OPEN SPACE

………..”I don’t want you/ to be compromised, in any way/ by the contingencies/ of empirical reality.” - Steve Benson……….

Re:configure at Kala Art Institute

Kala now boasts a large street-level gallery and expanded printmaking facilities. The new space allows for more ambitious exhibitions. It can accommodate multiple installations. Added studio space means that more local artists can be served through Kala’s residency, fellowship and facility rental programs. The gallery is easier for members of the public to find, and the pre-existing facility on Heinz Street can now be dedicated exclusively to art production. From the perspective of Kala’s mission, this is a huge development.

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Jasper Johns, Flag, 1958. On extended loan from Jean Christophe Castelli.

―Jasper Johns to Emile de Antonio.

I’m next up with one of our weekly One-on-One curator talks, Thursday 2 July at 6.30pm. Someone had the idea that the British curator should do 4th of July weekend. I’m going to be talking about Jasper Johns’ Flag (1958), one of his series of pictures, if they are pictures, of the flag of the United States. SFMOMA has another of these (not now on view), from 1960-69, made from lead. The first in the series, Flag (1954-55), is in the collection of MoMA in New York.

When I stopped teaching his work, I didn’t think about Johns again for a long while, until, recently, I saw a poster of a Johns Flag, quite large, hanging in the Visa Section of the U.S. Embassy in London. I’ve seen it there a few times in the last couple of years, at various interviews. There are a couple of other posters of paintings and, of course, there are some other American flags (though not as many as you would expect). The flag-like object in SFMOMA (or MoMA) is probably not a flag, nor is the poster of Flag in the Museum Store; the poster in the Embassy, I’m not so sure. And if someone stuck a poster of Flag in the window of his big rig, or burned one in a street somewhere, it’s a flag. Meaning is use.

Some people thought he was anti-American… that he was a man who protested against the symbols of America, the flag. At the time there really was no special reason for it: there was no Vietnam War… There was McCarthy. No, McCarthy had disappeared a long time before that.

―Leo Castelli to Emile de Antonio.

The original Flag, of 1954-55, was in Johns’ first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in New York, in January and February 1958. Alfred H. Barr Jr., former Director of MoMA but at that time the Director of Collections, wanted to acquire it for the Museum. The acquisition was blocked by the Committee on the Museum Collection (someone wondered if buying Flag ‘might not leave the Museum open to attack from groups like the American Legion’), and the matter was referred to the Board of Trustees. The Board also decided against buying Flag, ‘fearing that it would offend patriotic sensibilities’. The work eventually entered the MoMA collection in 1973, as the gift of Philip Johnson (who had been an anti-Johns member of the Committee on the Museum Collection in 1958), in honor of Barr on the occasion of his retirement.

By 1958, McCarthy had disappeared, but in 1954 he hadn’t yet. The Army-McCarthy Hearings (widely televised at the time, and, by the way, the subject of de Antonio’s amazing 1964 film Point of Order!) took place in the summer of that year, not long before Johns conceived of Flag. Patriotism and the flag were hot issues in 1954. On Flag Day, 14 June, Eisenhower approved controversial legislation that added the words ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. On 10 November, the dedication of the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery took place. Johns, himself, had been discharged from the army only two years before. Is Johns’ Flag for or against the American flag? Impossible to say.

The Flag on view now at SFMOMA was painted in 1958, shortly after the Castelli show. Like the ’54-55 Flag, it shows the 26th flag of the United States, with 48 stars (the 27th flag was instituted 4 July, 1959, and the twenty-eighth and current flag, on 4 July, 1960, following the granting of statehood to Alaska and Hawaii; later Flags by Johns show the 50 star version). SFMOMA’s Flag is, in fact, not in this museum’s collection. It is on extended loan from Leo Castelli’s son Jean Christophe. We’re very lucky to have it. It was previously shown in the Centre Pompidou’s 2001 exhibition Les Années Pop (The Pop Years), and before that—I love this fact—it was on loan to the US Embassy in Paris for the tenure of Ambassador Felix G. Rohatyn. Imagine it hanging in the Ambassador’s office. It originally entered France as diplomatic cargo, and when the painting came to San Francisco, transport was again facilitated by the US State Department.

Emile de Antonio: What about Dada?

Jasper Johns: ‘What about Dada?’ What kind of question is that? ‘What about Dada?’

My remarks here have been about what kind of flag Flag is. On Thursday, I’ll say some things about what kind of painting it is, about the lesson of Marcel Duchamp, lessons for Andy Warhol, and the glorious indifference Flag seems to have toward something that you would think it impossible to be indifferent about. I hope you can be there.

San Francisco-based artist Seth Lower has contributed an outstanding installation as part of the current Mission 17 exhibition, “The Man Behind the Curtain,” but I ran out of room to describe it below!

An adventure awaits anyone who makes it up to Mission 17, the innovative Mission Street gallery dedicated to conceptual and installation art (2111 Mission Street, Suite 401–at 17th).  I don’t know, sometimes does it seem to you that exhibitions in San Francisco come in only two varieties? Either they’re dumb and lithe and beautiful, like Michael Phelps, or they’re too darn hard to understand.  “The Man Behind the Curtain” (through July 11) has a theoretical platform, but it’s springy and imaginative. I wound up staying on and on much longer than I had planned, caught in an undercurrent of political intrigue and moral outrage, but also just stunned like a balloon had hit me in some pleasure center.

Curator Laura Mott has used the straightforwardness of the gallery space to her advantage. Its sharp corners and defined spaces aren’t modernist, exactly, they’re harsh and unyielding, and she uses them to show their analogues to democracy both here and abroad. Democracies for example don’t encourage luxury in their voting booths. They’re spare, even severe, for if they were pleasant people would want to stay in there longer and, what’s worse, more people would want to vote.

Acephale!

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Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988.

Jeff Koons’s porcelain sculpture, always of great curiosity to the crowds when it’s up in the galleries, and one of my favorites, of Michael Jackson and Bubbles. You already know the news about the King of Pop. About the sculpture, more here. We’ll miss you, Michael. No 1980s living room would have been the same without you.

“F–k Greensboro, f–k these people. They’re never going to change.”

This is what one of my fellow Project M advisors said to me during one of the Saturday critiques, and while I celebrated in my previous post the overflowing idealism that I and others have experienced here in Hale County, I could sympathize with this angry sentiment, too. The social aspect of the work being created here that provides much of the excitement in students and visitors alike can also be its biggest stumbling block. Reaching out to a community means embracing the idiosyncracies and conflicts, not just the potential. And that community will often push back, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes very intentionally.

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June is National GLBTQ PRIDE month and my next couple of posts will respond to art events sponsored by the National Queer Arts Festival.  Despite being late in the month, I hope these posts generate some discussion about the notion of queer arts and PRIDE month, more generally.

Last week I joined a sold-out, yet intimate gathering of people at The Garage for the film screening, Across Queer Time. Curated by artist, Jason Hanasik, Across Queer Time was part of the 12th Annual National Queer Arts Festival and featured thirteen artists including Rudy Lemcke, Curt McDowell, Marc Adelman, Tammy Rae Carland, Jesse Finely Reed, Barbara Hammer, Kristina Willemse, Tina Takemoto, Jennifer Parker, Cheryl Dunye, Julian Vargas, Margaret Tedesco, and Killer Banshee. Hanasik introduced the films describing them as oscillating around tension—fantasy, the world in which we wish we existed, and nightmare (which is, perhaps, part of our reality, as well).  Indeed, the films cascaded through themes of illness, the fear and reality of AIDS, the intersections of racial identity, religion, and sexual desire, private spaces of homes and intimate relationships, and public interventions and demonstrations.  Throughout the evening and over the past few days the title of the film screening continues to echo in my mind—across queer time. This title is especially thought provoking within the designation of June as National GLBTQ PRIDE month, a sanctified 30 day time period in which people throughout the country celebrate and pay homage to GLBTQ history—many of whom flock to San Francisco to participate in the overwhelming number of events, parties, parades and marches.

Scene from “Little Sheep” by Kristina Willemse

What exactly constitutes queer time? How is time, and consequently space, understood through queer identities? How do the films featured in Across Queer Time represent this experience?  In my own thinking, experience, and more formal research (influenced mostly by Judith Halberstam’s recent publication, the title of which I borrow for this blog post) queer time can be defined as a way of being that exists beyond the linear and conventional notions of familial institutions and biological reproduction.  It allows for a reinterpretation of family and a radical reformulation of kinship. Queer time also emerges in the context of struggles that are inherently political and personal, such as the AIDS epidemic and the communities formed through collective action and protest. Yet, the films chosen by Hanasik refuse to be directly defined by any formalized theories of queer time and I think their success lies within this refusal. Hanasik made a point to include an intergenerational perspective in Across Queer Time with films ranging from 1974 to 2009. More than this obvious relationship to time, the films featured non-linear narratives and film sequences, and made visible queer spaces, the slippages in identities, relationships, while questioning the time and space in which these experiences exist. The very designation of the term “queer” attempts to dislodge itself from a gay/straight dichotomy to exist within a liminal space of non-definition.

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Richmond’s National Institute of Art and Disabilities has a show on this month that bears consideration in the context of this week’s discussion about the Rural Studio. NIAD was founded at about the same time (and by many of the same people) as its better-known cousins, Creative Growth in Oakland and Creativity Explored in San Francisco. Situated in downtown Richmond, the East Bay’s forgotten city, NIAD serves a population of mentally and physically disabled artists with particularly acute material and therapeutic needs. Very much in the Rural Studio spirit, two recent graduates from CCA’s MA Design program have applied their skills to the benefit of this disadvantaged community in their own backyard. Several key aspects of the Rural Studio project also apply here: approaching design as a philanthropic act, relying on inexpensive and readily available materials, and encouraging students to realize pragmatic projects within an academic context.

Collage Stamp – Stamp Pads Prototype from matthew baranauskas on Vimeo.

CCA Design for Disability is the brainchild of Molly Ackerman-Brimberg and Matthew Baranauskas. The two spent over a year working with Gallery Director Brian Stechschulte,  NIAD’s teacher/therapists, and their “clients,” adult artists with severely limiting conditions including paraplegism and autism. While taking me through the exhibition, Matt Baranauskas explained that as a designer, he initially approached the project with the idea of identifying and solving the problems faced by these disabled artists. It was only after spending time working with the group and making multiple crude prototypes to aid in their art-making, that he began to understand his work differently. Why, he thought, should he just make tools that compensate for disabilities? Wouldn’t that simply make the fact of those disadvantages more oppressive, highlighting the clients’ differences as burdens to be overcome? Instead, Matt and Molly set out to create new tools for art-making, inspired by the needs of NIAD’s clients, but which could have uses for able-bodied and disabled artists alike.

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[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from assistant curator of painting and sculpture Ali Gass. Thanks Ali!]

Kiki Smith, Lilith, 1994. Bronze and glass.

Kiki Smith’s Lilith crouches and hangs in a precarious position of emotional and physical tension. The sculpture is a life-like figure of a woman. (Indeed, Smith’s mode of making the work heightens this naturalism, as she cast an actual human model in her studio in clay and then constructed the final form from bronze). This woman’s form moves into the realm of inhuman creature-hood, however: clamped onto the wall in an upside-down crouch reminiscent of a cat ready to spring, or an insect or a bat adhered in a gravity-defying pose. The surface of the work echoes the formal modeling of earlier western figurative sculpture. The “S” twist of the body pulses rhythmically, creating a curvilinear flow from neck to hip, reminiscent of an Italian renaissance sculpture’s perfectly continued fluidity. However, the surface of the bronze is more like a 19th century casting. It is imperfect in texture, evidence of the clay and finger marks of the sculptor appearing in the metal form.

The way the work is positioned might feel physically precarious to the viewer, as the artist hides any evidence of the way the sculpture is attached to the wall. One can intuit the heaviness of the bronze, yet the work appears to balance easily against the flat surface of the wall. This sensation of being unsettled that is triggered by the impossible lightness is heightened by closer inspection of the details of the work. Smith has inserted extremely natural-looking glass eyes into the head of this form. Their icy blue irises stare penetratingly back at the viewer as one gains intimate access to the form’s face. The lightness of the eyes contrast dramatically with the darkness of the bronze, and the seeming life behind their surface is in stark contrast to the obvious artifice of the metal skin and body contours. The eyes feel too like that of a creature about to attack, seemingly trapped in an emotional split between feeling threatened and being threatening.

Kiki Smith, Lilith (detail),1994. Bronze and glass.

The title of the work brings additional meaning to these formal artistic choices. Lilith is a biblical figure who has long been adopted by feminists. In Jewish lore, she is the first wife of Adam, exiled from the Garden of Eden for her unwillingness to bend to Adam’s will, and is ultimately replaced by Eve. In this mythical story, she is cast out and becomes a demon bringing death and disease to those she encounters throughout history. Feminist literature invokes her image as a woman literally demonized because of her unwillingness to be subservient. Lilith is thus both a sympathetic and a terrifying figure.

Please join me on Thursday June 24th as I lead a One-on-One tour discussing this powerful and complex sculpture. I plan to discuss the ways Kiki Smith’s work is marked by her ability to find the nuances of both femininity and humanity, and to bring those details to the forefront in ways that point to the beauty and grotesquery potentially inherent in each. Much of the artist’s greatest work folds human and animal forms into one another. Here, she has indeed created a body that challenges both the traditional notions of figurative sculpture as well as the traditional depictions of the female body and idealized femininity.

–Alison Gass, assistant curator, painting and sculpture.

Sherrie Levine, Fashion Collage 6. 1979, collage on paper. 24 in x 18 in

Displaced and isolated by Levine, however, they become detailed anthropological studies of the scenes they depict – the attenuation of the models’ poses, the baroque architecture of the room, the half-distracted audience, the picture of class and luxury the outfits convey – even as blur, size, rasterization and faint scuffs defy our examination and mark these as mass-media reproductions, images of images. Works in Levine’s signature style – a “rigorously conceptual and coolly aesthetic practice,” as Bishop puts it, indebted to Marcel Duchamp and pictorial nominalism – are across the room. In the context of such rigorous and cool production, the Fashion Collages might seem anomalous: paths-not-taken, “early works.”

But what if we read them instead as central, foundational? They might allow us to think of Levine’s productions more generally in their relation to collage – to imagine that Levine works in and against collage’s formal-conceptual operations.

As an art historian I often think out my ideas first in pictures, experimentally moving reproductions into sequences and constellations, relationships of similarity or opposition. (A decade ago this happened on a slide-sorter or slide-table; now it happens, in numbing fashion, in presentation software.) What follows, then, attempts to retain the experimental quality of images in stacks, rows and piles – even as I want to show what it is about collage that Levine aims to work against.

I am very eager to respond to Eric Heiman’s observations and experience so far at Project M and The Rural Studio which he discussed in his June 20th post “Dispatch from Alabama #1: Cynics Need Not Apply.” The issues of housing, the ownership of space, and the role that artists play within sustainable and community based projects are all very dear to my heart.

There is an endless amount of housing issues in the Bay Area from foreclosures, to redevelopment, to tenants rights violations—issues I have become more familiar with recently through my work with the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee. However after reading Eric’s post my thoughts immediately turned to the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, specifically Brad Pitt’s project called the Make It Right Foundation (MIR). This comes as no surprise as I spent the past two years researching and writing about housing politics and the concept of home in New Orleans through my graduate thesis project entitled, “Homesick: The Search for Belonging in New Orleans’ Landscape of Loss.”  This project was inspired by my experience as a volunteer with the organization Common Ground Relief and focused on the presence of the non-local volunteers in post-Katrina New Orleans, the majority of whom are young, white activists from middle-class backgrounds and whose long-term presence in the city, while hopeful, contributes to New Orleans’ changing racial demographic.

A home built by Brad Pitt's “Make It Right Foundation” at 1809 Deslonde Street in New Orlean's Lower Ninth Ward. To the left of the house is the volunteer center for the organization “Common Ground Relief.”

While the issue of non-local people, particularly students, working within economically disadvantaged areas is relevant both to New Orleans and Greensboro, Alabama, what I’d like to consider here is the relationship of MIR to Eric’s discussion of beauty and utility within architecture and design.  Pitt developed MIR after observing the damage of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood and meeting with local residents to hear their concerns and assess their housing needs.  MIR aims to build hurricane-safe homes with “an emphasis on a high quality of design, while preserving the spirit of the community’s culture.”  MIR has completed eight homes, however it is unclear to me if the residents who now live in these homes owned the property they were built on before the storm, nor is the affordability of the homes apparent.  What MIR does make clear is that their homes are green and designed to withstand storms through elevation, roof access, hurricane proof windows, and durable materials. More »

Charlene Tan, the young sculptor featured at 2nd floor projects.

Few years back, curator Margaret Tedesco named a show she organized at Queens Nails Annex “OverUnderSidewaysDown,” after the old Yardbirds hit, and this time around at her own gallery she dips back into those spooky psychedelic 60s days with “Andmoreagain,” the current show at [2nd floor projects], the unique space she has carved out of her own apartment to show new work. Do you know Arthur Lee, Bryan Maclean, the band called Love that, like Tedesco, stepped out of the bubbling pop stew of LA? “Andmoreagain” is the third track on their third album, Forever Changes, and it’s the ultimate song about the succubus or sociopath, “Andmoreagain,” a supernatural creature who manges to get you to fall in love with you by mimicking your human responses. “You can see you in her eyes/ Then you feel your heart beating/ [Pause]/ Thrum-pum-pum-pum.”

Tedesco’s tiny apartment gets cleared out every time she thinks of a show, the furniture from one sunny room and most of a hallway swept away into adjacent spots, and a show installed—generally on the small side, sometimes only two or three pieces per artist. She has had extraordinary critical success with some of the shows, though the buying public has been, as ever, a little behind the curve perhaps. I’ve seen some great presentations—the Tariq Alvi show, Luke Butler’s Star Trek-themed debut, the exhibition of George and Mike Kuchar’s paintings, the Curt McDowell retrospective, and nobody could have done them but Tedesco. A writer and artist herself, she commissions poets, artists and novelists to create catalogue essays for each show, and when she gets around to compiling these in an anthology it will be the best book of its kind. More »

Not a before/after comparison, but two homes on the same block in Greensboro, Alabama. One designed and built for $20,000 by Rural Studio students, the other abandoned.

Listening to a drawl-infected conversation about the manufacture of assault rifles on the plane from Denver to Birmingham yesterday, I was reminded that San Francisco, filled to the brim with cultivating distractions and multi-cultural mélange, is the exception not the rule in our country. The arts flourish in our urban centers and those of us drawn to the creative way of life flock to these cities to join this club that energizes and sustains us. So how do a bunch of artists, designers and filmmakers apply their talents in a place like Greensboro, Alabama?

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Tomorrow I leave for the 100-degree (plus humidity!) heat of Hale County, Alabama to advise the young creatives at Project M who are busy trying to come up with a design project that will have a positive impact on the world. They’ll be toiling alongside the inspiring Rural Studio architecture students who are designing and building amazing structures for the rural poor in the area. I’ll be posting to this blog while I’m there so check back over the next few days to see how we’re faring in the blazing Southeast heat.

But before I go, here are a few things I’ve seen over the last month that are of note. I encourage you to add your own thoughts about them (or related topics) in the comments section of this post.

-I was lucky enough to catch Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found magazine, at the Intersection for the Arts this past Monday. His merry “Denim and Diamonds Tour” crew includes his brother, Peter, and the twin sister music duo, the Watson Twins, who are both performing original songs in between Davy’s hilarious readings of finds published in the magazine. The tour is still in the Bay Area, stopping tonight in Oakland at the Ghost Town Gallery, and tomorrow night in Santa Cruz at Cayuga Vault.

-There is an interesting show at the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery called Trace Elements that asks, “What are the trace elements of a City? Does the urban environment hold secrets or codes that would provide a greater comprehension of its systems, or of its human inhabitants? What remains when individuals and the places we build cease to exist? How does this evidence, these trace elements, assist us in piecing together history?” Featured artists include Kelly Tunstall, Clare Rojas, Dan Nakamura, and the Hamburger Eyes Collective. The show closes on July 3rd.

-The Venice Biennale gets invaded by the Brooklyn artist, Swoon, and her band of anarchists via boats built from New York City garbage. Read all about it here. In related activist art news, I was lucky enough to be at a creative retreat in Utah a few weeks ago with the amazing Lisa Anne Auerbach, who I hope to write about in a future post. Readers, do you have any thoughts about contemporary politically-charged art?

-Lastly, I screened the Olivier Assayas film,  Summer Hours, at the recent San Francisco Film Festival and it’s still playing all around the Bay Area. Even if you balk at the thought of a subtitled film about the French bourgeoisie, Assayas poses some compelling questions about how we value art and the objects with which we surround ourselves. The final scene makes it all worthwhile. Trust me.

Much like Helvetica, his endearing 2007 ode to the ubiquitous typeface of the same name, Gary Hustwit’s new documentary, Objectified, is a well-made, highly entertaining foray into the world of design. This time Hurstwit has his sights on the most precious consumer products and their creators. All the heavy hitters are featured, including Jonathan Ive of Apple, IDEO, Smart Design, Dieter Rams, Hella Jongerius, and Karim Rashid, and their voices are nicely supplemented by the scholarly observations of Andrew Blauvelt, Paola Antonelli, and Alice Rawsthorn. But where Helvetica was sharply focused on a single piece of the designer’s large palette unfamiliar to most non-practitioners, Objectified seeks to explain the manufactured allure of these everyday objects that we all covet, purchase, and use. The film’s wider scope also affirms that reflective insight on one’s work and how it truly functions in the world is not the designer’s strong suit.

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I wanted quickly to follow up on a few past posts.

Artist Torreya Commings responded to ‘On Graduate Exhibitions.’ Having finished her MFA at CCA in May, she said of her experience of the grad exhibition, “It’s a very strange situation… not exactly a “show,” not exactly a “test,” still colored by the liminal status of “student” but with rumors of “making it” or being “picked up” flying around. I’m glad it’s over with, mostly.” In ‘A day is as long as a year,’ I wrote a bit about Jia Zhangke’s great film ‘The World.’ The New Yorker posted on their website clips from a few of the director’s films, including Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and Still Life, to accompany a profile in early May by Evan Osnos. It’s a tidy summary of what’s good about Jia’s work, if you need one.

Modern Art Notes posted a two part interview with Tim Clark, on the occasion of his Mellon lectures, which I wrote about here. In the second installment, a compelling passage on Guernica: “[N]ever has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world.”

KPFA has, in their archives, a recorded interview with Clark and Joseph Matthews from 2005, soon after their collective Retort published on Verso their book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (an early version here). It’s no substitute for the book, of course, but the interview is a bracing context for ‘Picasso and Truth.’

A favorite moment comes early on, as C.S. Sung begins the interview. “Afflicted Powers contains the following statement: ‘Spectacularly, the American state suffered a defeat on September 11.’ What does that mean?” Tim replies, “Right. OK, you’re going to get quite an answer from me…” The text from Retort’s 2006 broadsheet, “All Quiet on the Eastern Front” is here. It’s appalling to revisit this one in view of how little the situation has changed in the three years since. The outrageous Iraq war grinds on with no end in sight.

Last week Joseph Del Pesco and I wrote about Artforum and e-flux’s “Call for Art Historical Knowledge,” and mentioned in conclusion that we “sent on May 25 an email asking Art & Education for some clarifications on these matters, but haven’t yet received a reply.” We still haven’t, but Joseph did receive a pleasant note from an assistant editor at Artforum, telling us answers were coming.

Meanwhile, in Iran, protesters shout “Police, police, thank you,” as they’re beaten and slaughtered at Tehran University and Enqelab Square. It’s hard to think about anything else - to think about art. A thousand thoughts crowd in. State power and state violence; the power of the crowd; strength in numbers or strength in documents;  the weakness in images, and the weakness of empathy at a sickening distance; the impotence of solidarity-en-Facebook and the resonance with Guernica; piteous appeals for help in the comments boxes of American websites. “Mr Obama please HELP US/we are in big warning/our students are killing by Ahmadi suporters/helppppppp ussss.”

Maybe bits soon on Sherrie Levine, Otl Aicher, and Kai Althoff.