent -- not because I don't listen to people, but process for most people is, 'Let's have a meeting and talk you to death until you finally agree.' I mean, we'll be at a meeting about something and my staff will say, 'We should have a meeting about this.' And I'll say, 'Well, what is this, a quilting bee?' "
Yet many meetings over the past four years have put the museum on a path toward being more than just a tourist attraction. Faced with the prospect that locals would no longer visit the 5-year-old museum after surveying it once or twice, the Warhol recently adopted a new mission: to be "a vital center" where people in the region are brought together through the arts; to be a place that is "constantly redefining itself in relationship to contemporary life."
Hence the Friday evening happy hours ("Good Fridays"), the museum-hosted debate between county executive candidates Jim Roddey and Cyril Wecht, the numerous arts performances hosted there and the use of the museum for corporate gatherings. All this while the museum has continued to build its vast collection, ship home-curated shows to cities worldwide and draw an average of 60,000 visitors a year, 58 percent of whom come from outside the region.
"Tom knows the traditional way to run a museum but he doesn't let that stop him," says Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which the Warhol considers a model.
The board knew before Sokolowski arrived that it had to offer more than Warhol's art to the public. But it was Sokolowski -- an opera lover and a singer himself -- who embraced the performing arts as a complement to the visual. In a daring move, he partnered with the avant-garde presenting organization P.S. 122 in Manhattan to import edgy performance artists for a series of shows this year. The first two shows focused on gay issues and a critique of the Catholic church.
"Tom is pushing the envelope wherever he is," says Patrick O'Connell, a friend from New York. "But he's not just an agent provocateur. There's a follow-through. He understands the role that an active cultural policy can play in a community."
In displaying -- and not apologizing for -- sensational work, Sokolowski hopes to quash people's preconceived notions about art. If someone gets offended along the way, he believes, so be it.
"We're not going to take risks in terms of doing a project that will lose $50,000," he says, "but if the risk is to offend a few people, even the mayor, then that's good. ... Provocation, however, means taking an intellectual and artistic risk and getting a rise out of someone. It's not just, 'Tee hee hee, see my breasts.' It's about anger, politics, emotion. Art in and of itself agitates. So I'm clearing the way to allow art to do what it wants.
"The saddest thing," he continues, "is when people never have an art experience where they say, 'Oh, wow! Whew!' When that doesn't happen is when you have some bigoted or closed-minded lout, and I'm sorry to say, I don't like those people. I don't want those people in my life. ... If you go away not liking Warhol, that's fine, but at least give me and him the respect of listening and saying, 'OK, now I understand what he did -- I don't like it, but I understand.' But you do not have the right to make some ad hominem, bullshit comment when you don't know what you're talking about -- you do not have that right."
Sokolowski's fierce intolerance of closed-mindedness inspires him to do what he loves best: give lectures on Warhol to the Pittsburgh community. He knows that the ethnic, religious and elderly groups he speaks to might bristle at the sight of a penis painting by Warhol or an artwork mocking Jesus. But he is glad that people are often happy to be challenged.
"If you allow your community to be curmudgeonly and conservative, it will be," he says.
On a recent evening, speaking to an older, predominantly Jewish dinner crowd at the Concordia Club in Oakland, Sokolowski foreshadowed the possibility that his audience might squirm at the sexual and political artwork he was about to show.
"Some of you may boo or hiss or throw something at me," he said after taking the podium. "And that's fine, because in some sense, that's what Warhol would have liked."
But Sokolowski was saved by his self-deprecating wit, wide-ranging intellect and engrossing speaking style. When he lectures, his eyebrows rise, his eyes widen, and he looks into the distance, as if he's discovering his thoughts for the first time. He seems to know something about everything, and employs such a broad vocabulary that he often leaves people with a host of words to look up in the dictionary.
Observers say he is good at walking the line between going too far and not going far enough in discussing provocative art. But he'll rip others for not being challenging, as he did when arts leaders gathered to discuss the local advertisements that were created to interest people in the arts.
One television ad showed a woman at the opera wistfully recalling how she sang when she was young. It was meant to attract people to arts events by reminding them of their personal arts experiences.
"I sat there watching this, and then I said afterwards, 'I have a problem!'" Sokolowski recalls. " 'Some of these ads are cutesy,' I said, 'but if you only define the arts as little bunnies and 'Anne of Green Gables' and that, what happens when Marc Masterson [at City Theatre] puts on a play like 'Compleat Female Stage Beauty' with drag queens and simulated male sex on stage, or when we have a film called 'Blow Job' at the Warhol? That's all art, but when people only see these ads, no wonder we have problems."
John Dymun, the advertising executive who created the ad, says he understands Sokolowski's point but takes issue with the alternative. "You don't want to promise people the emotional or intellectual equivalent of a root canal to get them in," he says. "There is a scaling and a ramping that you have to engage in."
But when it comes to art, Sokolowski doesn't acknowledge the word "scaling." Since he got hooked after taking an art history class at the University of Chicago "from a wonderful old fuddy-duddy man with an ashen complexion and an expertise in Baroque art," he has wanted people to know that art can move them -- sometimes in directions they don't like.
"If you cry during a play, that's a good thing, we've touched something in your soul," he says. "And if you get angry, that's good, because it's been made to be real. And it's not just anger at whatever's on stage, it's anger at your mother or anger at your school teacher or anger at your first twerpy boyfriend. That's what's wonderful, when art can bring out that emotion that is so real ...
"In Pittsburgh, you have to sort of, not coddle people, but be the missionary. But there's something very, for me, gratifying that, with someone on the women's committee [at the Carnegie Museum of Art], traditional or what have you, you show them some piss painting or whatever and at the end they buy into it. I really like that."
Sokolowski even traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art last fall to speak up for art. At a rally against New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's decision to sanction the museum due to a painting it displayed that featured elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, he reminded the crowd that Andy Warhol moved to New York from Pittsburgh to be accepted as an artist.
"What would he think of New York today?" he said.
Sokolowski is respected in the art world for spreading the word about contemporary art in Pittsburgh, given that it's a city which hasn't had much access to cutting-edge work and people here tend to be suspicious of it.
"I have it relatively easy here because I'm talking to people in a busy, cosmopolitan city," says Mark Russell, who runs P.S. 122. "So I cheer people like Tom who are ready to take on that challenge. He has to engage in a constant education of people and deal with forces that I can't even imagine."
Some in the Pittsburgh arts community say privately that Sokolowski can leave people feeling negative about the local arts scene. He jumps on groups for their conservative programming and expresses frustration with the lack of galleries willing to show daring emerging artists.
Still, the majority say his comments challenge the arts community to take risks. Charlie Humphrey, head of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and a member of the Warhol board, says no one was angered when Sokolowski criticized the opera ad.
"It's because he's charming and he's funny," Humphrey says. "You're allowed a lot of latitude when you have a sense of humor. And he laughs at himself as much as anyone else."
But the Pirates aren't laughing much at Sokolowski, who has been a vocal opponent of the 50-foot-high pirate ship the team is planning to build outside PNC Park. He called the ship "a cheesy, fiberglass, Good Ship Lollipop" in the Post-Gazette in July, and at a city planning commission meeting this fall, at which the ship was discussed, he said, "Are we going to be Las Vegas? Will there be exploding volcanoes along the North Shore?"
Asked to comment, Steve Greenberg, the Pirates' vice president of new ballpark development, said, "I just wish he'd come to me directly rather than publicly."
After the meeting, Sokolowski chastised his like-minded colleagues in the arts who were there but didn't speak out against the ship.
"One of those people said later in the day, 'Oh, Tom, are you still talking to us?' And I said, 'Of course I'm still talking to you! But if you saw something negative, why didn't you stand up and say it? Did you feel like this is the Third Reich, that you were going to be shot?' And they said, 'Oh, it's this town.' And I said, 'This town? This town isn't you!"
Says Andy Newman, editor of City Paper and a friend of Sokolowski's: "There's a cult of consensus in the city right now and Tom just doesn't drink the Kool-Aid on that."
Sokolowski doesn't say surprising things just to make points. He also hopes to encourage honest conversations, believing that politeness prevents open dialogue and that people in Pittsburgh are just too polite.
So he brought condoms from the Warhol gift shop to an arts symposium when the directive was to present something revealing of you. At a meeting where a top University of Pittsburgh official was present, he called the international rooms at the Cathedral of Learning old-fashioned.
And he insinuated at a meeting of his board's executive committee that some of them -- and maybe some members of the Carnegie Museum of Art women's committee, a traditionally conservative fund-raising group -- might have body piercings. Sokolowski reports that "some of them looked at me speculatively, others laughed."
"Somehow, I think people like me and respect me enough that I can get away with saying things like that," he says. "It was like saying, 'Well, I may not know you, but how do I know? You may have your hot moments and you may lift up your skirt and have a tattooed bumblebee on your side.' Maybe they like that sort of titillating challenge, the challenge of hearing 'Come on, join in with me, it's fun.' "
Sokolowski says he's never been muffled by his board or by the Carnegie Institute, which oversees the Warhol along with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Carnegie Science Center. He suffered no professional consequences when he talked openly to the Post-Gazette about the importance of offering domestic partnership benefits to Institute employees.
"The board teased him about the Pirate ship -- not criticized him, teased him," says Warhol board member Jim Wilkinson.
Though the ship is his most well-known target, Sokolowski also lashes out at Pittsburgh Opera for its lack of innovative productions, WQED for its newsmagazine "On Q," which he believes is "jingoistic" in its enthusiasm for Pittsburgh, and PUMP, the Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project, which he believes is too apolitical in its advancement of young people's issues.
"Where is their ballsiness?" he says. "PUMP is basically the guys and girls who want to, instead of create a new order, want to find out how they can sit next to Henry Hillman at dinner or get a membership earlier than they would in the Duquesne Club. But when you're worrying about urban issues, don't worry about the Duquesne Club. Let's get a great Indian restaurant in town where all the new electronic technology people will all sit down and eat wearing Birkenstocks and discuss business and make deals and not say, 'Oh, let's bring Birkenstocks into the Duquesne Club.'"
Then there's his feeling that young and single people who want to eat dinner late, want public transportation that doesn't just serve commuters and crave cutting-edge culture are being ignored by city planners and scoffed at by those who have long defined Pittsburgh culture.
Despite the criticisms, observers say Sokolowski cares about Pittsburgh, which they note is similar to the working-class, ethnic neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where he grew up. The catch is, Newman says, Sokolowski doesn't want Pittsburgh to pander only to "yuppies who just want more cigar bars and more places to buy Palm Pilots."
Sokolowski's friends sense he is lonely in Pittsburgh. He visits New York, where most of his close friends are, once or twice a month. And though he lives in a spacious apartment in Downtown's Gateway Towers that is filled with art and books and would be impossible for him to afford in New York, he lives alone, and his social engagements are mostly business-related. He says the few people in Pittsburgh he hangs out with are not from here.
"I think it's incredibly hard to come into this community from the outside -- almost impossible," says Humphrey. "The traditions and family histories and all that stuff make it hard. And sometimes I think there's a tendency among people in Pittsburgh's social circles to want to be seen with Tom, but they don't bring him in a meaningful way."
Some wonder if his big persona intimidates. But it doesn't fully define him -- sometimes he appears distant and aloof. Colleen Criste, the Warhol's marketing director, says that when her boss was photographed for an eyeglasses advertisement, the photographer noted that Sokolowski was more demure than she thought he'd be.
"Although he's naturally fun and playful, there's a point where he doesn't want to make himself seem overly that way," Criste says.
But then someone will ask for his opinion -- and trying to absorb all he has to say will be, as Humphrey says, "like trying to take a drink of water from an open fire hydrant."
"When I make some comment in a meeting or say something that's quoted in the newspaper, people call me and applaud me for speaking out," Sokolowski says. "And that makes me feel good."
Perhaps his mother takes the credit -- or the blame -- for Thomas W. Sokolowski's outspokenness. There was a day long ago when he was driving with her in Chicago, and mother and son came across some boys who were fighting.
"She stopped the car and got out and went up to these kids and said, 'Stop that fighting!'" he recalls. "And I was sort of terrorized, I thought they'd beat us up. But the kids put their tails between their legs and slinked away. It was sort of like, 'Damn the torpedoes!' So maybe she's where I got my chutzpah."
His working-class parents, both of Polish descent, sent him to a Catholic high school where, he says, he was not openly gay. He wasn't until he attended the University of Chicago, where he almost majored in voice but got a degree in art history instead. He doesn't regret the change of majors, although he acknowledges that "part of my personality is that I like to perform very much. I'm a ham."
Then he went to New York University for his master's degree, writing a thesis on a Medici villa in Italy. It was then that he met Andy Warhol, at a gallery party "uptown."
"I remember going there and feeling terribly sophisticated because it was the first time I'd done that sort of thing. I remember having a glass of wine -- I had just turned 21. And I was standing against the wall watching this dance performance, and I turned to my side and there was Andy Warhol. And I was like, 'Andy Warhol! Andy Warhol!' And he said, 'Oh, well who are you?' And I told him, and he said, 'Are you new to New York?' I guess it was so obvious. And then he said, 'What do you do?' And I said 'I go to school at NYU.' And he said, 'Gee ... you must be smart.'
"I tell that story not for self-aggrandizement but because it says something about Warhol. For him, who was a genius but not an intellectual, he couldn't fathom how other people could know German and French and Italian and study all these books. He wasn't being coy or insulting."
After a three-year stint in Rome working on a dissertation that he never finished, he became director of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va. -- a city he praises for being less polite than Pittsburgh. Then he returned to New York City to be director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, where he championed emerging artists and hosted a number of exhibitions that addressed the AIDS crisis.
He doesn't talk about it much -- many acquaintances in Pittsburgh say they didn't know about it -- but Sokolowski was one of the four founders of Visual AIDS, a grass-roots organization that started "Day Without Art" in 1990. On Dec. 1 of that year, arts groups in New York commemorated AIDS deaths in their own way, many by draping their artwork in black cloth. The event was repeated the following year and continues today, in cities worldwide.
Ten years later, Sokolowski, who knows at least 75 people who have died from the disease, becomes emotional about the red ribbon, which Visual AIDS also pioneered.
"It was something artists did that people saw as nonthreatening and wore with respect, and I think that's miraculous, I think that's absolutely miraculous," he says. "If I'm ever going to be a part of history, that was it. It was a remarkable moment. I don't think I've ever felt more alive."
After a few years, though, the momentum of the ribbon and "Day Without Art" slowed, and by the time Sokolowski got the call from a headhunter asking if he'd be interested in the Warhol directorship, his life in New York had become "another opening, another show." In addition, there had been no significant art positions open in the city at the time.
His initial visit to Pittsburgh foreshadowed some of his bewilderment with the city. He asked the concierge at the Doubletree Hotel for directions to Sushi Kim, a Korean restaurant where he wanted to have lunch.
"This concierge said, 'We can get you a taxi.' And I said, 'It's two blocks!' He said, 'Oh, but you don't have to walk.' I said, 'I live in New York, I can walk two blocks.'"
Staff members at the Warhol, and many others, expected Sokolowski to be long gone by now.
"He listens to opera in his car, he's really urban, he has great taste, a refined aesthetic, a dry wit, he's gay, and he's single," Newman says. "So I just wonder: For someone who came here from New York, which is all about that, sometimes I think he must feel like he landed on another planet."
Sokolowski could have returned to New York when he was asked two years ago to be director of the New Museum, a contemporary art museum in SoHo. He told the Warhol board about the offer but eventually declined it.
"There were still some things I wanted to do here, and I thought, well, I love New York, but I don't want to go from the frying pan into the fire, so I told them no."
So the man who starts nearly every sentence with "I probably shouldn't say this, but ..." and follows that up with "Oh, what the hell, I'll say it anyway," continues to court change in Pittsburgh and at his museum.
When will his work be over here?
"Oh, I don't think it'll ever be over in Pittsburgh," he says. "And I don't mean that in a mean way or a pessimistic way. But I think it'll be over for me when I get tired of it or when I don't want to beat my head against the wall anymore. Or maybe I'll be cute and say, 'It'll be over when I get tired of the missionary position.' "
|
||||||||||||||||||||
