OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

Photo: Kris Davidson

Photo: Kris Davidson

Photo: Kris Davidson

It was spectacular. More photos here.  And even MORE photos here.

The Frida Kahlo exhibition closes tonight. I got a text message late last night saying 400,000 people have come through the museum since the show opened; which means in the last three months alone. Three hundred and forty thousand of those people have purchased the special tickets to Frida Kahlo.

The final day of the exhibition will see artist & curator René Yañez’s Pasión por Frida tableaux vivants (living paintings), happening most of the day in the Schwab room, with Frida lookalikes enacting many of Kahlo’s most famous pictures. I’ve also heard there will be Frida-alikes taking tea in the cafe, wandering the galleries, and washing up in the ladies’. The months of the exhibition have seen a lot of people of every age and gender passing through dressed up to look like Frida, and sometimes the gesture has been camp, but mostly it reflects a deep devotion to this artist whose work speaks so profoundly to so many.

The dress Frida affected (she started wearing the traditional clothes in her early 20s) was a highly constructed performance (and in part the long skirts helped hide her physical ailments). It was also a statement, a political one, of pride in indigenous Mexican culture, and as many readers will know, the regional costume Frida adopted was of the matriarchal community of Tehuana in southern Mexico. It’s worth noting too that many of our visitors arriving in the colorful dress we so closely identify with Frida Kahlo were not “in costume” at all.

Christo Oropeza, one of the Information Desk assistants who has been working so hard all summer with so many people streaming in for the exhibition, interviewed this woman about her dress:

Photo: Christo Oropeza

“I’m from Juchitan, Oaxaca and it’s an honor for me to see people from other countries appreciating the works of a Mexican painter: Frida Kahlo. The way I dress is the way my townfellows, my mother and sisters and I dress every day and we appreciate that Frida showed to the world our beautiful and colorful typical dresses.” – Elsa de Gyves (July 20, 2008)

Dear Reader,

This is Tammy.  It’s hard to imagine that the Sol LeWitts are gone. We got up REALLY EARLY last week to witness the big event and I think I gasped when the first roll of paint hit it. And not because I’m one of those people who believe in the sacredness of art and its artifacts, but because I suddenly realized that these giant stripes of color have been a subliminal message for me in my five years of working here at the museum, and I gasped because I had finally figured it out…yes, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings #935 and #936 look like my mother’s dresses from the seventies—sacred (my mother and the seventies, I don’t really care about dresses).

Even still, there was something very satisfying about watching the erasure of this bold display. Someone made a joke about wearing white after Labor Day, and then staff photographer Don Ross got stuck up in the cherry picker.

I was sad to see them go:

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[Our regular feature, "Collection Rotation". Once a month I invite a local guest to organize lists, groupings, or 'exhibitions' from our permanent collection. Our fabulous guest this month is Carson Bell, Curatorial Specialist at the California Library of Natural Sounds, at the Oakland Museum. Wait til you see/hear what he's done for you! He includes notes about his selections along the way. Thank you, Carson!] ——–

Liner Notes: When I was four years old I picked up the wonderfully colored and detailed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album from my parent’s record collection and stared at the cover. My tiny hands fumbled as I flipped the record over and over, playing it for hours on end. Since that moment the relationship between sound and image has played an important role in my life. The chance to pair works from the impressive SFMOMA collection with audio recordings from the California Library of Natural Sounds is incredibly exciting for me. While recording music or ambient sounds I am constantly visualizing cinematic images to accompany the audio. The following Collection Rotation is my attempt to use works of art as album covers for my ‘7″-singles collection’ of sounds from the natural world.

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The Northern Elephant Seal is my favorite California mammal. The male Elephant Seal makes wild vocalizations with his large nose, or proboscis, when he fights with other males for the attention of females. Gorky’s Enigmatic Combat immediately brings to mind the chaotic and humorous sounds of an Elephant Seal harem.

Arshile Gorky, Enigmatic Combat, 1936-1937, Collection SFMOMA, and the Northern Elephant Seal

This haunting image of Man Ray’s Untitled (Rayograph) seems to buzz like the strange electronic sound made by the Varied Thrush. The Thrush produces sounds from a divided vocal box, or syrinx, which is separated into two chambers. The birds can control each side separately.

Man Ray, Untitled (Rayograph), 1920s, Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Robert Shapazian

Ruge’s parachute photo gives the viewer a spectacular view of flight, much like a male red-tailed hawk. The hawk will go into a sudden, steep nosedive during his courtship display, while making a raspy cry. Each expresses its movement with dramatic effect.

Willi Ruge, Aviation, ca. 1931, Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund

Peregrine Falcons have been known to nest on man-made structures like bridges. Two of the most famous Peregrines, George and Gracie, chose to nest on the Bay Bridge in 2007.

Joseph Stella, Bridge, 1936, WPA Federal Arts Project

The Hermit Thrush’s song is an echoing, fluty warble that helps the male project his message. The dizzying quality of Sheeler’s Aerial Gyrations instantly reminds me of the Hermit Thrush call.

Charles Sheeler, Aerial Gyrations, 1953, Collection SFMOMA, Mrs. Manfred Bransten Special Fund purchase

Like Eggleston’s brilliant photo brimming with red, the male Red-winged Blackbird shows off his striking red shoulders. The Red-winged Blackbird’s vibrant red coloring and loud, raucous song are used to defend his territory and attract a mate.

William Eggleston, Untitled, Greenwood Mississippi, 1973 1973, Collection SFMOMA, Gift of a friend of the Museum

In my opinion, the Lazuli Bunting not only has the best name in the bird world, but is also one of the most striking-looking. Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #57’s wonderful mix of blues and yellows immediately reminds me of the Bunting’s beauty.

Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #57, 1955, Collection SFMOMA

Bison shakes the alphabet.

Jack W. Stauffacher, Untitled, from the series, Shifting and Inking, 1967

All recordings © California Library of Natural Sounds and the Oakland Museum of California.

——————- Carson Bell is the Curatorial Specialist for the California Library of Natural Sounds (CLNS) located at the Oakland Museum of California. Carson is a graduate of the California College of the Arts with a degree in Film and Video. He has worked in the music industry for over ten years, writing, producing records, and performing for Bay Area acts The Pattern and The Cuts, and has toured as a session musician for New York-based band The Mooney Suzuki. Carson is currently working on developing interactive media exhibits for the Oakland Museum of California and recording natural sounds for the CLNS collection.

Photo: Megan Brian

Photo: Susan Backman

Photo: Megan Brian

Photo: Susan Backman

Video: Susan Backman

Photo: Susan Backman

More here.

[At 6am this Wednesday morning, the iconic and colorful Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings #935 and #936 will be "deinstalled" (read: painted over), in part to make room for some VERY BIG sculptures that will be part of the upcoming Martin Puryear exhibition in November. Any SFMOMA search on Flickr will immediately turn up dozens of images of these works. The drawings, having lived in the Atrium for eight years, seem practically synonymous with that space, or even with the museum itself. Local artist Chris Cobb was part of the team of artists who worked on the Sol LeWitt exhibition at SFMOMA in 2000, creating many drawings from LeWitt's instructions. He reflects on the strange 'passing' of the drawings:]

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As the Wall Drawings Vanish……………………………………………………….

As SFMOMA prepares to remove Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #935 and #936 from its Atrium, I’ve been working at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, helping to install LeWitt’s last project and the largest retrospective of his work ever, consisting of over 100 of his wall drawings. MASS MoCA is working with Yale University and Williams College to create what’s got to be one of the most dynamic installations in the country. MASS MoCA has given an entire three-story factory building to the project and as of this writing it is has taken a small army of drawing installers, interns, and apprentices close to five months to complete. When all is said and done, the exhibition is scheduled to remain in place for twenty-five years.

Snapshot of a snapshot: LeWitt installation in progress @ SFMOMA, 2000. This was an ink wash wall drawing that was made by building up layers one at a time, letting them dry and then adding the next layer.  (Chris Cobb)

Wim Starkenburg, one of my fellow drawing installers here and at the SFMOMA retrospective, was in charge of executing #935 and #936 at SFMOMA back in 2000. He is now 61 and worked for Sol since the 1980s. When I broke the news to him about the deinstallation (after all, #935 and #936 have been there for eight years), Wim was surprised they were being removed because he thought they worked so well with the architecture. I speculated that maybe they went a little too well with the building and that rather than being a permanent motif it might be nice for them to vanish one day into memory. Longing, it seems to me, is one of the deeply moving aspects of LeWitt’s art. On one level it has a powerful physical presence but on another level the work is temporal and fragile. Still, the wall drawings exist only as a set of instructions. Because the drawings are a map of an idea, his concept is like that of an architect–an architect designs a building and then has people build the building. Sol LeWitt’s work is similar in that he comes up with the idea of how a drawing should look and how it should be made, and then he has others execute the plan for him. We drawing installers feel connected to them because we put our time and energy into making them, but in the end, they aren’t the art – the instructions are the art. Wim understood this.

Sol LeWitt, Working Drawing for Wall Drawing #936: Color arcs in four directions, 1999, Gift of the Artist

I remember that in 2000 I had just graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and that a teacher there, Léonie Guyer, asked me if I would be interested in working on the Sol LeWitt retrospective. I can’t remember how many wall drawings there were, but definitely more than thirty. Work teams changed up from time to time so I got to work a little bit on almost all of the drawings. But the first job I had was sharpening pencil leads. I remember estimating that in a week I had sharpened about five thousand pencil leads. Each wall drawing had a team of people working in either crayon, ink wash, acrylic paint, or in graphite. And if the drawing was in graphite, sharp lines were essential. As a pencil lead is dragged across the bumpy surface of a wall the line gradually becomes grainy. Depending on the wall, the leads might only last long enough to make two or three lines before the line quality is too rough, hence the need for someone like me to just sit and sharpen pencils. Working on LeWitt drawings can be like Zen Archery, where the student holds the bow for weeks before being given an arrow, but then holds the arrow in place with the bow again for weeks before being allowed to shoot. Only after holding the bow and then holding the arrow for a length of time is the target allowed to be shot at. In this way the student learns to be as close to his/her tools as possible so they can become second nature. Maybe this sounds a little bit hippie but if you sharpen five thousand pencils you really become familiar with them. You also develop a profound reluctance to waste materials or to take them for granted. I have found, in general, this is not taught in art schools much these days.

Chris & Wim,  North Adams, MA

I think that back in 2000 #935 and #936 were almost the last works to be completed. One of the best memories I have from then was standing on the scaffolding in front of the partly finished drawings with Wim, who came all the way from Holland to do the project. We were looking down at the empty lobby. We both knew that all the work we had done was going to be painted out one day because the eventual absence of the work was built in to its presence.

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Chris Cobb is a San Francisco-based artist represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery. An account of his work on the Sol LeWitt retrospective at MASS MoCA will appear in the Nov/Dec issue of The Believer magazine and a number of his photographs will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters Magazine. He is best known for an installation he did at the Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco in 2004.

Last Thursday eve was round two of Tony Labat’s I WANT YOU project: They came, they performed, we scored, and five winners were chosen from the original pool of 54, to have their slogans printed on posters and plastered around town.

Photo: Aimee Nicole Friberg

Top-scorer of the night (at 872 points) Ms. Sadie Lune, with the handsome & charismatic Mr. Tony Labat himself. (An excerpt from her winning slogan: “I want you. I want you to be nice to sex workers. I want you, I really do. Vote Yes on Prop K!”) At 861 points: Miss Nicole Mills-Novoa, also known as “Bird,” who warbled her way through a charming act with hand-puppets:

Photo: Aimee Nicole Friberg

Tara Jepsen & Beth Lisick, in third place, with 860 points, as Don & Phil: (“We just want you to have a little class.”):

Photo: Aimee Nicole Friberg

Poet Hazel White, with 805 points: (“I Want You/ to End Racism/ thought by thought/word by word.”):

Photo: Aimee Nicole Friberg

And Kali Eichen, with 782 points, who said, “I WANT YOU to smile at a stranger. Right now. Go on. Turn around. Find someone you don’t know, look them in the eye and smile.” [We did. Everyone in the audience did make smile at strangers nearby.]:

The voting was done scantron-style, and over 200 ballots were added up live onstage at the end of the evening (that’s the Education Department’s own Megan Brian, in patriotic red/white/blue, making good with the scantron machine).

And with inter-act cabaret by sparkling chanteuse of the fabulous shoes, Ms Veronica Klaus:

Photo: Aimee Nicole Friberg

A huge thank you to all the contestants who turned out to perform, to the audience for voting, and to emcee Jason Mateo. The Flickr set is here.

The project’s not over: look out around town for the posters which should be going up soon. Likewise, we’ll be screening Tony’s video of the auditions on election day, November 4th at 6:30 in the Wattis theater, and again on December 2nd at noon; both of these screenings will be free and open to the public.

I have heard tales in the corridors here of total madness/spectacle about to unfold on the Wattis stage. Tonight at 6:30 THIRTY-THREE CONTESTANTS chosen from last week’s solo auditions for Tony Labat’s I WANT YOU project will perform for your vote. The performances are set to be staged in three rounds, hosted by poet/activist emcee Jason Mateo, and with inter-act entertainments by local chanteuse Veronica Klaus. The audience will choose five winners via old-fashioned school-style scantron ballots that will be tallied up live onstage at the close of the eve; as each winner is announced, he or she will be whisked away to be immediately photographed for their poster+slogan, with the audience watching the  backstage proceedings over closed-circuit live feed.

The Finalists: Johnny Bicycle, Jeffrey Brown, Kym Coffey, Nathan Conrad, Donald Daedalus, Veri Severe, Peter Dobey, Kali Eichen, Misty Epperson, Erica Gangsei, Rebecca Goldfarb, Nalani Hernandez-Melo, Dale Hoyt, Tara Jepsen & Beth Lisick, Lauren Kronemyer, Peter Max Lawrence, Suzanne L’Heureux, Sadie Lune, Nicole Mills-Novoa, Lady Monster, Sahar Mozaffar, Henry Neill, Johnny Rogers & Shalo P, Kendra Russo, Brandon Santiago, Shreya Sethi, Stephen Shearer, Andrea Slattery & Elizabeth Deters, Angela Thornton, Alexis Luna, Ian Treasure, Zurab Tsintsabadze, Hazel White

I WANT YOU: TO SHOW UP AND VOTE!

At least fifty auditionees/sloganeers turned up for round one of Tony Labat’s I WANT YOU project this Thursday last, to deliver their I Want You to…imperatives to Tony and his team of celebrity(esque) judges. The bound, wailing creature above was one of the more curious and dramatic of the auditions but, interestingly, not the only performer to eschew actually speaking a demand.

Outside the theater, the Atrium looked a bit like any downtown casting call:

The auditions themselves were a bit unlike anything the Wattis stage is likely to have seen before:

And there was at least one inside job:

Overall it was a deeply SF/Bay-style set of demands & performances: There was a lot of half-nudity, a fair amount of enviro-positive, sex-positive demand (I want you to ride your bike, I want you to be nice to sex workers), a bit of silliness (I want you to eat your vegetables; I want youtube), and—at least in the round of 20 or so auditions I got to see—a surprisingly small amount of sloganeering directly addressing the upcoming presidential election.

One of the more amusing moments of the night, for me, came backstage, where I was standing in the stairwell text-messaging myself notes on the auditions. A woman in a black sparkling dress, next up to perform, was being outfitted with a wireless mic but explaining to the tech that she was going to take her dress off when she got on stage. A curious conversation ensued, regarding the limited options as to where this bit of technology might then most logically be affixed. She delivered her imperative (I want you to love your fat, beautiful body) while performing an old-school trick with tassles.  One judge’s response? “Now there’s a poster!”

Of course, this was only the first round, and the public performance/vote-off is still ahead. The judges have narrowed the field to THIRTY FINALISTS who will compete THIS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11th, onstage, American-Idol-style, in front of a live audience (THIS MEANS YOU). The audience will choose the five winners, who’ll have their slogans made into posters Tony will plaster around town between now and the November election.

All photos: Aimee Friberg. The Flickr set is here.

Dear Reader,

This is Tammy. Hey look! Summer’s gone up in smoke and it’s back-to-school time. And although my academic pursuits were stopped short many years ago by an ergonomic accident, September still brings with it a pain in my gut. Summer vacation drifts into a landslide of work and anxiety. Will my coworkers laugh at my back-to-school Toughskins and non-name-brand sneakers AGAIN this year? I ignore their petty, school-kid crap and plunge head first into my work. Thankfully, Stein and my boss, curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling, are keeping me busy with a lot of assignments. Stein even proposed I make my little postings here a regular column. (Name options: True Random Thoughts, Non Sequitur, Obvious Observations.) I’ve also been gearing up for the Art of Participation show, opening in November, editing interviews with Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer, and some more mundane projects, like hiding the filing I didn’t do this year and reorganizing the office to confuse Rudolf now that he’s back from vacation. I am seriously busy, but I do have priorities. So, with that in mind, I’ve been checking out the summer shows, and I noticed something peculiar….

Lee Miller is cruisey. Or maybe it’s just the third-floor photography gallery in general. But I’ve been in the exhibition three times now, and each time I happen upon some kind of girl-on-girl sexual tension. Let it be known that my gaydar is technically flawed, but still, if I can identify this ancient ritual, it must be painfully obvious to everyone else. I have some questions about this: Is Lee Miller a gay icon? Or do girls just think she’s hot? Does an artist have to be beautiful or interesting biographically in order to be successful? If so, does this apply more so for women? What would Frida say? Would the cross-dressing, bisexual Frida notice these things too? Would Frida cruise Lee? Would Lee cruise Frida? Could they see past their obvious attraction for each other and just be friends?

It’s high-stakes election time. What do YOU want YOUR PUBLIC to DO?

Riffing on the iconic “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of World Wars I and II, TONY LABAT wants you to make your own demands of the public. What if you had one minute to seize the voice of authority?

Would you want it?  would you take it? what would you do with it? what would you say?

The idea? Everyone is invited to compose and deliver a slogan that tells all of us what you really want us to do:

• I want you to do the dishes AND clean the catbox.
• I want you to get Russian troops out of contested regions in Georgia.
• I want you to imagine what life would be like if you didn’t have to pay a mortgage, file taxes, drive in cars, or work for a living.

THIS THURSDAY NIGHT.

YOU deliver YOUR slogan in solo auditions in the Wattis theater, before a panel of judges and Tony’s camera. The judges pick 50 finalists, who will compete in front of a live audience, American Idol style, next week, on September 11. Five winners will find themselves & their slogans transformed into I WANT YOU posters to be plastered around the city before the November elections. Everyone who delivers a slogan on September 4 will be videotaped, and Tony will turn the footage into a new video piece he’ll debut at SFMOMA on Election Day, November 4.

I’ll tell you what. Suzanne wants you too. I am deeply curious to know what people will propose they want me (the public) to do. Who is going to win? and will we do what YOU tell Tony you want US to do?  Who is the we and who is the you? I WANT YOU TO SHOW UP AND TELL ME WHAT TO DO. Think about it:

See you Thursday.