Matthew Deleget’s invitation to the most prominent American art show arrived in what seemed a random e-mail. A lifetime of questions, creativity, and critique crystallized into a single statement:
“I’d like you to participate in the Whitney Biennial.”
The invite came with a caveat. He could tell no one until the Whitney Museum coordinated the announcement.
Deleget kept that secret for almost four months, when a text message arrived one Thursday night in November 2013 giving him the go-ahead to talk. The announcement would appear in the New York Times within the hour.
“Keeping that secret,” Deleget recalls, “was not so much of a problem. It’s a great secret to keep. I was just trying to figure out what I was going to do and how to resolve the details of the piece that I put in the show. That’s where the process started.”
The Biennial, which ended its three-month run last May, is the often controversial and highly influential look at what is happening in American contemporary art. For nearly 80 years, this exhibition has been the art show in New York, America’s great art-making city.
It’s a BIG deal.
Such a big deal within the art world that the experience can be nerve-wracking.
“It’s extremely exciting to say the least, but at the same time, it’s completely humbling because of the history and tradition of this event,” Deleget says. “It’s also pretty terrifying, because the show is put under such scrutiny. It’s one of the top biennials in the world and is picked over and written about and criticized like nothing else.”
Deleget’s installation at the Biennial, “Zero-Sum,” was a critical statement unto itself about painting and its history. He made the statement without lifting a brush.
“Zero-Sum” is a configuration of art history books from the personal resource library that Deleget has been collecting since his Wabash days. About a decade ago he realized that all of the books about artists and movements that interested him were always on sale, in secondhand shops, or in discount bins.
“I reached the point where I started questioning why the stuff that I’m particularly interested in is always on discount. Why is it literally being discarded?” Deleget recalls.
That was the moment he realized this might make an interesting project, one that evolved into the vitrine case at the Biennial that
featured 42 publications, most of which had the discount stickers still on them. The books were organized chronologically and traced the development of abstraction in the U.S. from modernism to minimalism to post-painterly abstraction and into today.
Some of the books had taken a beating. One was being used as a doorstop at an art school where Deleget gave a talk a few years back.
For additional impact, “Zero-Sum” was installed on the ground floor near the Whitney’s bookstore, where some of the books were actually purchased. Just the place to become a catalyst for discussion.
“My great goal in all of this was to meet a larger community of people that I could have greater conversations with,” Deleget says. “The Biennial has been beneficial because you sort of have an institutional seal of approval on your work. It gives you latitude to be a part of the greater discourse.”
The larger community is central to Deleget’s work as an artist and art advocate. He and his wife, photographer Rossana Martinez, founded MINUS SPACE, a gallery in Brooklyn that spotlights reductive abstractionist art on an international level. What started in 2003 as an online project has become a thriving gallery giving voice to two dozen artists who work in the same way.
“We tried to create a space that had meaning,” Deleget says of the gallery the Village Voice has called “this charming cube of Zen.”
“I think of it as applied research; creating an environment or context for the work that we make.”
His installation at the Whitney Biennial boosts that work, but Deleget isn’t one to rest on his laurels.
“I really appreciate that from the outside it appears like I’m well established. But I’m a lot like other artists in that every time you do a show, even as influential as the Whitney, you are motivated and slightly terrified that this might be the last show you ever do.”
Not likely. Since “Zero-Sum” appeared at the Biennial in March, Deleget has opened shows in Los Angeles, New Bedford, MA, and back in Brooklyn. He completed an exhibition in Berlin, Germany, in October, and in 2015 he will head off for Toowoomba, Australia, for a show at Raygun Projects.
He traces the realization that art could be his vocation back to his Wabash days and art professors Doug Calisch and Greg Huebner H’77.
“It wasn’t until I met Greg and Doug that I knew people who were actually living, working artists. That was the big learning for me at Wabash. I can’t stress enough how important that was for me to see this was a career, you could do it professionally and earnestly and contribute to the culture of your community.”