Book Review: A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

Marcia Tucker’s autobiography, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, is all of 210 pages and packed with scandal, gossip, and amusing stories about finding her place in the museum world.  The emotional and casual nature of Tucker’s writing places this far from typical scholarly reading; however, there are ethical lessons to be learned from A Short Life of Trouble.  Tucker’s personal experiences with sexism and anti-Semitism show the dangers of prejudice – both inside and outside of the museum world.  Tucker also struggled with changes in the art world during the late 1960s and the 1970s, when artists were starting to use unconventional materials and pieces in their work.  A Short Life of Trouble illustrates that a successful museum is open to diverse people and ideas.
 
Her father, Emmanuel Silverman, was a lawyer, one of the first of his colleagues to hire an African American as a junior partner.  He worked long hours, often six days a week, to provide for his family.  Hoping that one day his daughter would follow in his footsteps, he let Tucker work in his office as a secretary.  Tucker picked up on her father’s work ethic, which would help her immensely when she needed to work 90-hour weeks as a curator, and again as a museum director. 
 
Tucker’s mother, Dorothy, had a different view of her daughter’s future.  Dorothy was a housewife who hated housework and was often bored and sad.  Though she seemed to resent her position, Dorothy would give her daughter the following advice: 
 
“When I was thirteen, my mother told me not to act so smart or I’d never have a boyfriend.  When I was eighteen, she told me that unless I learned to cook and my ironing improved drastically, I’d be an old maid.”1
 
Tucker learned that she would have to prove herself twice as hard since she was a woman.  Other women – even her mother – would resist her wishes for independence and a career.  This early lesson prepared Tucker well for the sexism she would face in the museum profession and taught her to fight it.
 
Tucker also had the ability to skew unpleasant situations to her advantage.  Teased for her looks as a teenager, Tucker formed the Ugly Club with her friends.  Every member carried a membership card with a personalized caricature (Tucker made them herself).  The Ugly Club also hosted parties, and outsiders started clamoring to get in.  “‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the teenage reject.”2 Tucker demonstrated skills for quick thinking and adaptability early on, not to mention the chutzpah to embrace her flaws and side with misfits, rather than attempt to blend into the popular crowd.  Her attitude would certainly come in handy later on.
 
During her junior year of college, Tucker studied abroad in Paris at the École du Louvre.  The most important lesson that Tucker learned, however, was how dangerous discrimination can be.  In 1959, anti-Semitism was rampant in France.  Tucker encountered anti-Semitic graffiti outside of her home and was publicly harassed by locals. During a vacation in Germany, Tucker encountered violence.  A group of men that police would describe as “crazed Nazis” beat Tucker and her boyfriend, Henri, with oars while they were on a boat, leaving Tucker unconscious for days.  After Henri and Tucker recovered from the assault, the friends they were staying with threw them a farewell picnic, inviting others to join them.  Drinking, dining, and struggling to overcome the language barrier, Tucker realized that “the nightmare of that dreadful afternoon had been largely replaced by a sense of friendship and commonality with another, very different, generation of Germans.”3 Not only did Tucker experience first hand that harm caused by prejudice, but also she learned the benefits of keeping an open mind, challenging her parents’ conception that “all Germans are Nazis.”  Her refusal to yield to stereotypes would help her immensely in her career as a curator and a museum director.  Not only would she find herself in a position to open up to different ethnic groups, but also to remain receptive to artistic concepts that she did not understand right away.
 
To get the job, she had to prove herself in spite of her gender.  Her first interview with director John I. H. Baur, known as Jack, was typical.  He asked questions about her research and her interest in the Whitney Museum.  Her second interview with the president of the board of trustees, David Solinger, was unsettling.  She was asked questions like, “What makes you think you’d ever be able to do this job?” and “Are you married?  Why not?”  Tucker countered with the following tirade:
 
"Let me tell you why you don’t want to hire a woman.  One, I won’t be able to do budgets, because, as you know, women can’t even balance their own checkbooks.  Two, once a month I’ll go crazy and no one will be able to reason with me, much less talk to me.  Third, and most important, o one will want to take orders from a woman, so I’ll be completely ineffectual no matter how smart I am.  And, of course, I’ll get pregnant within the year, so your investment in me will have been completely wasted."4
 
Though Tucker excelled as a curator, she had to battle sexism constantly in the work place, from off-color comments to unequal pay.  What eventually got her fired, however, was not her gender but her insistence that the Whitney Museum include marginalized artists and unconventional art.  Tucker had to conquer her fear of the unknown in her own way.  When she taught classes at the City University at New York, she took her students to Bruce Nauman’s first show at Leo Castelli Gallery.  When they approached a neon sign that articulated the sentence “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystical Truths,” Tucker told her students that it was crap. “‘Works of art are not jokes,’ I declared.  ‘They are not made of ordinary materials, and they don’t look like a stupid bar sign.  Words are not images, either.  Images are art, words are literature.’”5 She could not accept Nauman’s work because it did not fit into any of her preconceived definition of art.  Slowly, it began to occur to her that the art world was changing.  The fact that Nauman’s neon sign did not look like a typical work of art was part of why it was important.  The more Tucker went back to visit the gallery, the more she began to like the art.
 
Joanne Gallop’s Reading Lacan states, “One can effectively undo authority only from the position of authority, in a way that exposes the illusions of that position without renouncing it.”6 As a woman working in a field dominated by white men, Tucker felt that it was her duty to promote the works of artists overlooked due to their gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.  She convinced the director and trustees to exhibit these artists because the art was of high quality.  She organized solo shows for artists such as Jane Kaufman, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell as well as Betye Saar, Jack Whitten, and Alvin Loving (ignored because they are not white).
 
Tucker’s inclusive policy alienated her from her colleagues:
 
When I fought for greater diversity in the museum’s exhibition program, I thought I was just doing what needed to be done, but it made me a crazed activist to those who thought that all the interesting and important artists had to be white guys living in Manhattan.  Perhaps strangest of all, I had the idea that art wasn’t just painting and sculpture, which turned out to be a concept so upsetting to some as to threaten the museum’s existence.7
 
Though the climate at the Whitney Museum was chilly, Tucker always had the support of the director, Jack Baur.  Unfortunately, Baur retired from the Whitney, leaving Tucker with a new director, Tom Armstrong, who was not impressed with her.  Without any support from her colleagues, Armstrong eventually asked Tucker to resign.  She refused, preferring that the staff know the truth.  She received two months’ notice.
 
In 1977, Tucker founded the New Museum, which would be anything but traditional.  She kept the museum small so that she would not have to plan exhibits years in advance, allowing her to respond quickly to sudden changes in the art world.  She tried to do away with hierarchies and favoritism by sharing decision-making power with her staff, and all employees earned equal pay (a policy that ended when Tucker realized that it was not fair to employees who did more work than others).  The New Museum had no permanent collection.  Any pieces collected would be deaccessioned in between ten and twenty years in order keep the museum current in contemporary art.  She tried to diversify the work place, giving a voice to minority groups.  Rather than run the museum as a business or an academy, Tucker wished to create a public forum for discussing and viewing art rather than assigning value for visitors. 
 
In addition, as she did at the Whitney, Tucker continued to seek out artists who were previously ignored – women, people of color, gays and lesbians.  She held exhibits that focused on political issues, including an exhibit about AIDS awareness in the front windows facing the street.   Her exhibit, Bad Girls, featuring works such as Sue Williams’s “cartoonlike [sic] painting of a woman’s head with penises stuffed in her mouth, nose, and ears, with the scrawled caption ‘This won’t hurt a bit’” did not drive away NEA funding, although the organization insisted that its name be removed from the exhibit.8 Tucker was not concerned with offending authority figures.  She cared more about exhibiting art without censorship or prejudice and giving the public a chance to decide what they liked and how they defined art.  Though it was constantly under attack from critics, the New Museum is still going strong.
 
Marcia Tucker’s autobiography contains many lessons about defying traditional standards and combating prejudice.  Nearly forty years after Tucker’s Whitney days, diversity in the museum profession is still an issue.  As the museum field is turning towards community outreach, some feel that this trend of relating to a more general audience threatens scholarship in museums.  Museum professionals are often fighting the same battles that Tucker did.  It is important that museum professionals remember that it is not collections that make the museum; rather, it is people.  Without an open mind to new ideas and perspectives, which could be the result of different ethnic backgrounds, cultural values, or political opinions, the museum will alienate certain groups of people.  If museum professionals strive to be more tolerant and outgoing, as Tucker did, the museum will benefit, being a place that people can relate to rather than a stuffy institution that condescends to its audience.
 

Reviewed by Elise Freed-Brown
 
M.A. Program, Museum Professions, Seton Hall University
 

1 Tucker, Marcia.  A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World.  Ed.
Liza Lou.  Berkeley: University of California Press: 2008, 13

2 Ibid., 8

3 Ibid., 21

4 Ibid., 77-78

5 Ibid., 81

6 Ibid., 92

7 Ibid., 109

8 Ibid., 176