“JOSEPH KETNER” Professor Joseph Ketner talks art, curating, and Andy Warhol.
T
text // HUNTER HARRIS
HERE’S A precision in his posture, an attitude of assurance in his demeanor. The crisp mintcolored oxford he wears, the immaculate neatness of his office, the way the winter sun cloaks his desk in its light through the window—Joseph Ketner sits neatly and precisely, a bastion of knowledge for the contemporary art world. As a curator and visual art historian, Ketner’s speech is ripe with thrilling declarations of today’s artistic experience. “Art is artifice,” he says. “And when I create visual art installations, I’m trying to create visual stimuli that unfolds in certain sequences without you really thinking about it.” Joseph Ketner is Emerson’s Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice, as well as Distinguished Curator-in-Residence. Ketner is a paradox of persuasions: all at once, he is a published expert on the life and work of
24
EM MAGAZINE
Andy Warhol, he’s currently researching and writing a publication on the German Gruppe Zero (a trio of European post-World War II artists), and is the definitive scholar of the landscape painter and freed slave Robert S. Duncanson. There’s the sense that a critical component might have been overlooked, that this array of places and periods couldn’t all be the same person’s expertise. As chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum from 2005 to 2008, Ketner grew disenchanted with the work required of him before Emerson presented itself as an opportunity. Describing his pre-Emerson position, he explains, “My principle measure of success was to increase acquisitions and to sell tickets.” When an opportunity at Emerson became available, Ketner made the switch and began operating within the larger paradox of being a visual art expert at a school often hyper-focused on moving images. “I remember that first lecture,” Ketner recalls, his tone tepidly describing a memory. “And after I was done, there was dead silence. I realized I shot over the bow way too hard, and I had to readjust. You spend 30 years working in the visual art world, and you develop a certain vocabulary… and I’ve been adjusting that baseline of expectation here.” In conversation, it’s clear that Ketner’s adjustments have been effective; there’s never
“AMERICANA” F/W 2013