Botwinick’s Objectives d’ Art : Museum: The Newport Harbor’s director talks about his institution’s role in a changing Orange County.

Thirteen months ago, Michael Botwinick--who had been head of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum but who had spent the last several years in the commercial art field--became director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. His return to the nonprofit museum world has been dominated by financial setbacks, primarily caused by the recession.

In December, Newport Harbor’s trustees voted unanimously to postpone indefinitely a $40-million campaign for a new building and endowment, pending an upturn in the economy. (The present museum, a 23,000-square-foot building, lacks space to exhibit the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions simultaneously.) Then, last month, to help reduce an accumulated deficit of more than $650,000, Botwinick decided to lay off nearly one-fifth of the museum’s staff.

The 30-year-old museum developed a national reputation for exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting and cutting-edge contemporary art during the ‘80s, under the leadership of director Kevin Consey (now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago) and chief curator Paul Schimmel (now chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles).

Botwinick has replaced Schimmel with Bruce Guenther, former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. But a number of big questions remain, ranging from possible alternatives to a new building to the overall vision Botwinick has of Newport Harbor’s purpose and future. Last week, Botwinick sat down for a two-hour discussion of these questions.

Q: The official announcement of the museum’s staff cuts said there would be no impact on programming or services for the public. But surely you do anticipate some cutbacks.

A: I don’t know what the effect is going to be. What we’re committed to is to try and turn this (situation) into an opportunity to revaluate, to do other things.

Q: What kind of other things?

A: I don’t know. If I had the answer, I’d make some announcements. Everybody has this tremendous desire: “We want answers, we want answers.” And I’ve got a lot of questions first before I can share anything.

Q: What are some of the questions?

A: We’ve got to retrench, clearly. Everybody we know who’s writing checks in this county says this is not the time to do a $40-million campaign. So the opportunity is, I think, to go back and take a look at what our short-term and midterm goals and plans are.

Like it or hate it, you’ve got a whole new economic reality out there. The difference between the reality today with me sitting here and five years ago with (former director) Kevin (Consey) sitting here has almost nothing to do with the difference between Kevin and me. The world has changed in ways none of us anticipated.

I just came back from (the Assn. of American Museums meeting in) Ft. Worth. I’d say there are about a handful of museums around the country that are growing in the traditional way. . . . The Amon Carter (Museum, in Ft. Worth) just finished a big expansion based on the extraordinary richness of its foundation. And the Kimbell (Art Museum, also in Ft. Worth) has been preparing for (its expansion) for a long time. . . . Denver (Art Museum) finished its expansion. They got in and out in time. Dallas (Museum of Art) is the only other one I know. They’re putting a new wing. And the Getty. (In Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Trust unveiled plans last year for the $360-million Getty Center, including a 360,000-square-foot museum, set to open in 1996).

Other than that, by and large the whole rest of the (museum) world is either consolidating or shrinking. I’d say about a third of the museums around the country are in some way in a downward mode.

Q: Are they reducing staff?

A: Well, you’re seeing staff reductions. You’re seeing public service and hour reductions, in some cases, outright program reductions. But much more often you’re seeing program reorganization ranging from practical things like, if you can do four fewer shows a year and hold them longer, on some level that makes sense. You’re seeing more in-house exhibits using your own collection, and smaller, simpler catalogues. There’s a whole gamut of tools, all of which we’ve all used at one level or another, and all of which we’ll look at and use here where applicable. That’s not the surprise.

What I’ve been trying to get across is, this museum hasn’t really gone through a real honest soul-searching in eight or nine years.

Q: Does that include re-evaluating whether the museum should retain its central mission

to collect postwar California art and exhibit modern and contemporary art?

A: Well, I deal with that very gently because, in fact, that’s usually a code word for, “When are you going to start doing Impressionist shows?” I don’t want to say the mission is sacrosanct, but it’s almost inconceivable to me--given the way museums have developed in Southern California--that it would make any sense at all, even if one wanted to, to change that. I think the way we pursue our mission must change.

Q: In what sense?

A: In the sense that it was a mission that was refined and conceived before there was a MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles). Do we perceive our mission the same way we did before there was a MOCA in Southern California? I’m not sure that we do.

When Newport Harbor was doing (the exhibitions) “L.A. Pop in the ‘60s” and “The Figurative Fifties,” nobody in Southern California was doing that. . . . MOCA didn’t do shows like that until the last two or three years. MOCA is now into a much more mature phase. It has enormous resources; the resources quite naturally flowed there for good reasons.

I don’t view us as competitors, but our role--our 20-year run of being the only significant museum between San Francisco and La Jolla looking at these questions--has changed. Because the reality of Southern California has changed. There is a much more sophisticated, much more complex art-making environment and also a much more complex museum environment . . . .

Imagine the chutzpah of going out and getting (internationally renowned Genoese architect) Renzo Piano to (design) the (Newport Harbor’s new) building. That was based on a very strong notion of what the museum’s role was.

But I think what we might as well do now is ask ourselves: Has the world fundamentally changed between 1985 and 1993? I suspect there are some issues we have to look at. I’m not talking programmatically. On a much broader level than that, our role in Southern California and the community may have slightly shifted.

Q: But besides the exhibition program, what else is there?

A: There’s audience, there’s outreach, there’s education.

Q: But isn’t the education program based on what’s on the walls of the museum for people to see?

A: It has been. The question is, are there other things that it can be doing?

Q: Do you mean that programming exhibitions has become a lesser thing, and education is now the tail that wags the dog?

A: No. Up until now, our existence has been driven entirely by our exhibition schedule, and that has achieved some notable successes in terms of our reputation. The question that we’re asking as we look into the ‘90s is: Will a continuation of that as a pure, undiluted approach serve the county as well as it ought to be served? I think it’s a question that ought to be asked.

I’m very clear what the implication of pulling off those kinds of shows is. I’ve been doing it all my career. I know how important it is in terms of the museum’s standing and reputation. It’s less critical, in my judgment, for a museum that has a broad range of programs it can offer at any one time. But it becomes extremely critical with a museum that has such a focused (approach).

So long as we’re primarily an exhibiting institution, with special exhibits--so long as you accept the premise that everything is driven by that--when it all works, it’s fine. But if it doesn’t work, you are, in effect, out of business until the next show comes along.

Q: What do you mean by, “If it doesn’t work”? If a particular exhibit is not popular?

A: No, popularity isn’t the issue. Contemporary art, which is our mission is, is a complex and difficult world. When you work it, you have to work it on a certain uncompromising level. And when you do that, you find that some of the most intriguing, some of the most critically interesting issues and artists, are also very inaccessible, very narrow and very tightly focused. If you’re going to do justice to them--and you have to because that’s your driving force--you realize that you’ve accepted the fact that you’re going to leave enormous numbers of people behind. . .

Suppose there is a Jane Smith, who does dense, mysterious, intellectually black (works of art). She appears like a meteor on the horizon and she seems to be influencing a whole generation of young European artists. . . . You get a curator who says, “This is important; this is what we’re good at. We ought to give this person some exposure and see where it goes.” Great. That’s what we do. We’re good at that.

(But) the other reality of Jane Smith’s work is, it requires a certain level of sophistication, a certain comfort level, a certain awareness of other work, to put it in context. Another reality is, it’s meaningless to elementary and high school students. . . .

How can you continue as an institution to seek out other fine Jane Smiths without constantly leaving people behind--and without doing exhibitions with subtitles for dumb people? I tell you, this is, for me, a very critical question. I don’t remotely have the beginning of an answer.

Q: If a museum has sufficient space, it can have a Jane Smith exhibition in one spot and do something more accessible in another.

A: I think it goes beyond space. . . . The question is, how can we continue to do a Jane Smith program and yet sit here in a horrendous economy for the next two, three, four years--take your pick. Clearly, the way to address this problem is to become a multiprogramming institution. You’ve got to be doing other things at the same time as you’re doing Jane Smith. Now, I don’t know what those other things are, and I don’t know how you do them. Yet.

As I often say, we’re selling (art) but nobody’s buying. . . . So what do you do? . . . The answer isn’t to say, “Go away, go up to the galleries in Santa Monica and come back when you understand contemporary art.”

What are the things we could be doing to make people comfortable and visually literate in those exhibitions? It involves education, it involves lectures, whatever. . . . If you don’t do that, sooner or later you start doing (exhibitions of) “Walt Disney’s Greatest Abstract Paintings.”

We happen to be coming out of a very difficult aesthetic period. I have my own notion we’re about to enter a very difficult political period which is going to change the nature of the debate.

Q: Well, the new politically motivated art is more accessible to general viewers--but also extremely irritating to those who disagree with it.

A: To say the least. . . . It’s going to be gender politics, abortion politics. It’s going to be class and race and education politics. It’s going to be social system politics. . . . We’re going to be challenged. It’s a challenge that’s going to go far beyond (the explicit work of photographer Robert) Mapplethorpe. . . . We start being challenged by bodily fluids and AIDS issues and fetuses. . . . Young artists, who are the “early warning system” of our society, are saying that from their point of view (the United States) has gotten off the tracks somehow. . . .

It’s going to be very hard for people. I’ve told the staff and I’ve told the board that we can expect to be beaten up in the course of the next 10 years. We will be under siege. Not because this is Orange County, not because this is a poor, benighted place. . . . Because on some level . . . it’s going to be in people’s face a lot more . . .

There are trustees who, no doubt, have in the past 10 years and will in the next 10 years be horrified by what artists do and what we hang up on the walls. The key to what we’re about is that they are firm in their commitment that (showing such work) is what institutions are supposed to do. . . .

Q: To return to the building campaign, is there any danger the museum may lose some of the cash pledges, now that the campaign has been dismantled for the foreseeable future?

A: Absolutely. Inevitably, there was a loss of pledges in the departure of (Renzo) Piano. Some people were committed to that plan. (And there are) people who felt comfortable committing a certain amount of money (a few years ago) who today don’t have a tenth of what they had when they made their commitment. That’s exactly the kind of reality that was behind the decision not to go ahead. I think the biggest danger would have been to go ahead and not make it a second time. I think that would have (torpedoed) our project for this generation. We really have to be confident we can succeed in this drive. We cannot afford to take people to the precipice again.

Q: Was the $10 million that the museum announced it raised in 1988 mostly in pledges rather than cash?

A: I have deliberately not done an analysis. It was a big hunk in cash, a big hunk in pledges and a big hunk of bequests and trusts. I don’t know what the mix is, but that was the spread. The bequests and the pledges were all revocable. There’s no such thing as an irrevocable pledge.

(I encountered) no one who attributed their reservations (about continuing the building campaign) to the change in plan. I worked very hard to hear from people who were strongly committed to the Piano plan and felt very strongly that the museum had made a mistake. That’s something I had to get firsthand. So I can say with some degree of comfort that the negative feedback I was getting was as nearly completely tied to economics as anything else.

Q: So the die-hard Piano supporters . . . ?

A: They’re still here. . . . I’m comfortable with what their views were and I’m equally comfortable that they’re still on board. I’m pretty comfortable that the judgment that we made about the advisability of going back to our pledges and going out for new money was based on the economic assessment and not based on an evaluation that the museum was barking up the wrong tree.

Q: What’s happening with Kohn Pederson Fox, the New York architecture firm hired to work up a fresh plan for the museum?

A: They’ve done about 90% of a conceptual plan. My recommendation was to finish it, not to leave that loose end. I’d like to have the whole plan on the shelf. We were working within a rough budget in terms of space and dollars. The charge was to think of a building of about 75,000 square feet and a budget of about $20 million. I think theirs is a provocative and interesting approach, and it’s a real good solution to enormous site problems. It’s a comfort to have that.

Q: So in the absence of a new building for the time being, what other ways will the museum expand its reach? Are there plans to open a satellite in a shopping mall, say?

A: We are actively talking internally and externally about the whole concept of satellite facilities. . . . It seems to me that one of the things about programs like New California Artists is that we go to the trouble of putting together a show and doing a catalogue, and it’s here for eight to 10 weeks and it’s gone forever. It would make a lot of sense if we could move that and all of the attendant programs to another location.

(The idea) could work on a lot of levels. Bits and pieces of the biennial (“The Third Newport Biennial: Mapping Histories,” at the museum last fall) could have gone elsewhere. I watched what (artists Richard) Lou and (Robert) Sanchez did here, and I thought, “Can you imagine doing that in some other places with all of the energy and all of the anger and all of the focus?” (Their installation, “Entrance Is Not Acceptance,” was about physical and social barriers between the United States and Mexico).

Q: What kind of spaces are you looking at?

A: I can imagine anything from a shopping center that gets a lot of traffic to a vacant storefront in Garden Grove. Where there’s a constituency. The space is the easiest issue. There’s lots of empty space. The issue is going to be to identify partnerships in that environment.

Q: What kinds of partnerships?

A: A municipality, a developer. . . . (Such partnerships) can increase enormously the service you can give to a broader constituency without patronizing or weakening what we do. . . . We need some recognition that there are some things that we do that have a very narrow focus and other things that, if you think about them differently, have much broader applications.

Q: Newport Harbor seems to be in a vastly different fund-raising position than the Performing Art Center, which received a record $5.17 million in donations in 1991. Do you think your institution is stymied by not being able to offer potential big donors the chance to attend opening nights in their finery or hobnob with stars?

A: If you can sit next to (opera star Luciano) Pavarotti at lunch, it’s a lot better than sitting next to me. . . . There’s great robust sense about that place. . . . I think they do very well because people love the glitz and also, I firmly believe, because people understand how important the center is to this part of the world. . . . It’s probably the only central cultural institution of any kind that’s common to the whole county.

Q: So Newport Harbor can never be central to the county in that way?

A: It’s a good question to ask. No museum has been central to the life of the county. . . . Conceptually, there are lots of reasons to be marginalized. I don’t use that word in a negative connotation. (The reason may be) geography (or) subject matter. Our attendance today is pretty much what it was 10 years ago: 60,000 to 80,000 a year. The county has grown phenomenally in 10 years; we’ve not created phenomenal new audiences.

Q: But you seem to think it is possible to create new audiences.

A: Not everybody who’s moved into the county during last 10 years likes contemporary art, but somebody must have moved in here who likes it. . . .

I think what’s happening in Orange County is far more complex than conservatism. There are social and economic forces that are very powerful. What’s Orange County going to look like in the year 2000? Racially? Educationally? What jobs will there be? How many people will be living here and how will they be concentrated?

I think about those kinds of issues, not because I think that I could go with a video disc to everybody’s house and say “Here’s your modern art for the week,” but with 3 million people in the county by the year 2000, I suspect there is a lot more to our constituency than the beach (towns). . . . That tremendous growth is largely divided between a low socioeconomic group and--the other part that everybody looks at--the upper educational spectrum.

The notion that I grate against is that contemporary art is something that only appeals to people who live in $500,000 houses. . . . Orange County’s living patterns are basically economic, not educational. It’s very easy to mistake one for the other. . . .

This is not about bringing art to migrant farm workers. This is realizing that contemporary art is meaningful to a much broader section because it’s educationally driven, not economically driven. . . . I’m not going to be turned aside by the notion that people . . . are much too busy working on their tans and jogging. That’s a cop-out. . . .

Perhaps the challenge of this decade for the museum is, how do you keep (the museum’s current supporters) and reach out to people you probably should have been talking to all along, as well? There are a lot of people we would be meaningful to. . . . Space engineers . . . computer (professionals) . . . people who do marketing for Disney . . . . These are people engaged by the world. . . .

We will inevitably do things that (people will) look at and go, “Are you kidding?” That’s the only way we can be true to our standards. You’ve got to understand that we’re doing lots of different things, some of which will engage you and some of which will not, and that’s the nature of contemporary art. In a larger institution, doing more than one (field of art), you will get a certain amount of bleed-off: people who come for one purpose and stay for another. It’s much harder for us.

Audience-building is the hardest thing. Harvey Lichtenstein at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, known for its innovative cultural programming) is the best example. He has devoted 20 years of his life to building audiences. . . . I’m concerned that we don’t have the patience. . . . I have a great concern that we’ll bail out or we’ll go on to other things or people will lose heart because it is so difficult.

We started a (free) lecture program on Tuesdays (at noon). We have a core audience of about 80 or 90 people. I’d like to have a series that runs every Tuesday forever, so people don’t think about whether they want to hear the lecture or not. They’ll go “Ah! There’s always a great lecture on Tuesday. It’s always interesting even when I hate it.” It’ll take years to do that.

There are other (plans to help build audiences). Over a three- to five-year period there’ll be a string of exhibitions, a sequence of 10 or 12 of them that are somehow interrelated. . . . . (The museum will use) a little more educational video, a valuable tool to give people a lot of information. . . .

We’re probably going to do more brochures, more gallery giveaways. . . . We’re probably (already) doing slightly more didactic support material (wall texts for exhibitions) than has been the custom. Its absence has always been an aesthetic decision as far as I can tell.

Just putting up a bunch of labels for Jackie Winsor (a current exhibition) doesn’t change the world. (But) it’s the beginning of a subtle shift. . . . Five years from now the relationship between the viewer and the art exhibition may be slightly shifted.

There is no reason why the museum should not make itself accessible simultaneously in a lot of different ways to a lot of different audiences. . . . If there’s nothing in the store today that you like, come back tomorrow.

* Michael Botwinick speaks at noon today at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Admission: free. Information: (714) 759-1222.

Profile: Michael Botwinick

Director, Newport Harbor Art Museum

Born Nov.14, 1943; married to Harriet Maltzer, 1965; two children: Jonathan (b. 1970) and Daniel (b. 1973).

Education: Rutgers College, B.A., 1964; Columbia University, M.A., Medieval Art History, 1968.

Previous Positions:

* President, Fine Arts Group Limited Partnership, Chicago, 1988-90. (Fine Arts Group is involved with investments in commercial art galleries, fine art publishing, tapestry and fabric manufacturing and other fields.)

* Senior vice president, Knoedler-Modarco, S.A., New York, 1987-88. (Knoedler-Modarco is the corporate parent of a group of art-related businesses: galleries, an art publishing company and a graphics sales company.)

* Director, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1983-87. (Planned and launched $12 million capital campaign, revised budget and accounting systems, planned mixed-use 100,000-square-foot office building; during his tenure, the gallery’s art school was accredited and American collections were reinstalled.)

* Director, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1974-83. (Reorganized staff during New York’s fiscal crisis of 1975, received $1.5 million in challenge grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, planned and built a new museum wing, helped to organize various exhibitions; during his tenure, several collections were reinstalled.)

* Assistant director for art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1971-74. (Responsible for 10 curatorial departments, planned climate control and renovation, coordinated exhibition activities and designed new special exhibition galleries.)

* Several curatorial positions, ranging from assistant curator for medieval art and the cloisters to assistant curator-in-chief, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969-71. (As assistant curator-in-chief, was principle curatorial staff support person for budget, planning and master plan; organized two centennial exhibitions, “The Year 200” and “Masterpieces of 50 Centuries”; did research for collections and exhibitions.)

Teaching:

* Columbia University, Columbia College, 1968-69, preceptor in humanities/fine arts.

* City College, City University of New York, 1969, instructor, art history.

Professional Affiliations (partial list):

*Fine Arts Advisory Committee, U.S. Department of State, Arts in Embassies Program, 1986-87; Executive Committee, American Assn. of Museums, 1984-87; Executive Committee, U.S. Committee, International Council of Museums, 1982-86; board of advisers, WNET Public Television, 1979-83; National Conservation Advisory Council, 1979-80; secretary, Assn. of Art Museum Directors, 1977; New York City Commission on Cultural Affairs, 1975-76.