OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

This is a portrait studio if I say so.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?

It will. This pair of empty desks and chairs tucked into a corner of the third-floor landing will shortly become the portrait studio for Jochen Gerz’s project THE GIFT, part of the upcoming exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which—I’ve been writing this paragraph for three hours trying to convey my true exhilaration at the nearing prospect of! In super brief: the exhibition examines ways artists have been engaging audiences as essential collaborators over the last sixty years, covers a whole wide range of genre and media, is so much of what this correspondent loves in contemporary art, and promises to be a lot of FUN.

The image I have in my mind of what happens when AoP opens the morning of Nov 8 is something like hundreds of squealing eight-year-olds flooding the Atrium, the stairwells, the galleries, and immediately transforming those spaces with their infinitely renewable bright excitable energy. A somewhat undignified way of introducing this important, layered survey of participatory art practice, but nevertheless a gesture toward some of the very human, relational, and tangible experiences I think the exhibition hopes to provide. The infinitely renewable, excitable eight-year-old of my heart wants to tell you EVERYTHING about the exhibition, ALL AT ONCE, RIGHT NOW! and in coming days and months you’ll hear a lot about it on the blog, starting with a (more) dignified interview with The Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling next week. But for today, just a quick sneak peek at Jochen Gerz’s The Gift:

Jochen Gerz, The Gift, iteration SFMOMA 2008. The gallery wall awaiting your image; ‘photo studio’; and picture-storage wall-o-cubbies. Those cubbies are big enough for whole teenagers to stuff themselves inside of, according to exhibitions manager Kent Roberts, who caught half a high-school class doing same.

The idea is that at the beginning of the exhibition there is literally nothing on the wall. With your collaboration, and with a lot of help from students and volunteers from around the Bay Area, The Gift will be produced over time. We’ll use the photo studio to take portrait pictures of museum-goers which will then be printed, framed, exhibited, and stored all on the same floor, all on view. Gerz’s work is called The Gift because you give your picture to the show, & because you also get something in return: on closing day, we’ll have a big communal event (a.k.a “a party!”), and the artist will hand out a picture to everyone who contributed theirs to the project.  In other words, if you have given your portrait, you will then also own a part of the collection. You don’t get your own photo, however; you get a picture of a stranger, and the condition of receiving a portrait is that it then gets exhibited elsewhere (BART station/your living room/your tropical vacation?). Portrait sittings will be on a first-come, first-serve basis, when the studio is open (tentatively 12-4 M-Tu-Th-F). Also look for big spreads of visitor portraits in local newspapers over the run of the exhibition, also orchestrated by Gerz & part of the project, and another way of extending the artwork into the daily life of the city in ways that aren’t specific to the museum walls. Or even, exactly, SFMOMA’s jurisdiction. More on this in future.

Jochen Gerz, The Gift, 2000; digital photography studio, production lab, digital pigment prints, and newspaper advertisements, each photograph: 23 5/8 × 19 11/16 in., overall dimensions variable; installation view at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Tourcoing, France, 2000; photo: courtesy the artist; © 2008 Jochen Gerz and Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany

In the meanwhile: More on The Art of Participation here. Members’ preview opening is FRIDAY NOV 7, adjunct to Martin Puryear, with everything open to the public November 8. Become a member! Come to the party! It is going to be a lot of fun. And for months to come.

xxoo!

SS