OPEN SPACE

…………………………………………………..“That’s not perversity, people, that’s poetry.” Michael Fox……………………………………………

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff. Today's post is from assistant curator of photography,  Lisa Sutcliffe, who will be talking about Jim Goldberg's  The Orchard this Thursday at 6:30pm. And look for a conversation between Lisa and Jim, upcoming this spring on Open Space.]

It’s almost impossible to get a full sense of Jim Goldberg’s photographic style from just one picture. A complex storyteller, he weaves his own artistic narrative by collaborating with people on the margins of society through photographs, film, text and ephemera. Working across media and in diverse formats including 35mm, Polaroid land camera and 4×5, his multilayered installations test and blur the boundaries of traditional documentary photography. From his earliest pictures documenting the rich and poor residents of San Francisco, Goldberg has sought to give voice to his subject by asking them to write on his pictures. In Raised by Wolves, his photographs were accompanied by his own innovative account of kids living on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. His most recent series, Open See, began with a 2003 commission from the Greek Olympiad to photograph immigrant and refugee communities in Greece. He spent the next six years tracing the migration of these displaced people to places as diverse as Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bangladesh. The resulting work is a complex analysis of the hopes and dreams that led so many people to seek a better life in Europe and the cruel realities they faced on their journeys. This series employs diverse formats similar to his earlier work, but there are also photographs such as The Orchard that are far removed from his hallmark snapshot aesthetic.

Upon first glance, The Orchard tells a somewhat familiar story of two young people enjoying the sunshine in a pastoral field. For me it calls to mind a tradition of artists depicting the everyday that begins with Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) of 1863 and extends to Jeff Wall’s Tattoos and Shadows from 2000 (also currently on view at SFMOMA). In his painting of a group of men and a nude woman picnicking in the grass, Manet answered Charles Baudelaire’s call in The Painter of Modern Life to paint contemporary scenes that captured “the passing moment and all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” The alienation of the figures from each other and the abstract and unfinished nature with which the paint was rendered led to its ultimate rejection from the Salon. In Tattoos and Shadows Jeff Wall reinterprets the scene using a group of alienated figures whose presence offers the possibility of admiring the play of light and shadow on their inked skin. Although The Orchard was not made in direct response to this work it certainly engages the tradition. The remote orchard in the far eastern reaches of the Ukraine at first seems romantic—even idyllic—recalling the Garden of Eden in its symbolic construction. Upon closer inspection, however, details such as the debris-strewn dry grass, the ragged clothing of the unemployed drifters and their suspicious and somewhat dejected body language reveal a more complex and far from idealized vision of the modern experience.

Please join me on Thursday evening at 6:30 pm to explore this work further, and stay tuned to the blog for a conversation with Jim that will offer an in-depth look at his thoughts and process.

—Lisa Sutcliffe, assistant curator of photography

I’m tremendously pleased this morning to welcome our latest cohort of columnist-bloggers to Open Space, as they begin to get started this week:

Renny Pritikin was director of New Langton Arts for more than a decade, chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and is currently director and curator of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Art Collection at UC Davis. He’s written a zillion catalogue essays, and is also a poet.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, essayist, poet, and teacher. Without giving too much away, I’ll say Dodie will be writing Open Space’s first long-form commission…

Anne Walsh is a visual artist who works with video, performance, audio, photography and text, and she’s already started! with two posts just below this one.

Many of our readers I know are already fans of the great Brecht Andersch, filmmaker and SFMOMA projectionist, who’s been writing about film here at Open Space intermittently since the get-go.

Last, and not even metaphorically ‘not-least’, REBAR. Our four-person group-within-the-group, REBAR is an interdisciplinary studio based here in San Francisco. Operating at the intersection of art, design and activism, their work includes conceptual public art, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, & digital media and print design.

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As always, our columnists are writing in an EDITORIAL FREE ZONE. Like you, I just can’t wait to see what they will do. WATCH THIS BLOG.

I had the interesting task recently of taking a small group of Wheaton College alumnae (class of 1960) on a “tour” of the 4th floor show, ‘Focus on Artists,’ at SFMoMA. After we looked at the first half of the exhibition, (beautiful, exciting, invigorating) I pointed out that among the eight artists “whose iconic works have been influential in defining movements from Abstract Expressionism to Postminimalism and beyond,” * none were women. One of the alumnae (Wheaton is a women’s college) then asked if there WERE any modern women artists. Now this is a person whose question came more from a simple lack of familiarity with 20th c. art – possibly with visual art in general – than from ignorance or lack of intelligence. So even if the question is naive, it’s also one whose asking, in January 2010, by a privileged Caucasian woman  who was 22 in 1960,  ought to raise some questions for curators, not to mention educators, critics, gallerists, historians, and artists.

We went on to the second half of Focus on Artists, where among the ten artists “whose work has signaled a shift toward more psychological, social, and historical content in art,”* seven were men, and three were women.

The museum’s decision to give a single rooms to each of 18 artists for the Focus on Artists show, as well as the choice to rotate a second round of works into the galleries mid-way through the show’s run, allows for an appreciably deeper experience of the artists’ work. There are many works on display that are old friends, and so nice to see again. But 15:3 is the kind of ratio that makes me want to know more about how the artists were selected. When I’ve learned more, I’ll post again.

*http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/400

In the spirit of transparency and beginnings, I’m going to mention a few details of the first meeting of the new cohort of Open Space writers, which took place at B bar, above YB Gardens, on a Wednesday night beginning at 7 p.m.  One of our group had just come from teaching a class in which students were presenting their completed assignment: playing the role of an INTERVIEWER or INTERVIEWEE for a curatorial job. In addition to preparing questions or answers, the students were to dress the part of the role they were playing. Though I didn’t ask, I’m guessing the following costumes might have been included: Non-profit artist-run space; corporate art collection; urban art museum; college art museum or gallery; private museum/foundation. The longer I go on with this list, the more questions arise. The exercise sounds like a mightily useful one, if excruciating to participate in.

The photograph above is one of the cheeses served at B: the “Bermuda Triangle Chevre.”

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

Hey everyone, I want to take a moment  to say thanks to our fall/winter columnists just now winding down their term. It’s been great to see how same-but-different the temperature of the blog could be with a new group posting in. Please give standing ovation to Joseph del Pesco, Michelle Tea, Duane Deterville, Stephanie Syjuco, and Cedar Sigo. As I say, this is so long and not farewell, as the rules of engagement here state that, once an Open Space columnist always an Open Space columnist. Our writers are always welcome at the door.

Thanks y’all and don’t be a stranger. Tomorrow I’ll introduce our winter/spring compatriots, a spectacular group, if I do say so. Just you wait.

Here at the Open Space, we are huge fans of a site called Jumping in Art Museums. So when we saw Malia Campbell’s set of images in front of Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I on the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden, we were super excited.

Malia says:

The subject in the photo is my boyfriend, Scott Hargis. He lives in Oakland and I live in Seattle. Whenever I go down to visit him we always go to SFMOMA and, after our 2nd or 3rd trip, we realized it was just cheaper to get a membership. We were especially excited for the Avedon exhibit (we’re both professional photographers) and ended up going three or four times just to see his work.

This photo was taken after our first viewing of the Avedon exhibit. I was inspired by Avedon’s self portrait of he and Twiggy dancing. The movement was so dynamic and fun—by the time we made our way up to the rooftop garden I knew I wanted to capture something of the same essence so I made Scott stand in front of the sculpture and jump for me. It took about five takes and these three were my favorites.

These images were captured on my iPhone, proving that fun and exciting images are captured by a photographer, not a camera.

Malia also has some handy photography tips on her blog.

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We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA”. You tag too!

HERE’S THE LINK.

For an upcoming project I’ve been researching the first issues of art magazines produced in the San Francisco Bay Area. The SF Bay Area hasn’t been able to sustain a contemporary arts journal for a variety of reasons, but there have been at least a dozen attempts. With the help of my brave and talented intern Simon Jolly, I’ll be scanning and presenting a number of these journals in June in conjunction with the SFAC Gallery’s 40th Anniversary. We’ll also be running OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software on all the scans which makes the downloadable pdfs word-searchable, a helpful aid to research. I’m starting with ArtWeek, which has been on my mind since it ceased printing last year. While it’s never been a specifically San Francisco oriented magazine, and hasn’t been a progressively contemporary journal in well over a decade, many notable writers and curators from the Bay Area have contributed to its four decades in print.

Go to Download Page for ArtWeek Vol. 1 No. 1

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff. Today's post is from assistant curator of media arts, Tanya Zimbardo, who will be talking about Fried's Inside the Harlequin: Approach Avoidance III and II, this Thursday at 6:30pm.]

From the start of the 1970s, Howard Fried put forward one of the most compelling bodies of conceptual film and video work. The artist belongs to a generation that radically redefined sculpture and questioned the role and form of art in society. A leading figure on the West Coast in the intertwined fields of performance, video, and installation art as they emerged, he was also one of the key advocates of these mediums in founding the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute in that era. Exploring his own psychology as a point of departure, his abject sculptural and performance-based works investigated more broadly the problems and processes of how we perceive and learn information. The paradox of choice was central to his study of scenarios in which individuals are faced with competing options: from the routine of ordering food in a restaurant to the rhetoric of political television advertising. His meticulously crafted works probe issues of criteria, judgment, control, and predictability in analyzing how people deal with conflict situations and group power dynamics. Fried’s conceptual practice was tethered to everyday activities, interactions, and possessions that held personal meaning in his life. The artist frequently placed himself as the protagonist in his witty, disquieting works. Whether humorously performing the role of a victim of his own ambivalence, or the role of a mindfucker who constructs a frustrating situation that his participants must indirectly learn to negotiate, he implicates others in the decision-making process.

Objectifying the problem of indecision, specifically the basic type of psychological conflict known as approach-avoidance that arises in pursuing a goal or activity that is both attractive and undesirable, is the framework for several early pieces, notably Inside the Harlequin (1971). This installation consists of two silent Super-8 film projections joined at the seam and subtitled from left to right Approach-Avoidance III and Approach-Avoidance II. The unsynchronized film loops of slightly different lengths (approx. 12 minutes) echo the endless cyclical pattern of a conflict without resolution.

Fried often used structural opposition: two characters, two teams, two goals, or two systems pitted against or played off one another. Here, the artist divided his warehouse studio in San Francisco into two parts, the floors of either side painted a different shade of gray. Two men are restricted to opposite sides of the space, while the third (Fried) moves freely—embodying the idea of a consciousness considering more than one position or vantage point. He crosses the line again and again—relating either cooperatively or antagonistically to the other two. An arrangement of the artist’s belongings on the darker side diminishes in successive shots as a man hands off various objects to the one bound to the lighter side. Fried assists with the bigger items, including a two-man chainsaw we see him use cooperatively in the other projection. Echoing the motif of splitting in the piece, the men decimate the functionless architecture of stacked sheet-rocked worktables. Perhaps inevitably, the split evokes psychoanalytic associations, from opening up the repressed to the onset of a psychotic break. While on the one hand, the double ensures against loss, on the other, the split has a destabilizing effect.

Each of the two films features two pairs of opposing actions—contrasting the active vs. passive camera movements, the established vs. disrupted positions of objects. Inside the Harlequin cycles through actions 1-4 on the left and 5-8 on the right. However, there are two sequences (3 and 7) that appear in both films in which the action crosses over the studio, as well as ‘crosses over’ the dual projection, so that at times we simultaneously see different moments of the same scene. In the second cross-over sequence, we observe the trio rappelling from the long wall of the studio. When Fried crosses the center line to one of the sides, the man assigned to that side also stands on the wall parallel to the floor, while the other one stands on the ground. Playing with closeness and distance, the projections alternate between views of the long and short axis of the studio, and the dyadic and triadic relationships of the figures.

As its title suggests, the dual projection is triangulated by an absent, first film, Approach-Avoidance I (1970). The complex editing pattern of Inside the Harlequin was essentially built on time sequences developed in this earlier animated film, of the typed letters in APPROACHAVOIDANCE. The scenes in III and II are divided into segments analogous in duration to the positions of the letters in that first film, used to symbolically illustrate directional and velocity changes in the conflict pattern. Fried’s characteristic wordplay, in this case, is a subversion that extends down into the underlying details that act as the subconscious of the piece. The sequencing reverses in the projection on the right. Through its use of thematic polarities, physical metaphors, and movements and reversals in space and time, the work addresses the tendency expressed in approach-avoidance conflict of being more repelled (i.e. rappelling) and less attracted by a goal that one is moving toward, and vice versa. The artist places emphasis on the ongoing artistic process of re-evaluation over completion. The purity of his mathematically generated system is cut with cheap drama and laced with personal example. While Fried’s filmmaking is primarily structural, there is something about the distinctive content—physical comedy, raw aggression, or makeshift attire—that seems to evoke multiple associations with popular cinema amongst viewers. The chaotic content and casually executed tasks allow the overall tightly structured piece to breathe.

The piece was filmed over a week at 16 Rose Street (overlooking Market), the site of a number of Fried’s most iconic performance actions and videos, sometimes featuring neighboring artists in the building, like sculptor James Pennuto, who we see here in the white painter’s overalls. David Sherk (helmet and padded gray sweatsuit) and Fried would wrestle again for Indian War Dance, the first part of Fried’s notorious performance for Documenta V (1972)—drinking at the ring of a bell, their sobriety manipulated by a judge until they collapsed. Drawing on his experience with this sport, Fried’s interest was not only in the physical involvement and competition, but the idea of kinesthetic feedback. As he reflected in Avalanche magazine, “There are what seem to be physically sadistic parts of the action, inflicting pressure on the opponent, and masochistic counterparts, receiving similar pressures. One is active and the other passive, but you get feedback either way.” The artist studio here resembles a cross between a gym and a garage workshop. Athletic training as an analogy to artistic production would be made explicit later in well-known studio actions like Tony Labat’s Terminal Gym (1980-81) and Matthew Barney’s DRAWING RESTRAINT 1-6 (1987-89).

Like his peers Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman, Fried is one of the few video art pioneers who had also previously created film installations specifically for the gallery context, exploring the spatial use of multiple projections.

As a prologue to seeing Inside the Harlequin, go check out Fried’s Studio Relocation (1970) featured in The View From Here (otherwise illegible online). Exemplifying a poetics of failure, this anecdotal piece hinges on his best-laid plans going awry. Playing off of the genre of studio-based performance and the notion of the ‘artist at work’, my own exhibition The Studio Sessions explored process-oriented pieces as dialogues about the works themselves. Fried’s discursive transparency about his working method and the exhibition phase within several pieces was critical to my thinking about the condition of publicness.

I’ve been waiting for years for Inside the Harlequin to be on view, knowing it was slated for The Anniversary Show. The section of that exhibition Space/Time/Sound: Bay Area Conceptual Art takes its title from a major survey of 1970s performance art in which Fried figured prominently. Prior, he was included in several SFMOMA group exhibitions; his 1977 solo show focused on his sculptural installations and textual practice. Please join me this Thursday, February 4, at 6:30 p.m. and we’ll move into the galleries to discuss this collection highlight and Bay Area Conceptualism.

—Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator, Media Arts