OPEN SPACE

………………………………………………..”Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” - André Gide……………

SFMOMA director Neal Benezra, with Elaine McKeon, tending bar in the Koret Visitor Education Center, for last night’s Marioni salon:

Tom Marioni; SFMOMA exhibitions design manager Kent Roberts.

Tammy Fortin; Kent Roberts

All pictures: Chris Brennan.

Many many more pictures of last night’s salon are here.

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, Elaine McKeon, FREE BEER, Neal Benezra, Tom Marioni

For serious.

Tonight’s guest bartender at Tom Marioni’s salon is none other than SFMOMA director, Neal Benezra. And not only that, but Neal will be joined in his labors by long-time SFMOMA trustee and former chairman of the board, Elaine McKeon. It should be said that, among Ms. McKeon’s many leadership credits, it was she who recruited Neal from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Also, she wears fabulous outfits.  I’m looking forward to seeing this pair’s prowess behind the bar.

Tonight’s all-star cast ALSO includes SFMOMA exhibition design manager & chief preparator of nearly thirty years, Kent Roberts, as the evening’s reader. Not to be outdone by Neal, Kent is bringing along his own sidekick, media arts assistant & Open Space regular, Tammy Fortin, who for certain won’t let herself be outdone by Elaine in the get-up department. Plus, she’ll be playing the drums.

ALSO on tonight: novelist Michael Cunningham and designer Martin Venezky will talk about their collaboration on a limited-edition double deck of cards (design by Venezky, text by Cunningham), commissioned by SFMOMA in conjunction with the exhibition Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas. They’ll be joined by Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design. Free with admission; Wattis Theater, 6:30pm. SEATING IS LIMITED.

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, Elaine McKeon, FREE BEER, Neal Benezra, Tom Marioni

[Here, our managing editor of communications, Apollonia Morrill, talks with SFMOMA associate curator of photography Corey Keller about the exhibition Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. More than four years in the making, Corey's "science show"--as we often heard it referred to during the planning stages--includes examples of early scientific (and pseudoscientific) photography. This Sunday, join Corey in the Wattis theater with film historian Tom Gunning & science historian Jennifer Tucker, as they discuss the representation of phenomena invisible to the naked eye and the potential of photography as a scientific tool. Or, you can check out Corey's illustrated online tour, also downloadable as a podcast.]

Apollonia Morrill: How were science and photography connected in the 19th century?

Corey Keller: Photography was invented in 1839 and one of the things that interested me was the way it’s a product of science, but also influenced science at the same time. Many of the earliest photographers were in fact scientists, who were experimenting with this optical device, the camera obscura, and then trying to figure out how to capture the picture it made. They were experimenting with new lenses, new optics, and with chemistry. At the same time, because science was becoming so important, it became apparent that the pictures photography produced could help scientists, as a way of sharing information, and as a way of making pictures that was a lot faster and simpler than drawing.

So illustration was the primary function of scientific photography at that time?

Primarily illustration. But significantly, and this was a key aspect, the metaphor that was commonly used to talk about photography at the time was “nature drawing her own picture.” This was important because it positions photography as a natural process, as something that was somehow like the natural phenomena that were being studied. The idea was that the picture generated itself, that there was no artist or scientist intervening … and that this record somehow comes into being as an exact copy of nature all by itself.

There was a broad range of scientific photographs being made in the 19th century. Can you give some examples of the types of pictures in the exhibition?

Because so many of the early photographers were scientists, and because science remains so important throughout the 19th century, photography was applied to almost every branch of science you can think of. But this show specifically looks at photographs of things that were invisible to the naked eye. We begin by looking at photographs made through the microscope–of things that are too small to be seen by the naked eye–and then move on to pictures through the telescope, objects that could sometimes be seen with the naked eye but most often had to be seen with an optically aided eye. By the late 1870s photographic emulsions had improved so much that photography began to record things that can’t be seen by the eye at all. For example, in astronomy that often meant that stars that were too far away to register on the retina would show up on the negative. The exhibition then considers things like photographs of electricity, or motion studies, things that are moving too fast for the eye to perceive. We close with one of the most dramatic scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, the X-ray. The first X-rays were made in 1895.

Can you say a little more about the idea of the invisible?

One of the things we think about photography is that a photograph has a particular relationship to its subject, which is to say that the photograph looks like the thing it’s a photograph of. But what happens when you make a picture of something you can’t see? You have a picture but then you have nothing with which to compare it. This takes away one of the most basic ideas we have about photographs–that they are a record of the visible world. In the 19th century this was a particularly problematic issue because one of the metaphors people developed to make sense of photography was that the camera functioned like an eye, that it saw like the human eye, but in fact it functioned even better than the human eye, because it didn’t get tired and it didn’t have bias. But when the camera began to be able to make pictures of things that no human eye–no matter how perfect–could ever see, it posed a cultural challenge, and began to chip away at this metaphor. There’s a strange moment where photography and vision come unhinged.

Do you think people stopped thinking of the camera as an eye?

What’s interesting is that they kept using this metaphor, at the same time they were seeing that the camera can make pictures that the eye can’t see. They were also learning a lot about the eye itself, which turns out doesn’t work as well as we think it does. Suddenly there were pictures of things the eye can’t see, and viewers had to put faith in the picture, rather than in sensory experience. That’s something we’re used to today. A lot of the data we receive comes to us mediated. For example, how war is waged today. A lot of war intelligence is gathered by satellite, not so much by spies on the ground anymore. We get data from the satellite and then make decisions based on this mediated seeing. Who knows where the person reading that data is sitting! They could be thousands of miles away. That’s something we’re much more used to now: the idea that you can receive visual data indirectly. However, that was a strange concept in the 19th century. For a long time the photograph wasn’t accepted into a court of law as evidence unless you had a corroborating witness who could testify that the photograph was in fact true. Take X-rays, for example. When people first tried to introduce X-rays as evidence, they had difficulty because nobody could corroborate that the evidence presented on that photograph was true unless you cut the person open! There was no way to correlate that photograph to anything in the real world. And that posed a big problem. It didn’t take them long to get over that, but it was a conceptual hurdle.

Victor Chabaud, X-ray of a plate with crayfish: Radiograph executed by Mr. Chabaud with a cylindrical focus tube, small model, ca. 1897; Musée des arts et métiers, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris: photo: Michèle Favareille

Can you say more about the relationship between seeing and knowing? I think the adage “seeing is believing” holds true today; did it in the 19th century?

I don’t know when the phrase “seeing is believing” comes into use, but its meaning has changed over time. I’m not sure it holds true today. I think we tend to doubt our vision much more. For example, one of the first things we think about now, when we look at a photograph, is whether it’s been manipulated, or, is it digital? In the 19th century, the phrase would have had a very particular meaning because it was aligned with this new branch of science, with this interest in empirical observation–the idea that you could only trust observable phenomena. And that trusting in observation trickled out into all areas of practice. You see it in realist painting or literature. Scientific culture inflected an enormous range of cultural activities. With photography, replicating the natural world exactly carried an aura of authenticity that fit the world-view of this culture where seeing was believing.

So, despite the fact that photographers began manipulating their pictures early on, photographs still carried an aura of authenticity?

Well, it’s interesting. One of the things that was so shocking about early photographs was, because emulsions were so slow, things that were moving didn’t show up on the plate at all, so you could look at a picture of a street scene, for example, and you would know it actually had nothing to do with what that street had looked like when the picture was taken, because the moving people had disappeared. But there was a cultural belief system that was invested in the photograph, which came to stand for an idea of truthfulness, even though it wasn’t always the case. It’s interesting to look at the discourse that surrounds photography, because even its claims to truthfulness were debated from the very beginning.

How did 19th-century scientific photography influence the development of the medium more broadly, or did it?

Oh, it definitely did. In large part, these experimentations with materials–development of new emulsions primarily–and new cameras, new lenses, and things like that were probably the greatest contribution of science to photography in general. But I think also that scientific photography helped to prove in many cases the value of photography, in the sense of communicating information, not only to specialized audiences, as scientists would exchange photographs, but also to engage the public. These pictures were spectacular and they appeared in fairs, and newspapers, and illustrated journals, and books, and they had an extraordinary ability to communicate to people in ways that other kinds of illustrations didn’t.

Why show 19th-century work in a modern and contemporary museum?

I guess what I would challenge is the presumption that modernity begins in the 20th century. It’s true that museums of modern art tend to focus on 20th-century art, but a lot of people might argue that modernism in art emerges with the impressionists in the 19th century, and that photography in large part contributed to the emergence of modernity; it was part and parcel of this whole conglomeration of ideas–technological, industrial, aesthetic, social–what we call modernity. Photography and modernity emerged simultaneously and are in many ways almost synonymous, I think.

These pictures were not intended as art; are they being presented as art now?

The pictures were certainly not intended as art, but their aesthetic value was not discounted. One of the reasons photography worked was because of this idea of mechanical objectivity I talked about before: the image had an authority that was inherent to it and didn’t depend on the artist’s hand. But on the other hand, people at the time recognized that they were beautiful pictures. And scientists then, like scientists now, always needed support for their work, whether it was government or private support. They used these pictures as a way to draw in the public. There was an enormous movement in the 19th century towards popular science, and a belief that to have a healthy citizenry you had to have a population that understood the most important ideas in modern science, and so they used photography and other kinds of materials as a way of bringing these ideas to the public. The pictures needed to be interesting as well as informational. The fact that they work on both levels is not a contemporary concept. (more…)

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: astronomy, Brought to Light, Corey Keller, microscopy, motion studies, spirit photography, X-rays

Dear reader, this is Tammy.

Last night, as part of the ongoing exhibition The Art of Participation, SFMOMA hosted the first in the series of the Tom Marioni salons: The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art. Bringing this simple act into a museum setting required the building of a bar (which I am petitioning to keep well-stocked beyond the show) in the Koret Center, ordering twelve cases of Pacifico beer from the local Bevmo, the completion of many pink and green logistics forms, the administration of drink tickets, and the acquiring of a bartender for each night. Last night’s barkeep was Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling. It was a special occasion, as it is the only time I’ve ever ordered a beer from my boss.

The place filled up quickly with friends and we all drank (with gusto). We were doing it! We were creating art and I could feel it: tiny carbonated bubbles and a general loosening of the seams. The game of quarters was not attempted, but the idea was bandied about. Tom Marioni walked to the podium and gave his address. He was loaded–with jokes. And read with a slight impish nature. A poet appeared on the scene. He had a sign that read “Poems for Sale.” I handed him a dollar. He asked, “What would you like a poem about?” I thought and said “A dark window.” He licked his lips, took a glug from the bottle and began typing on his little typewriter. He finished and handed me a slip of paper with my poem on it. It read:

mac
book
night
dot com
aka wall

Well worth every cent!

The next salon will be Thursday, November 20th at 5pm. Anne Colvin is bartending, Bill Morrison is the guest reader. I hope you can make it.

Posted by twiceastammy under About Last Night, Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, FREE BEER, Tom Marioni

For serious, I have been waiting to post that headline for over a year.  Starting tonight! and for the next three months, we are hosting Bay Area conceptual artist and sculptor Tom Marioni’s weekly salon, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art. If you’re not familiar with this work, Tom has been organizing these salons, where friends and artists can convene, converse and drink beer, in his studio and elsewhere, for more than two decades.

Each week we’ll have special guest bartenders and readers, & I’ll try to keep you apprised: tonight’s bartender is Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts, and the reader is Mr Tom Marioni himself. Do come by! It’s free, with museum admission of course; keep in mind that space is limited (see below). Entry will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Like any drinking establishment, you must be over 21 & carrying vaild ID.

Here’s Tom’s FREE BEER sculpture as we have it in our collection (and as you can see it on view now on the fourth floor as part of AoP)—the piece is made from the detritus of the salon as it was exhibited/hosted here at SFMOMA in 1979:

Tom Marioni, FREE BEER (The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art), 1970-79; refrigerator, framed print, shelf, beer bottles, and lightbulb, installation view at SFMOMA; collection SFMOMA; photo: Ben Blackwell; © 2008 Tom Marioni

Here’s the bar set-up in the Koret Vistor Education Center, ready for bartenders to dispense FREE BEER and for art lovers and friends to drink it happily and I hope noisily together:

And here are the still QUITE EMPTY (as of today) shelves which will hold and store our many emptied bottles of beer:

No one lacks expertise in this particular form of art, or if you do, now’s a great time to hone your skills. Come on by, or, we hope to see you soon!

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art, FREE BEER, Tom Marioni

Hey! It’s Masanori Mark Christianson, bass guitarist for Oakland’s indie rock band, The Heavenly States,  dangling Lygia Clark’s Diálogo: Óculos (Dialogue: Goggles)

Photo by Cynthia Mott.

Hey facebook, where I found this pic. Thanks, Mark!

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, Goggles, Heavenly States, local rock stars, Lygia Clark, Mark Christianson

Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, 1970 - 2008, 1979 installation view at SFMOMA; © 2008 Tom Marioni; photo: Paul Hoffman

Part two of my conversation with Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, on The Art of Participation. Yesterday we covered some specific projects in the exhibition and what an ‘art of participation’ might be; today we’re talking about the build-it-yourself cardboard furniture in the Koret Visitor Education Center, and the particular challenges and delights of putting on an exhibition like this one in a museum setting.

Let’s start with the transformation of our Koret Visitor Education Center and the Freecell commission. For the run of the exhibition, the ed center is being turned into something called “D-Space.” Can you talk about that?

One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.

So, if I understand you correctly, you’re talking about a way we might mirror artistic practice, by attempting to blur the boundaries between the education spaces, the lecture halls, and the galleries of our own institution.

Right. My initial concept was to create a core zone, an open educational and performative space, right at the center of the whole show in the fourth-floor galleries, but for logistical reasons we had to relocate to the second floor, to our current educational center. So we thought, well how can we take the spirit of the show into that space and transform the space? We can ask artists to interpret that situation and to provide a different solution. We wanted to have a space that could be transformed by visitors, also by staff members, and be transformed for different uses, different functions, with the idea being that it could always be set up differently and so always provide a different experience.

Based on who was using it and for what purpose.

And you would never know quite what to expect before you get inside. So we asked an architectural and design group in New York, Freecell, to design pieces of furniture or some kind of reconfigurable structure based on a do-it-yourself model. They came up with a series of cardboard panels with perforations and instructions, to be folded into furniture. In the beginning they will be just rectangular shapes leaning against the wall, in an empty room, almost like pictures in a gallery, but that are to be taken off the wall and used, turned into something else-that is a truly participatory act.

So if we want to sit down to read a book or have a conversation or listen to a lecture in the center, we have to first build our own furniture, but we can also put it together however we like or in a way that will suit our particular desire or need.

Right, and these objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain functions, but they might also be reconfigured and used in ways that we can not foresee. I was always saying, why should we reinvent the table when the table is such a clear and successful structure? Precisely because we might embrace the idea of dysfunctionality-the fact that it becomes more difficult to do something maybe is what makes it more interesting-and provide an open situation.

We’ve been talking here about the blurring of boundaries in the physical spaces of the museum and the change in the way a visitor will experience art in this exhibition. Something that’s interested me over the last 18 months or so while The Art of Participation has been in development is that this work also impacts how the museum itself operates, and not just for the duration of the show, but perhaps over the long term as well. Can you speak to that?

Sure—we are a museum that has departments with clearly assigned roles. The moment you try something new, we have to figure out how to deal with that. The curatorial team and the exhibition department are collaborating with the education department in transforming our educational center, but the responsibilities and distribution of labor is all of a sudden totally unclear. I think we have to reinvent ourselves and analyze what happens, and hopefully come to a different structuring of our processes. Perhaps a more open way of doing things. What happens in a museum—timing and controlling of processes—is so much based on the idea that you select things, you ship things, you unpack things, and you exhibit them and return them.

It’s about objects.

Right. So how can we turn the museum into a site of production and into a site of live events and into a site for different social functions, maybe temporarily. It is still a museum of course and not a clubhouse, but we know that artists have for some time now been turning the gallery into a discotheque or a lounge or restaurant or school, confusing barriers and functionalities, inviting confusion and instability. Indeterminacy becomes an inherent part of the artistic experience.

But which is perhaps antithetical to an institutional one.

There will always be a clash between the needs of a sustainable structure (like planning a budget) and the kind of improvisation that artists would like to do in a museum. To not do it, to not embrace this kind of practice, I think, would be the wrong answer. But there are challenges. There is a famous historic example of an exhibition by Robert Morris in 1971, at the Tate in London, that had to be closed after a few days because people were destroying some of the objects. There is an urge and an eagerness to do something and to participate that can be counterproductive to the usual aims of a museum.

Which are in part to collect and conserve.

On a broader level I would say collecting has become much more difficult. Collecting ephemera, or collecting works that evolve over a long time is inherently difficult for an institution. We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties of exhibiting the kinds of work that require participation, just in terms of sustainability. A lot more players are involved, in terms of making something happen. It’s not just the artist and curator and the exhibition crew, the works are more fluid and they change, and that is something that’s hard to plan for. We have to be ready to embrace things that are not planned to the minute detail, and perhaps think of an artwork as a quality rather than thinking of it as something that is unfinished or that needs to be finished. Other implications for a museum of modern art might be in part about the expectations our public could have—do they expect to come and see great artworks on the wall, or will they complain if they don’t see that? We do want to offer the public different experiences of what modern or contemporary art is.

In the exhibition catalogue, you ask whether or not we’ve come to understand the radical implications of participatory work; my question is, can we view this work as radical now? Or is it absorbed into the fabric of what we are now comfortable calling artistic practice and therefore part of the status quo? Can open or participatory practice today still carry the implications of radicality that it once did?

There are two issues that we need to address: one is the institution’s ability to deal with open and process-based works, and that has been and will also be in the future a structural conflict. The institutional solution has often been to either close the openness of the work, even fetishize it as an object, or to not show the work. And I don’t think that is an option because this kind of work has become such an important aspect of contemporary practice. The second issue is that, within the discourse of art, media art and contemporary art are often on two distinct and separate trajectories. They do not talk to each other. I would like to bridge this gap. You’d be surprised to hear how many art world practitioners still take issue with technology, or vice versa, how many media art practitioners take issue with the institutionalization of art. Both sides need to take into account that 60s and 70s notions of radicality are already challenged when networking and communication are mainstream practices in our everyday life. “Radicality” is perhaps not the key idea here, but instead, various degrees of participation in the public realm.

Something else striking about the exhibition of course is that a lot of the works are FUN, and funny. It will be a pleasure to engage with them. I’m really looking forward to the show.

I think a lot of people will agree that. One of the things I think we should have in our life is fun. Life should be more fun and not just work. How can you make that happen in a place that is maybe not geared for “fun”? Would we contribute to the “entertainment” industry in a museum? I think we should be able to provide something that only a museum can provide. Perhaps a more dubious, ambivalent, but culturally fascinating experience. When I perform a sculpture by Erwin Wurm, I’m sure I’m going to look ridiculous in the perception of others, maybe in my own perception as well. But having allowed that one moment of looking ridiculous, but actually performing an artwork, I think that’s a unique opportunity.

On a more subtle level, take George Brecht, who was a key player in the Fluxus movement. We’ll be exhibiting some of his instruction cards, and you will be able to read them-one piece is called Exit, and the card just says “exit.” So the moment you exit the show you might think of it as you performing this piece. Your life becomes, temporarily, an artwork. Blurring the distinction between art and life has been a dream for many artists, especially in the 60s. It is clear that life will always be different from art; but perhaps infiltrating life with artistic moments and experiences is something the museum can provide.

———————

The Art of Participation opens Saturday, and the public preview, open to all, is TONIGHT! Thursday.

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: Art of Participation, D-Space, Erwin Wurm, Freecell, George Brecht, green DIY furniture, Rudolf Frieling

A few weeks back I had the chance to talk with Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling about The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, rolling in this Saturday. The exhibition looks at ways artists have been engaging audiences as collaborators in the art-making process over the last sixty years; of its many distinctive features, “AoP” (as we’ve been short-handing it back of house) will change form and content as people contribute to it. I wanted to ask Rudolf some specifics about the exhibition, and also get his take on what happens when you try to set a big, mutable, participatory exhibition down in an institutional setting a tiny bit more used to the object-on-wall approach than double headsets & DIY cardboard furniture. It was fun, & we talked a lot: I’ll post this in two parts, today & tomorrow.

—-

Rudolf, let’s start by my asking a very basic question: what is an “art of participation”?

That is my question as well, and really the question we are exploring with this exhibition. We know what it means to participate in politics or school, and sometimes know what it means to participate in a work of art if we get clear instructions. However there are some projects where it is unclear what exactly is asked of you, or you can only find out by actually doing something. The work requires your input and your act of contribution.

But the term can also mean an open situation. The idea of “the open work of art” goes back to a 1962 book by Umberto Eco, in which he reflects on developments within contemporary art and music where the results of the artwork were not predefined, but rather could change over time, or change by interpretation. He said, in the whole history of art, the act of looking is a kind of interpretation; it’s always different and each one of us sees art in a different way. In this exhibition, we’re interested in ways people can contribute to a work not only by looking—but also by interacting, participating in a group dynamic, or contributing to an artwork. We go, in other words, beyond the viewer.

What does it mean in this context to contribute or participate? Is it a physical action or something else?

Let me give you two examples that are quite physical. The artist Lygia Clark is a pioneer of what we would call today relational aesthetics. I believe she invented the term “relational objects” –objects that relate to people, to each other, or to a group of people. One example is a net made of rubber bands. There are no specific instructions for use, but together with other people you can test the possibilities of the net. You can stretch or play with it, in a joined, cooperative initiative. By doing this with others, you are dependent on the dynamics of the group; this could lead to something very deeply felt and intense, or it might not even work; for example, if you can not communicate with anybody.

Another example is Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. Wurm offers a series of tools and objects which you use by following instructions—and these tools are exhibited as if they were sculptures. However, the artwork is not the set of objects on the white platform, but the moment a visitor performs the sculpture according to the instruction. You have basic material and the instructions are clear, but it is not so easy to do. Balancing a series of objects against a wall with your body is physically challenging. And performing the sculpture will look different with every single visitor, so there’s always a new sculpture being performed. What I like specifically about this work is that the sculpture is only temporarily enacted. We think of sculpture as something very solid, an object, and then we think of performance—of theater—as acted on a stage. Here these two concepts are mixed.

Lygia Clark’s work seems obviously relational, it requires multiple people, but these One Minute Sculptures require only one?

It’s too limiting to think that participation is about only two people interacting, or one person performing. Participation also means that you watch others and others watch you, but as you do so you become aware of the potential that you might also do it, or not do it.

Ok. So why should we participate?

It’s a very fair question: why should I participate in the first place? There are a number of works where this is open–instructions as concepts for example–but there are also works where there is nothing to see unless you become part of it. There is a work, called Delayed, by a German artist, Matthias Gommel. You just see two headphones with microphones attached to them, suspended from the ceiling and facing each other; this is a situation for two people to talk to each other. Obviously, just watching it, you can’t hear, and what you do not hear is that the mode of communication is delayed to an extent that the participants continuously interrupt each other and start talking at the same time. This is a very simple situation, but when you actually do it it’s a different experience. Likewise, you can watch someone perform a sculpture and that is fine, but doing it yourself will give you a different understanding of the piece.

Even when you’re faced with instructions that perhaps you cannot perform, you can try and realize the limits you are facing. It’s something I find very interesting about the art of participation: it can provide a very deep sensation, almost a sensual experience, but can also provide a sense of failure.

I always think of participatory art practice as somehow messy or uncontained; spilled out all over the place and you don’t know what’s going to happen. How can a museum be messy, or uncontained? It seems beyond institutional comfort zones.

Well, the fact that a museum of modern art has a mission to document and show a range of contemporary art practices means that we need to address all aspects of contemporary art-we need to address the participatory nature of the work—the openness of these works or even what you call messiness—and we need to think about how to do it in a sustained way. Some of the works challenge the way a museum operates, an example would be 1st Public White Cube, by Blank & Jeron, with Gerrit Gohlke, where you will be able to bid on Ebay for the right to make an intervention into an artwork. For us working at SFMOMA, it’s certainly posing a lot of questions in terms of the value of the work, if you can actually pay to get your work into the museum! But this is one of the important reasons a museum of modern art should do such a show—testing itself—while also fulfilling its job of recognizing and acknowledging the history of contemporary art. Another question is, how much does this kind of practice suffer from being transported or displaced into an institution? How many works are out there that can function successfully in a museum over a length of time, and what does that mean for our procedures?

And of course there’s a question about works that perhaps can’t be absorbed into or presented in an institutional context at all.

Well certainly we were looking for works that would work out over a length of time; however we are also including work that is performative by nature. We have a New York artist duo called MTAA who are proposing a performance that is voted on by the public in every single detail. The voting public decides collectively on the title of the performance, on the location, on the props, on the length of time, on the content, on every single item of the performance … and at the end of the show MTAA will then do an actual performance interpreting a script that has been written, in a way, by the public.

How do people participate in the MTAA project? Do they vote in the gallery?

They can vote in the gallery; they can also vote online. We will have a special display in the D-Space on the second floor where you will be able to see the state of affairs. E.g., people have already voted on the title, we know the performance will happen in the gallery, or in the atrium, or in the elevator, and then on the basis of that you can decide how to cast your vote for the next detail. Voting perhaps is not a very creative way of participating, but the way that the choices are set up is quite interesting, and the way the artists will then have to interpret the result requires a lot of creativity on their part. For instance, what if they’re asked to perform for 24 hours, but the museum is only open for 8 hours?

What will the museum do?

I don’t know at this point. This is also posing questions for us working in the institution. We’re now required to adapt or participate in a different way as well, and this is being done with the help of artists.

More from Rudolf tomorrow, on build-it-yourself cardboard furniture, and what happens to standard operating procedures in a museum when it takes on a playful, participatory, mutating exhibition like this one. Do come back! [part two is here]

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: Art of Participation, Blank & Jeron, Erwin Wurm, Gerrit Gohlke, Lygia Clark, MTAA, Rudolf Frieling

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 x 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

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Art of Participation, Giant-sized cubbies not for cuddling, Jochen Gerz, The Gift, This is just the beginning & there is more to come

I admit that one of things I love to look at most around the museum is this kind of backstage view. Like many of us, I have a passion for loading docks, pallets on casters, worktables, crates, drills, drywall, nails, screws, frames; I like seeing things taken apart, or just about to get put together… At any rate, this shot was taken last weekend, in the middle of Frida closing-day frenzy. That we can’t see here what was in the crates that Sunday is appropriate: the objects so carefully transported would have been pictures for a new photo exhibition opening this Saturday, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. The show looks at “photographs of things invisible to the naked eye: faraway stars, microscopic creatures, electricity, motion, the inside of the body” and is the special project of associate curator of photography Corey Keller. I’m a huge fan of Corey’s, not least because she’s incredibly down-to-earth, direct, and funny. And I’m looking forward to the exhibition, which she’s been working on for FOUR YEARS, a substantial investment of time and devotion. I understand too that some of the pictures we’ll see are ‘thought portraits’ (did I get that right?), images taken of people’s foreheads that claimed to expose what was on their minds at the time (and I am really glad that’s a science that never developed).

One of the pictures from the SFMOMA collection that will be included in the exhibition turned up in a “Collection Rotation” here on the blog a few weeks back (scroll down a bit, Maximilian Wolf’s The Milky Way) and is the back cover for the exhibition catalogue, very beautifully designed by James Williams, SFMOMA senior graphic designer. It’s exciting we’ll get to see that picture now in person.

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions | Tags: Brought to Light, Corey Keller, I wish I knew what you were thinking, Photography

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)

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions, Live Art, Miscellany | Tags: Frida Kahlo

I attended the Frida Kahlo opening last night and took Andrew McKinley as my chaperone. Andrew, if you don’t know, is the charismatic owner of Adobe Books. He’s also a notorious flirt. Since I was horribly underdressed, my chaperone offered up a vintage, silk shirt that he found in the bottom of a box of books that had probably been molding in his car since 1988. It smelled ok, so I put it on, draping it over my usual patchwork clown look. We made a bee line to the bar. Lucky for us Mendillo was ordering just as we arrived and ordered up some whiskies. We headed toward the food: ceviche in tiny plastic cups, far too small for the giant tri-colored corn chips that were meant for dipping. I broke the chips into smaller pieces while balancing my drink on my elbow. The waiter brought out gazpacho. And I started for it, but then stopped. There was something in the news lately, about tomatoes. Was it a good or bad mention…I couldn’t recall the hard story. Something about cancer I think. They cure cancer! Cause cancer? High in vitamins? Salmonella? E-coli? Lock jaw? I stepped away from the gazpacho. Photographers snapped pictures of the guy from coat check-dressed in Frida drag. He looked quite good, but I thought my natural ‘stache and eye brows made me a more subtle dead ringer. Whatever! I spotted Dominic, empty handed. He explained his aversion to free drinks and his preference for paying. I assumed it was a form of masochism having something to do with his recent fascination with Fassbinder and Berlin Aleksanderplotz. I suggested he work through it by tipping the barkeep extravagantly. Suzanne said, for next time, we make a video, where we pose the question: “Have you been upstairs yet to see the show?” I took some really blurry pictures. Thankfully, Jessica Whiteside was there and took some really good ones.

Posted by twiceastammy under About Last Night, Exhibitions

Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico

Terril Neely, Market St from Twin Peaks

But something else entirely: Here are two similar pictures of a familiar view of San Francisco, taken facing east from the top of Twin Peaks. The first is by Gabriele Basilico, the Italian photographer famous for his documentation of urban and industrial landscapes. SFMOMA invited Basilico to the Bay Area last year to photograph our local landscape (”From San Francisco to the Silicon Valley“).

The second photo is by Terril Neely, SFMOMA graphic designer, famous for baked goods and an inordinate love of kombucha, who snapped the picture during a holiday visit with friends. Terril sent me both pictures when she saw the Basilico, which she was about to place into some marketing material, back in February.

Someone in a nearby cubicle, when I said I was going to post these side-by-side on the blog, claimed that of course the Basilico was the “better picture”, because it more closely captures the feeling of actually being at the top of Twin Peaks, the sense of isolation, quality of light, expansiveness of scope of vision, etc. Better-pictureness, to my mind, isn’t so relevant here (although I do like the bit of hair left frame in Terril’s shot): Twin Peaks is a REALLY POPULAR San Francisco taking-in-the-view spot, for tourists and locals alike. For a zillion more such like: Flickr.

Posted by Suzanne under Exhibitions, Miscellany | Tags: Gabriele Basilico, Grand Claims, Sweeping Views