OPEN SPACE

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

Nick, a.k.a kukkurovaca, took this picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I in the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden. Looks like the person on the left is entering another dimension.  The dapper gentleman on the right may have just returned from it.

Nick says:

“There’s no real story to this photograph—If I remember correctly, I had just gone to see the Avedon exhibit for the first time, and the Adams-O’Keeffe for the third or fourth time, probably. I went up to the roof, got a beverage, and sat down to people-watch. I had my camera with me—I suspect I’m not alone in going to the roof in part to take out my pent-up photographic urges from the no-photography areas of the museum.

The composition that I wound up with is not quite what I had anticipated. At the time I brought up my camera, the fellow on the left was just standing and looking up at the piece; it was entirely fortuitous that at the moment I pressed the shutter release he began to step past it, or, thanks to the perspective, into it.“

I love the matching blue shirts and the Avedon gestures of these two.  The pictures come from Anitechi’s flickr, and she writes:

“This trip was our honeymoon, and I was glad there were fabulous exhibitions in my favorite museum. I appreciate that you like these photos. It will be a special experience to see our photos on SFMOMA’s blog.”

(The second in a two-part series from assistant curator of photography Lisa Sutcliffe, who organized both of our current collection exhibitions of Asian photography: The Provoke Era and Photography Now. Lisa posed a single question to the artists whose works are included in Photography Now. Part one is here.)

This week we’re returning to the question Why Photography Now? Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea presents SFMOMA’s new acquisitions by contemporary photographers working in Asia, and was conceptualized as a companion to our current exhibition of postwar Japanese photography.

Even as globalization and technology have allowed for faster and more fluid cross-cultural influence, the artists represented in the show embrace varied approaches and offer diverse personal visions, from Byung-Hun Min’s minimal landscapes that reference traditional Korean ink painting to Hiromi Tsuchida’s distant and vibrantly colored examinations of urban crowds. What they all have in common is an interest in expressing themselves with photography. Since its inception, photography has been used both as a mechanical tool and a method of creating art. With this in mind, I asked each of the artists in Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea to answer the following question: why do you work in photography and how do the particular aspects of the medium affect your artistic decisions?

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I was instantly charmed by this image of stockings that match the SFMOMA grand staircase and walls.  Thanks Marco!

Here’s what he had to say about the shot:

“The legs belong to my girlfriend Holly. The story is nothing special, I was feeling creative after we saw the Robert Frank and Richard Avedon photographs and I saw the similarity between the wall and Holly’s stockings. So I whipped out my point & shoot and took the shot.”

Rita, a.k.a Seenyarita, snapped this picture at the entrance to the current Richard Avedon exhibition.  From time to time, the SFMOMA freight elevator is in use during public hours and the doors open, much to the surprise of visitors.  Rita explains her picture better than I could:

“I’ve been to see the Avedon show 3 times now. Probably will go back at least one more time before it’s over.  I was intrigued by the way that the image on the elevator parts to reveal another world. I feel that Avedon was able to show worlds to us through portraits on a white background. There was no need to see anything in the background beyond the subject since the portraits themselves spoke volumes.“

(The first in a two-part series from assistant curator of photography Lisa Sutcliffe, who organized both of our current collection exhibitions of Asian photography: The Provoke Era and Photography Now. Lisa posed a single question to the artists whose works are included in Photography Now.)

Photography, with its ability to “mirror” reality, has a more direct connection to the visible world than most other media, including painting and sculpture. It can also alter our perception of reality, either through the artist’s unique perspective, or by manipulation. Examining artistic decisions can reveal quite a bit about how a photograph is understood. Why was this picture made? Who is the intended audience? What did the artist decide to keep inside the frame or to crop out and how does that change our interpretation of the scene? Or perhaps the artist digitally manipulated the image to create something from his or her own imagination. In the digital age, the photographic medium is being redefined and artists are freer to create whatever image they imagine.

Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea presents SFMOMA’s recent acquisitions of photographs by artists working in Asia, and was conceptualized as a companion to our current exhibition of postwar Japanese photography. Even as globalization and technology have allowed for faster and more fluid cross-cultural influence, the artists represented in the show embrace varied approaches and offer diverse personal visions. Many record the changing urban fabric and the development of a new migratory population. What they all have in common is an interest in expressing themselves with photography.

I began to wonder how the rapid cultural transformations, especially in China, might be influencing the growing interest in photography. In addition, I was hoping to find out what intrigues these artists about working with and manipulating the visible world. With this in mind, I asked each artist in the exhibition to answer the same question: why do you work in photography and how do the particular qualities of the medium affect your artistic decisions?

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One of our current collection exhibitions, The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography presents a number of pictures from that turbulent moment in Japanese history. After the devastation of World War II, Japan entered a period of American military occupation and modernization. Photographers reacted to the drastic sociocultural changes taking place by forging a new visual language that broke with tradition while it memorialized the old culture and recorded the new. SFMOMA began collecting this work in the 1970s, under curators John Humphrey and Van Deren Coke, but the bulk of the collection has been built by senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips over the last two decades. Here, she joins in conversation with poet, essayist, and translator W.S. Di Piero, an avid fan of postwar Japanese photography.

Sandra Phillips: Simone, what intrigues you most about postwar Japanese photography?

W.S. Di Piero : I’m interested in it for two reasons: it has the archival memorializing street photography does, and it’s archival memorializing that’s taking place in one of the most critical periods of Japanese history—that time from1945 to roughly the late 1960s, when the American presence was felt first in a terrifying way, and then later in a very different way during the occupation. And all of that was experienced and taken in by these photographers. I think Daido Moriyama was seven or eight years old when they dropped the bomb. He was young, but he was of consciousness when that happened.

SP: Shomei Tomatsu talks about being a kid of, I think, eleven, when he would not go down into the bomb shelters. Instead, he stayed upstairs in his room and looked at the bombs exploding, as though they were fireworks. He was both terrified and fascinated by them. I think that’s the whole key to his work, frankly, being terrified and fascinated by what’s happened. These photographers who experienced the war as children grew up and were—like the Japanese people as a whole—trying to deal with the fact that the Americans were still there, on all these military bases.

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Composer, philospher, poet, artist John Cage was born on this day in 1912. This video was made last winter, during The Art of Participation exhibition, when we were treated to daily noontime performances (usually with staff performers) of Cage’s seminal work 4′33″. Thanks to Tammy Fortin as always for fantastic video gesture.

4′33″ (1952) is a composition of silence lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Without instrumentation, the score highlights ambient sounds surrounding the performance: noises in the environment and those produced by the audience. Having decided there is no such thing as absolute silence, Cage chose to define it as the absence of intentional sound. In this he was influenced not only by avant-garde composition and Surrealism, but also by Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism. Indeterminacy, chance, and nonlinear progression became integral to the structure of his music. By scoring silence, Cage sought to open his listeners to divine influences, making music a process of discovery rather than one of forced communication.

—Melissa Pellico, ‘John Cage’, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now

[Ian Padgham, our marketing and communications assistant, with a fantastic story about the elevator girl in Robert Frank's famous photo...and do come down if you've yet to see Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans"— it closes Sunday.]

“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.

To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?”

Such are the closing words of Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s book of photographs, The Americans. For me, these three sentences sum up in beautiful Beat wisdom the bittersweet essence of Frank’s work. America is a sad poem, but nestled within that sadness is a sweetness that calls us siren-songlike into something profound.

Aside from the incredible pay that accompanies a museum job there is an entire array of employee perks that make working at a nonprofit worth your while. We get to meet artists behind the scenes, see art that is not on display, enter all museums free, and roller skate through the galleries during off hours (okay, I was kidding about seeing art not on display). We also—and this is my favorite—have staff “walkthroughs” of the exhibitions: a sneak peak with a curator where you get to hear all the great stories behind the exhibition.

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Surely if you’ve been in the building anytime in recent months, you’ve taken a look at our latest Haas Atrium commission, Kerry James Marshall’s monumental pair of murals called Visible Means of Support. Last February a team of painters from Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, a community mural organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District, spent two full weeks of long, long days in the Atrium painting the works onto the huge, formerly-known-as-the-LeWitt-walls.

The murals depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of American presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Half-hidden in the paintings are also depictions of the slaves who supported plantation life. Appropriately, the SFMOMA Tammy-and-Megan team chronicled the muralists’ labors as the project unfolded. Thanks muralists! Thanks team! Thanks Kerry!

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[Muralists at work last winter. Poster image: Christo Oropeza.]

Shades of Blue! photo by SFMOMA visitor Rob Reich

I liked this fabulous image of  Alexander Calder’s Big Crinkly (1969), now on view in our Rooftop Sculpture Garden. Photo by Rob Reich.

Thanks Rob!

It sure has been awhile since my last post. I’m here to tell you of a wonderful article that covered the SFMOMA Teen Mural project in the East Bay Express. It covers the project from start to finish, illustrating the evolution of the student’s artistic process and how their experiences helped shape the final piece.  Take a few minutes and check it out here. It’s currently featured on the front page!

Just to remind you what the project was all about:  SFMOMA commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium, and in response fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools designed and produced a collaborative mural, to be installed in the skate park at DeFremery Park.  Your can learn about the project in its entirety here.

Also, don’t forget to visit the exhibition chronicling the SFMOMA Teen Mural Project in the galleries of the Koret Visitor Education Center, on the second floor of SFMOMA, through October 18.

Enjoy!

For the opening of SFMOMA’s new Rooftop Garden, Bay Area artist Rosana Castrillo Díaz was commissioned to create a mural painting on the bridge leading to the new outdoor space. Rosana was a recipient of the 2004 SECA Art Award &, if you’re a local reader, you might remember the wall drawing she created on the museum’s third-floor landing: it was made entirely of cellophane tape. The new bridge mural is painted in shades of white, using reflective mica paint to take advantage of the light flooding into the glass-walled bridge. While Rosana was here working on the installation back in April, we asked her to take some time out to sit down and talk with painting and sculpture curator Janet Bishop, who worked with the artist on both the SECA show and the new commission, about her work.

JANET BISHOP: Thank you for coming in, and taking time away from the mural to talk a little bit about it now. When you and I last worked together, about four years ago, you were one of the SECA Art Award winners, and you made an extraordinarily beautiful large wall relief, a very subtle cloud made of looped Scotch tape. One of the remarkable things I remember about that was, because it was not only the opening of the SECA Art Award exhibition, but also SFMOMA’s tenth anniversary in this building, Mario Botta, our architect, was here. He said that your tape drawing was the most sympathetic piece he’d ever seen in this building.

Since that time, you’ve continued to make works on paper in a very intimate scale, and also some very large-scale pieces, including a project at UCSF. I wonder if you can start by telling us a little bit about some of the works that led to the work you’re doing on the commission at SFMOMA now.

ROSANA CASTRILLO DÍAZ: In the white-on-white drawings, and the tape piece, my interest is in quiet, in simplicity, and in the kind of space that is in the periphery and is not quite there, or you don’t know whether it’s there or not.

JB: I remember you said about the tape piece that it wasn’t even so important to you whether people even saw it. I think that most people probably did see it, but it required careful looking, a slow experience of the piece.

RCD: Right. Or for example, I did a show at Mills College, where they have a big skylight on top of the building. It was kind of like the bridge here. The light was intense and very diffuse, and you approached the piece frontally, so many people just missed it. Which is fine. I like that. I think the piece did what it needed to do, which was to surprise you in passing.

The UCSF project [in the Legoretta building on the Mission Bay campus] which you mentioned is in a long dark hallway. The hallway ends with a window, however, and I was very attracted to the light from that window. I thought I could use reflectivity to bring some of that light in, and use the length of the passageway so people might see the light changing. At the same time, at the studio, I was playing with mica. I was fascinated with it as a material. (more…)

SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall’s works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

We’ve blogged about this project here for the last 14 weeks.  To read our posts documenting the project week by week, we invite you to view them here. Here we are at the very end of our program. About 7 teens showed up last week to put the finishing touches on the mural. Fred of Precita Eyes, two teens, and myself were at the park past 6 pm (good thing I wore sunblock)!

Thanks to Fred, Rafa, and K-dub for all of their support with this project.  I can’t say how proud we are of the teens from Oakland High School, Oakland School for the Arts, and Ralphe Bunche Academy for their dedication, hard work, and tremendous spirit.

Come visit the exhibition of the planning and design process of this project in SFMOMA’s Koret Visitor Education Center.  On view May 30 – October 18, 2009.

SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall’s works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

We had an AWESOME time last Saturday.  Kerry James Marshall was back in the Bay Area and came out to see the final touches being made to the mural.   After about an hour of watching the teens paint (in the rain), we went to find drier land.  We moved indoors and Kerry talked with the teens about their work on the mural,  the meaning of their piece, and the artistic decisions they made.  Even though the program officially ended on Saturday, there were still some loose ends to tie up in the mural.  We were psyched when the teens agreed to come back this Saturday to finish up.  Now THAT’S dedication.  Next week: the full mural.

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Click for the bigger, prettier one.

More at Flickr.

Ellsworth Kelly, on our rooftop sculpture garden for the first time, in front of his 1973 sculpture Stele I.

Many more pictures coming soon.

[Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing regular ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design.]

A preeminent figure in graphic design history, Otl Aicher’s identity for the 1972 Munich Olympics remains a seminal project on which much of contemporary identity and branding design has been based. On view in SFMOMA’s Architecture and Design gallery is a selection of the studio’s Olympic graphic work: a sampling of Aicher’s playful color palettes and distilled sports imagery set within carefully calculated grid layouts and strict structural hierarchy. Aicher understood the need for a universally comprehensible set of graphics for the games, and this dictated many design decisions, leading to the creation of a new visual language. Perhaps the most recognizable component of Aicher’s design—the pictogram system developed for the sporting events—was later expanded upon to become an international system of symbols and icons.

With the Olympics, the studio employed a concept that held graphic design as a platform for communication and social interaction, beyond aesthetics and into experience. From the architectural signage, to the uniforms of the official Olympic staff, from the sporting event tickets to the public advertisement posters, each piece was carefully crafted to be part of the bigger picture. Aicher’s philosophy of a unified aesthetic that could be implemented for virtually every component of the games was based in ideas of interpretation and resonance. The design was as much about the entire visual experience—the cohesiveness of the Olympic identity—as it was about the individual artifact.

Some of my interests in the progression of graphic design are explored here. Aicher capitalizes on the essence of graphics — of visual language — as communication. He freely moves beyond the typically 2D world of posters and print, and begins to assimilate his playful and colorful designs into part of the architecture of the Olympic Village. He sees the poster not just as a single unit, but explores how it works in multiple, and what it means in, say, an assembly which follows the line of the sidewalk. Here, graphic design is more than graphics. Aicher even specifies which flowers should be planted where, so that the colors compliment the signage of certain arenas, and what typeface the scoreboards should use so as to coordinate and fit into the larger scheme. The notion of branding—of each piece working together to resonate with the viewer—is prevalent.

Please join me in the Atrium on May 7th at 6:30 pm to hear more about Otl Aicher and the Munich Olympics.

Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design, SFMOMA

SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall’s works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Hello!  Last week we left DeFremery Park, looking at the mural with intense satisfaction.  Upon leaving, Fred from Precita Eyes, said, “The mural is bascially done.”  The time has gone by incredibly fast and the teens have worked incredibly hard.  This Saturday we’re lucky enough to have the artist, Kerry James Marshall, who painted the first Haas Atrium Commission in the museum’s grand atrium, come back and spend some time with the teens.  This is Kerry’s second visit with the group, and his first since work on the mural began.  The last touches and varnish will be applied to the mural, and Kerry is expected to give his thoughts on their project.  Everyone is super excited!  This week I leave you in suspense.  All you see here are colors and brushes.  And that’s because next week, you’ll see a lot more: the whole shebang.

Check out the past blog posts on this program here.

SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall’s works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

After a Saturday off for Spring Break, the teens met back at DeFremery Park ready to work with fervor.  They painted for 3 hours, and then Fred took us on a mini field trip to a local art  space,  LoBot Gallery.  The teens were mesmerized by the cardboard city and remote-control car racetrack known as The Cardburg 500.  We had to get back to work so we walked back to the park and painted until 4:00.

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Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing regular ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Elizabeth Gand, Assistant Curator of Photography.

When crisis or calamity strikes, what can photographs do? All four photographers in the exhibition The Face of Our Time ask that question, but each takes a different path towards an answer. For Leo Rubinfien, the question has deep personal roots. In early September of 2001, Rubinfien and his family moved into a new apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center. On September 11th of that year, he found himself face to face with “the massacre across the street,” as he calls it.

The chaos, destruction, and agony of that massacre prompted Rubinfien to embark on a five-year photographic quest. He visited cities across the world that have suffered acts of cruel violence meant to terrorize the populace. In each city, he photographed the faces of people passing by in the street. Bombay, Benares, Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Colombo, Hebron, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karahi, London, Madrid, Manila, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Tokyo are all represented in Rubinfien’s photographic essay. Each city is personified by individual, anonymous citizens who gaze out from the picture with searing intensity.

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[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Last week the teens were super productive, filling out the color of the entire mural and beginning to add details like outlines and shading. The painting is almost done and soon they’ll start applying more layers of paint on top of what’s been completed thus far. Here are some images of last week’s session, taken by Alvin:

more pictures after the jump!

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Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Lisa Sutcliffe, Assistant Curator of Photography:

Please join me tomorrow evening at 6:30pm for a discussion of the work of Guy Tillim, a South-African photographer included in the current exhibition, Face of Our Time. Born in Johannesburg in 1962, Tillim has spent the last twenty years documenting the political, social and economic conditions of African nations as a photojournalist and freelance photographer.

In his recent series Congo Democratic, Tillim describes the political climate leading up to the historic 2006 elections in the capital city of Kinshasa. With a long history of political strife, including two successive civil wars that claimed an estimated 3.5 million lives and left the country in ruin, the Democratic Republic of Congo finally held multiparty elections in 2006. Tillim’s depiction of this momentous event diverges from the tradition of classic photojournalism: instead of capturing heroic images of leaders or dramatic instances of violence, he presents subtle details that serve as metaphors for the chaotic and charged political atmosphere. While shooting at a political rally that drew thousands of people into the streets,  for example, Tillim records the rapture of the crowd, and a quiet sense of anticipation. This picture of Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of two leading presidential candidates out of a group of thirty-three, emphasizes the hulking form of Bemba’s back as he enters the stadium and a menacing glance from one of the bodyguards who flank him. Tomorrow I hope to further discuss the development of Tillim’s personal documentary style, and its relation to the tradition of photojournalism.

Lisa Sutcliffe, Assistant Curator, Photography, SFMOMA

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

We’re really digging showing the artistic process of creating this mural through pictures posted on the blog every week. So here’s the story of last Saturday’s session, seen through the eyes of Nile.

Thanks to Nile for sharing his photography skills with us for this week’s post. Today we hope to finish the entire underpainting and begin to build up the layers of color. And a special treat: Fred will be grilling burgers for lunch.

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Henry Urbach, SFMOMA curator of architecture and design:

Guestbook by Jürgen Mayer H., principal of the Berlin architectural studio J. MAYER H., is a limited edition book composed solely of sheets printed with data protection pattern. A touchstone of the studio’s work and focus of the exhibition Patterns of Speculation: J. MAYER H., data protection patterns are ubiquitous, jibberish-like image types that serve to conceal other information, including bank statements, shipping labels and paycheck stubs.

Mayer H. began collecting data protection patterns many years ago and has gathered hundreds; he has worked with them across multiple media and scales, even generating architectural form from their dense scramble. In Guestbook, he printed the pattern in thermosensitive ink, so that when people touch the page to ‘sign in,’ the pattern temporarily vanishes, capturing a trace of the viewer’s hand which, in turn, vanishes as the pattern slowly returns. Much of Mayer H.’s work addresses the uneasy relation between embodied, sensory experience and digital, dematerialized realities; with Guestbook he articulates this contemporary condition with exceptional elegance.

Guestbook was made in 1996; one of Mayer H.’s earliest works, it set the stage for the extraordinary body of work that has followed. Please join me Thursday, April 2 for a discussion of the exhibition Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H., and how it aims to reveal the interrelationship of concept and form across the firm’s many compelling projects.

Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’ll be doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Stephanie Pau, our Manager of Interpretation:

I feel fortunate that at SFMOMA, educators (like myself) are often treated as collaborators in the making of exhibitions. And sometimes, we even organize our own exhibitions in the drop-in Koret Visitor Education Center. This is the story of The 1000 Journals Project, which I recently co-curated with “Someguy”, and which is on view through April 5. Around this time last year, I’d been looking for exhibition and project ideas to complement Rudolf Frieling’s then-upcoming The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now. That exhibit, which was deinstalled last month, looked at six decades of artworks in which artists engaged the public as co-creators, and in the process suggesting the radical notion that musuems could be places of production as well as display.

Inspired by the simple elegance of participatory exhibitions and activities crafted by the education teams at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I hoped to craft an exhibition experience in the Center that not only mirrored the more inclusive atmosphere of Participation, but that counted the contributions of many people as essential to its existence.

Eventually, my shortlist of exhibition ideas included a project I’d grown enamored with several years ago, called The 1000 Journals Project — a simple but brilliant art/social experiment launched by “Someguy.” Someguy, who is active in the Bay Area graphic design community, chose, at least for this particular endeavor, to remain anonymous. In a culture as glory-hungry as ours, I admire that Someguy was not only mad enough to launch the project with his own money, but sought to claim none of the fame that might come with it (granted, his identity is among the worst-kept secrets I’m privy to, but still…).

The 1000 Journals Project began in August 2000, when — like Johnny Appleseed — Someguy began “planting” a thousand blank journals around San Francisco — dropping them in bus shelters, park benches, even bar bathrooms. Each book was stamped with only minimal instructions for adding to, sharing, and (eventually) returning the books, and left Someguy’s hands with his faint hope that one day he might see what became of them. In the years since the project started, the books have circulated from stranger to stranger, traveling to Palestine, Tokyo, the top of a mountain in Croatia — places many of us may never see in our lifetimes.

The project seemed ripe for some form of exhibition. Within days, we (meaning me and Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Interpretation) cold-called Someguy at his graphic design office with our idea and, lucky for us, he was more than game: he had already been searching for a venue to host an exhibition for the thirty-plus books that finally made their way back “home”.

Our primary challenge, and goal, with this exhibition was to find ways to overcome the tacitly understood codes of “behavior” that visitors, myself included, bring with them to the museum. Rule #1 in nearly all but the most progressive arts and culture museums?:  Do not touch.

Working closely with Someguy, in-house graphic designer James Williams, and Senior Museum Preparator John Holland, we developed a concept and design for the exhibition that was, in retrospect, a true anomaly for museums: it emphasized the “anti-precious” nature of the work on display. Vitrines, frames, and pedestals — the common modes of display (and protection) — were not an option. After all, the “art” wouldn’t exist if the books were placed behind glass: it was imperative they could be drawn in, written on, touched, added to, or even destroyed, depending on the whims of the participants.

We hoped to break down the rules of engagement from the beginning, with an unusual approach to signage. We installed a grid of blank journals that displayed the sparest outlines of the words in the exhibition title. Our somewhat fanciful conceit was that the rest of the title might be filled in by the doodles and unfiltered entries of visitors, using writing implements we provided on a chalkboard rail beneath.

When designing mounts for the journals themselves, we found inspiration in the old-timey editor’s desk, whose inclined surface allowed for easy reading and also an ergonomic surface for those who chose to add their own entries. John’s design included a drawer at each station, which held pens, glue, stamps, and other ephemera that we hoped might inspire visitors to keep adding to the books. A thin ledge allowed us to place pens on the surface — another signal that these books were as-yet unfinished works-in-progress, and invited participation. Finally, John recycled the wood from platforms we’d created for The Art of Richard Tuttle and built a lovely communal table that we placed in the middle of the KVEC Lounge area. We wired down four of the journals from the original one thousand and put out buckets of drawing materials, old magazines, and glue.

In the months since the opening, its become clear to me that The 1000 Journals Project exhibition is really about encouraging art-making. The point, for me, was to create an environment in which everybody, not just children, might feel compelled or invited to try their hand at being an artist. It’s not unlike the challenges that Erwin Wurm, Tom Marioni, and other artists posed to visitors of Participation — step on a platform; crack open a beer; perform alongside us. In October of last year, I recorded an interview with Someguy, and I think he sums it up nicely: “You don’t have to sign your name to it. You could put anything you want in the journal. I just hope that people who participate in the project, or even don’t participate, can start letting go of that fear of creativity and fear of being judged.”

—————-

Stephanie Pau is Manager of Interpretation at SFMOMA. She studied archaelolgy, not art history, and used to write extensive reports about things she excavated in one-by-one meter pits in tiny towns across California. She has a gift for creating and consuming vast amounts of soup, and can sometimes be found hunting for mushrooms in the Bay Area’s lovely oak woodlands.

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Pictures sometimes speak louder than words. This week, we’d like to share last Saturday’s session through the eyes of Tony.

Thanks to Tony for some great shots.

Check back next week for more color, more action, and hopefully some more sunshine!

A short clip to give you an idea of what it’s been like:

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William Kentridge’s restaging of Monterverdi’s The Return of Ulysses has been a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, and Pacific Operaworks in Seattle, with musical direction by Stephen Stubbs.  More reviews, for the curious, at Dwell, and at SF Classical Voice.

Last night was the glamorous opening night benefit for The Return of Ulysses. I wasn’t there (benefit=$$$$$), but I’m sure it was fabulous. I was at the preview/dress rehearsal on Tuesday night: it was  curious, and delightful. The puppets (handcarved) are fantastic-looking and quite expressive, which was a surprise to me, grown-up puppet opera novice that I am, and the opera begins with an interesting set of allusions: Time, Fortune, and Love surround the bed of the dying Ulysses, singing of the fate of ‘the human, the mortal’, making it clear that life is fragile and rests in hands beyond human control. We witness the drama of this the-gods-they-roll-the-dice in quite explicit terms: The actors in this play are puppets. The story in one sentence: The faithful Penelope awaits the return of Ulysses, who, aided, abetted and manipulated as always by the gods, shows up in Ithaca in disguise, vanquishes some pesky suitors, and proves his true identity to his wife by telling boudoir secrets only he could know.

Above: Penelope offers Ulysses’s bow to potential suitors: whoever can bend the bow will win her hand. Of course none can. You can see here (I think) the way puppeteer and vocalist are collaborating on proper manipulation of the puppet. The vocalist is helping to carry the bow.

As I understand it, Kentridge’s decision to seat the instrumentalists in a permanent wooden stage frame (resembling an operating theater) is quite innovative for productions of this kind,  solving a logistical problem of early baroque opera:  acoustic proximity of the singers and their accompanists. This operating-theater stage set also has the interesting effect of making the instrumentalists actors in the drama as well as accompanists AND ‘audience’. The actual audience tucked away in the dark on the theater seats completes the medical-theater audience—does this implicate the audience as actor too? Not really/not at all. The screen above the instrumentalists is a version of scenery flat, with Kentridge’s trademark animated charcoal drawings, as well as surgical footage (of open-heart surgery), barium x-rays, and live-action shots of waves, water, and clouds. With musicians, puppets, puppeteers, vocalists, animations,  and then the supertitles above, it was a lot to keep track of, but it was magical, I must admit.

Sorrily, the rest of the run is sold out.  If I can retrieve a video clip and post it up, I will. Many more pre-show and preview pictures here. Joshua Kosman’s Chronicle review is here.

Moving the set in from the truck to the theater.

I ran over to Theater Artaud yesterday afternoon to catch a bit of the unloading of set and puppets for the William Kentridge + Pacific Operaworks + Handspring Puppet Company’s restaging of Claudio Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses.  In case you’ve missed this: Kentridge has brought us a puppet opera, being presented in conjunction with William Kentridge: Five Themes.  An amusing tidbit: there’d been a lot of rumors here that the puppets were being shipped in kid-size coffins, and until a few days ago we were gleefully awaiting the arrival of some morbid-looking little boxes. But of course, uh, musical equipment and the like: those heavy steel cases, carefully padded: they’re called “coffins”.

No one had the key to unlock them yesterday, but we have a correspondent onsite at Artaud this morning who promises to try to get some pictures when the coffins are pried open. Many more pictures of the set being unloaded, and of the stage and theater before-the-fact, here. With the exception of Wednesday’s Opening Night Benefit Performance, tickets are, sadly, SOLD OUT.  We’ll post as many pictures and clips as we can at Flickr and here on the blog. More info on the SFMOMA presentation of the opera here.

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Last week the teens finished up the color composite of the mural design and began to plot out how the mural will be drawn.  The composite was divided into a grid of equal squares to be transferred to the six 4′ × 8′ mural panels.  The panels were divided into grids as well, and the teens began drawing on the panels. Dalena described her experience:

“I had a lot of fun trying to figure out the colors that would mix together and coloring in my own drawing. As soon as we got over there, everyone knew what to do and everyone was working as a team to make the mural. As much as we were working, we were also playing at the same time.”

Thanks to Kimani for his awesome photos and to Dalena for her positive comments.  Today the teens will begin painting the panels, rain or shine.  But we’re hoping for a sunny day…

Check out some more photos of the project here.

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Last week the teens did some writing about the meanings of the mural.  Fred (from Precita Eyes) thought it would be important for them be able to articulate the reasons for their artistic choices.  The color scheme was worked out: first on practice sheets, and then on the final composite.  Susan Cervantes, founder and director of Precita Eyes, came by to check out the progress.   It looks great, and this week the transfer of drawing to mural begins!

Two program participants contributed to  today’s blog post.  Devanio took these photos during last weeks session and  Jorge  describes his experience here:

“Currently at SFMOMA, the young teens from different  schools are working on a mural project for DeFremery Park. Today we started coloring a copy of the drawing to see what would it look like when we finished it. The project is going great and all the drawings in the picture are important because they all are part of Oakland. Today we finished most of it and next week we are going to be meeting to start making the mural. We hope to see you at DeFremery Park to show and explain what is currently happening in your community park.”

Thanks to Devanio and Jorge for their contributions week AND…check out our mention in the March 8 New York Times Art & Design section!

We’ve just started a great new onsite series here: curator “One on One” talks. Each Thursday evening at 6:30pm, one of our curators shares their perspective on a single work on view. Talks last about twenty minutes and take place in the galleries: a really great opportunity for conversation with some of the marvelous people on staff here. From Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Design:

I hope you will join me this Thursday night, March 12, in a discussion about an exciting new accession into the Architecture and Design collection, Silent Architecture (2003-2004), by the German architect Simon Ungers. This complex project is a study of four types of civic structure — Library, Theater, Museum and Cathedral — buildings that often employ grandiose architectural gestures in order to become recognizable symbols of the city in which they reside. Comprised of four untreated steel models that recall Minimalist sculpture, austere plans and monumental renderings, Silent Architecture is ideal for opening up several issues within design. I’d like to take this One on One opportunity to address a few ideas, perhaps iconographic architecture, typological analysis, the influence of artistic genres within architecture, or how to display architecture in a museum. Depending on time and interest level, we could unpack one of these topics in depth, or touch upon all them.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher
Assistant Curator, Architecture and Design, SFMOMA

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Opening March 14.  Exhibition details here.

Our newest atrium commission, which had its official opening/unveiling last Thursday,  features artist Kerry James Marshall, who has just produced two murals on what I suppose can no longer be fairly called our Lewitt walls. The paintings were realized in collaboration with Precita Mural Eyes Center; for those of you not local to the Bay, Precita Eyes is a community-based arts organization here that has created murals all around SF, and the world.

The KJM atrium murals depict Monticello & Mount Vernon, the homes of American presidents Jefferson and Washington, and in a  game-like, connect-the-dots, find-the-figure fashion Kerry has presented partially hidden or to-be-discovered heads and figures of slaves: those slaves, owned by this country’s founding fathers, who are so rarely depicted in other images of these famous estates.  In other words, that once-invisible means of support is here made visible.  For more insight into the project from Kerry James Marshall himself, you can download the cell phone audio tour to your MP3 player here, or just dial 415.294.3609. Our IET team has also produced some wonderful multimedia you can check out online. Remember that it is FREE to visit the atrium, and these murals; just stop in anytime to take a look.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of making the creative & collaborative labor visible,  some shots of the Precita Eyes mural team at work over the last several weeks, all by our fabulous front-desk/Visitor Services friend Christo Oropeza. You can see many more, of the team at work, and with Kerry, at Christo’s Flickr stream, and on ours.

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

Last week the teens continued their brainstorming sessions, and began drawing designs for the mural. Working with the title they came up with last week, “The Creation of Culture is to Stop the Battlefield with Change,” they looked at images of public art, at drawing books, and at reproductions of historic photographs to draw inspiration from. The result: an array of drawings, photocopies, and text that will work their way into the first composite drawing of the mural as a whole.

We asked the teens to take control of the blog this week. Jacob was happy to contribute his words:

“This experience is epic and inspirational. Every time I look up I open an idea of creativity because I am inspired by my peers at SFMOMA. I love art, I love to work, and I love people. Most of what I’ve learned through this experience is the Bay Area is an extremely creative place and I would love to keep its creativity flowing.”

And Jose did an awesome job documenting the day’s work in photographs. He took all the pictures in this post.

Today the kids will be putting the final touches on the composite drawing, and will begin the color scheme. Can’t wait to see what they come up with…

[SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum's Haas Atrium. For over 30 years, Marshall has explored stories of racial identity, the Civil Rights movement, and unsung histories in his work. In response to Marshall's works, fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools are designing and producing a collaborative mural, in Town Park at DeFremery Park, focusing on the themes of silenced histories and storytelling. We’re blogging about it here on Saturdays.]

The Teen Program talking with Kerry James Marshall in the Atrium.  Photo: Andria Lo

Last Saturday the group was given the exceptional opportunity to spend the morning with artist, Kerry James Marshall. We met in the Atrium where we watched the mural artists in action painting Kerry’s enormous and prolific designs. The teens poured their curiosity into questions for Marshall, & I took notes on his answers:

What made you think of the concept of this piece?

Kerry answered that he’s interested in how historical narratives are told. He’s interested in stories…& what’s left out of the stories. His idea for the work was to put in the more complicated parts of the stories of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. How can [the Founding Fathers] be so much about justice and liberty if they owned slaves their whole lives?

How did you get to the place you are today?

The LA County Museum is the first museum Kerry went to, when he was fifteen years old. He said he wanted to make sure a painting he made got into that museum. One of his paintings was bought by the LA County Museum in 1993, he said, so other fifteen-year-olds could see that painting. When he was in school it was not common for African American artists to be in a museum. He said he recognized that gap and wanted to fill it. If you start to believe you have the capacity, Kerry said, it is all possible.

We continued our discussion in the Koret Visitor Education Center studios. It was the perfect introduction into beginning the mural design process. Fred Alvarado, Art Director of the program from Precita Eyes, had everyone brainstorming ideas for the themes of the mural. We  generated over a dozen ideas, broke it down to just a few, & by this week we’ll have a title and will begin the composite drawing.

Spending the day with Kerry was an inspiration to all.  Lionel from Oakland High said, “Today I learned that when you put your body and mind into your artwork, it will come out how you imagine it: PEACEFUL.“

Sketching out ideas for the mural.  Photo: Aimee Shapiro

I’m obsessed with the how and where people are installing their Gerz gift portraits, and the relationships they’re having with the portraits.

The outdoor installs are great (from funderbolt):

Some are naming theirs (”She looks like an Ashley to me”):

anna leah says:  I’ve had a blast with this experience. I especially loved seeing the participants walk through the street with portraits in arms. As for mine, I’ve named it “Consuelo”. I’ve had a challenging time and this face says to me, “There’s still hope for you chiquitita.” Now that’s a gift!

Plus (”installed” on Missed Connections?):

“OK, so we never met but both of our photographs were part of that exhibit at the Moma called the Gift. I went back yesterday and thought I was going to get a picture of myself (and was thinking what was I going to do with a large photo of myself) Instead they all gave us a random photo and I got yours..

If this is your photo and you want it let me know…”

Last week we had our first site visit to Town Park in DeFremery Park & met up with some key players in the Teen Mural Project: Internationally renowned local artist Brett Cook [left]; mural artist, and artistic director of our program, Fred Alvarado from Precita Eyes; and Bay Area activist, artist, teacher & skateboarder, K-dub.

We all piled into cars and headed over to Emeryville to Brett’s incredibly gigantic and light filled studio. Upon entering, many “wows” were heard when Brett’s very large spray paint collection was discovered. Brett’s studio is amazing: two levels of wall-sized paintings and almost an entire floor filled with books. A plate of oranges welcomed us. Brett gave a presentation beginning with images of his early days as a graffiti artist in San Diego. From there he traveled to the east coast, Mexico, and back to California, leaving his politically and socially minded art everywhere from outside walls of dilapidated buildings to construction walls surrounding the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and eventually into museums and galleries world-wide. He stressed the importance of community, soul, and collaboration in creating public art. It was an inspiring two hours, for teens and adults alike.

Heading back to the park, we chowed down at the DeFremery House where Fred and K-dub introduced themselves. Both artists work closely with their local communities, and will play a large and committed part in this year’s Teen Mural Project.

After the intros, Steve Lavoie, from the Oakland History Room at the Main Library, gave us a run-down of Oakland history since the 1800’s, including the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad & the formation of the Black Panthers, giving us a better understanding of this very historic site.

This week: Fred will walk us through the mural design process; the teens will meet and interview Kerry James Marshall himself, and watch the muralists who are working on Kerry’s murals in the Atrium.  Next week: questions and answers from the Kerry James Marshall Teen Mural Project interview.

A sweet little robot-love interlude during last Saturday’s MTAA performance AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE (We Solemnly Promise That No One Will Get Naked), while Uni and her Ukelele perform R.E.M.’s Nightswimming, above. Every element of the event was dictated by popular vote, including subtitle, duration, location, audience, costume, theme, props, etc.  As voted by the people, and to be interpreted by the artists, the performance was to take place in the freight elevator; be the exact length of R.E.M’s album Automatic for the People; include lawn chairs, potted plants, & robot costumes; and reference Marcel Duchamp, chat rooms, ukeleles & take-out food. Man, I love these guys. You wish you were here, for serious.  More pics, more video, here.

Jochen Gerz was here on Sunday handing out portraits to participants of THE GIFT, and now the portraits are making their way all over town and, one can hope, beyond. We’ve set up a Flickr group for all participants to upload pictures of where and how they’ve installed their “gifts”—do note that participants who sat to have their portrait taken were given not their own picture, but a picture of stranger to take home with them.

Here’s Heidi De Vries, out at the Headlands Sunday afternoon with hers:

Photo: Aleksandr Vladimirskiy

And the recipient of Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling’s portrait made a cell-phone photo essay of Rudolf’s journey “home”:


The rest of this story is here.  More pictures from the closing day giveaway/reception here. A bit more about Jochen Gerz and The Gift here.

**and note: the portrait traveling with Rudolf’s on the cable car (and throughout this journey) is Patrick Hillman, an art student who volunteered as a photographer for the project.***

Hans Haacke’s News, on November 5th, 2008, when Art of Participation opened:

and on February 8th, 2009, when it closed:

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Janis Joplin said it best: Get it while you can. AoP closes today.

Exhibit A: MTAA is going to do their you-voted-it-through performance AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE (We Solemnly Promise That No One Will Get Naked) tomorrow at high noon. Gather yourselves circa 11:45 a.m. in front of the freight elevator on the third floor, where the performance will take place. If you’re not familiar with MTAA, check out Karaoke DeathMatch 100 “This alcohol-fueled blood feud features 50 rounds of sing-along fury (taped live over an 8-hour period with hardly any pee breaks.)”

Exhibit B: At 2pm, following AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE, there will be a panel discussion, led by Ted Purves (chair of the Graduate Program in Fine Arts at CCA & author of book fabulously titled What We Want is Free) on “Social Practice West“.

Exhibit Last: ON SUNDAY: from noon until 5pm, come down for the special closing event for Jochen Gerz’s THE GIFT. During Art of Participation more than a thousand SFMOMA visitors had their portraits taken; a number of those have been on view in the museum during the show. For this special reception, Gerz invites all project participants to return to SFMOMA to receive a framed portrait from the exhibition as a gift to display at home:

The last step is to exhibit your piece of the collection, and document how you display it; I’ve set up a special Flickr group for participants of The Gift to share photos (or videos) of how and where they exhibit the portraits they receive.

David Bernstein, Head of Music and Professor of Music at Mills College, demonstrating 4′33″ for staff performers, back in early November. On the piano is the Irwin Kremen 4′33″ score in proportional notation, and behind the piano is Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting (Three Panel).

[Throughout the run of the Art of Participation, we've been treated to daily performances of John Cage's seminal work 4'33", a composition of silence lasting -- well, yes -- four minutes and thirty-three seconds. A score of 'silence' highlights ambient sounds surrounding the performance. Cage was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, and together these two works form the opening or entrance to the exhibition. Below, SFMOMA visitor services attendant Michael Zelenko, on what it's been like to experience 4'33" day in and day out, for the last three months. There's also a nice YouTube clip with Cage discussing silence, here.]

4′33″

Once a day, six times a week, four weeks a month, for almost three months…I’ve seen John Cage’s 4′33″ performed at least three dozen times while I’ve been working part-time as a gallery attendant on the fourth floor. Maybe I needed to see it that many times in order to let the whole thing develop, to ripen. My feelings toward the piece have gone from veneration to frustration, fascination to boredom, and finally, in these last few weeks, a return to reverence. I now experience those four-odd minutes as a resting place in an otherwise scattered work day.

Over the weeks, my attention has shifted inevitably from the performance to the audience. On the wide spectrum between befuddlement and admiration, most visitors’ reactions fall somewhere in the middle. However, after a few weeks I realized that those listeners at either end have a common reaction–total and absolute silence. Admittedly, the completely attentive individuals are rare, but they have contributed more than their fair share to my experience. I remember in early December when an elderly Swedish music professor stood riveted next to the piano, intensely focused during those four and half minutes. Afterwards, he shared with me his theory regarding the length of the composition in a hushed tone: the 273 seconds that make up the piece are possibly a reference to -273 Celsius, or absolute zero, when all molecular motion stops, or at least reaches its minimal state, a sort of molecular silence. These audience members –the fans — are my favorite because they stick it out, smile, and applaud warmly when the performer stands up from the bench.

On the other hand, I’ve repeatedly heard the story of a visitor who brazenly tapped a performing staff member on the shoulder, asking for directions. When someone from the audience whispered that they were interrupting, the visitor stepped back in disbelief, as if suddenly awakened. For the most part though, visitors patiently watch the pianist for a couple of minutes before they look at each other and, smiling sideways and shrugging their shoulders,they move on. Others don’t stop at all, but simply throw an awkward glance in passing.

After almost three months, I’d yet to do the honors myself! So it was with excitement that I finally sat down behind that ominous looking piano last week. I have to admit I was a bit nervous. As the seconds ticked by, I began hearing the kinds of things I’d overlooked during all those other thirty-six performances: the droning tones of laughter from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole-In-Space or the abrasive sawing of Hans Haacke’s News printer, both installed nearby; and finally, a woman singing, right next to me, in front of Nam Jun Paik’s Participation TV, blissfully unaware she was engaged in two pieces at once, Paik’s and Cage’s. At some point during the third movement, as if orchestrated, all these previously unacknowledged sounds seemed to come together. It felt to me as if the museum itself was performing for us. When it was all over I turned to the audience and heard the pitter-patter of applause, not quite sure who it was for.

——————-

Mai-Thu Perret, Borogrovess, 2008; MDF Ultra Light, synthetic foam, plastic mirror; courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; photo: James Lander; © 2008 Mai-Thu Perret

“The Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret produces multidisciplinary, installation-based work that integrates socialist subject matter, feminist politics, and classic modernist themes. Her protean artistic practice flows from a utopian narrative titled The Crystal Frontier that she has been writing for nearly a decade, and comprised of a series of discrete fictional texts that take various forms (including diary entries, letters, daily schedules, and song lyrics).” Apsara DiQuinzio, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture, in the exhibition brochure

“Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta is a novel about a spaceship named Ultravioleta, a spaceship that is made of paper, or more precisely, of ‘personal letters’ that are ‘passionate, desperate, and philosophical. As the reader soon realizes, the novel is itself the very spaceship described in its narrative…” Andrew Joron, in Rain Taxi.

I thought it might be interesting to put these two artists, from different generations, different countries, and with very different practices, but with some shared concerns, in dialogue with each other. Bay Area poet and novelist Laura Moriarty interviews Mai-Thu Perret about The Crystal Frontier, and about M-TP’s New Work exhibition, on view through March 1. You can also hear Mai Thu in conversation with Apsara this Thursday evening in the Wattis theater.

——————————

Laura Moriarty: That the location of the utopia in The Crystal Frontier is the American West is interesting to those of us who live here because we are aware of a local utopian impulse, sometimes in resistance to Western culture, sometimes in response to it. I wonder if the presence of such places as Soleri’s Arcosanti in Arizona or Old Oraibi, Taos (and other Hopi towns in New Mexico), or also Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Sedona contributed to your desire to locate the community in the Southwest? Or is it more the landscape itself?

Mai Thu Perret: Yes, these existing communities were very important for me, and to a large extent it’s because of these examples that I decided to locate the Crystal Frontier there. I first went to Arizona and New Mexico to see my friend the painter Olivier Mosset, and our visit to Arcosanti, for example, was a real eye opener in terms of the reality of a utopian commune. With a group of friends from Switzerland and New York, we took a tour of the place, led by a very enthusiastic volunteer, and after seeing their living quarters, the fields where they grew their crops and their constantly expanding buildings, we were led around to the metal studio. This is the place where they cast bronze bells that the community sells in crafts shops all over the world to raise money. There was only one bell shape, in different sizes, designed by Paolo Soleri. Since the metal shop had been touted by the volunteer as a place where people could unleash their creative energies, one of my friends asked him if they ever made anything else than bells. The volunteer looked puzzled, and as though he could not understand the intent of the question, quipped “We can make anything, as long as it’s a bell.” It was almost like a Zen koan come to life. Of course, I love the landscape too, it played an important role for all these forerunners and does so in my story too. On one level, it’s about a narrative blank slate, and the emptiness of the desert fits this idea perfectly.

New Work: Mai-Thu Perret (installation view); SFMOMA, November 21, 2008 – March 1, 2009. © Ian Reeves

How does symmetry function in your work? The symmetries that exist in the work at SFMOMA, as well in 2012, and in other works of yours findable on the internet, are compelling and seem to be thematic as well as visual. There is the repeated radial symmetry of the wallpaper which reflects wonderful textile and decorative traditions; the use of eggs, hair (wigs), and other objects which are naturally symmetrical; the mirror symmetry of the sculpture of the woman, the women in the story and yourself, and of your production as an artist and theirs; some of the movements of the dancers in An Evening of the Book (and of course the pattern overlaying them in the moving image); and, perhaps most intriguing, the expression of the story  –presented as something to be inferred and experienced rather than watched or read — in many parallel media.

Symmetry in some sense is a readymade form of composition, and I suspect that’s one of the main reasons I am so interested in it. It relieves me of the burden of more idiosyncratic, “creative”, or “personal” compositional choices. There is a parallel with the story, you’re right, in the sense that the story was also imagined, at the beginning, as a kind of machine that makes the art, a device to relieve me from the arbitrariness of picking this color rather than that one. In some way I am looking for a kind of automatic dimension to art making, and symmetry is a good shortcut for that. I enjoy a lot of the associations that come with symmetrical forms: naturally forms, patterns, repetition, outsider art. However, there are also many different instances in the work where symmetry is broken, offset.

An added question: Does making a work in one media create the desire for works in different media to balance or fill out the ‘story’?

I’m not sure I would use the word balance, but it’s true I tend to react in terms of opposites, I am easily bored and always afraid of settling into a style, so if I do one type of work I tend to want to follow with something different, or at least contrasting.

(Left: Mai-Thu Perret, The dragon gave birth to a golden phoenix that shattered the turquoise blue sky, 2008; glazed ceramic; courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; photo: Christian Altengarten; © 2008 Mai-Thu Perret)

Elements of Buddhism appear in this work, especially text — is it mostly Zen? — and I wonder if there is any aspect of Buddhist practice that is a part of the activities of the women in The Crystal Frontier or of your own artistic practice?

I assume you’re referring to the titles of the ceramics from my exhibition 2012. Yes, those all came from a book called Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice. It’s a book of phrases used by Zen students as possible answers to Koans, or riddles. Many of them take the form of small poems, or haikus, and they are often absurd or paradoxical. I don’t practice meditation myself (although I often wish I did), but I have always enjoyed reading about Buddhism and other non-dualistic spiritual traditions. When I first encountered the phrases it was like finding a treasure trove of readymade poetry. They were a perfect match for the absurdist and process based logic of the ceramic works. While other Buddhist motifs appear in my work (the position of the hands of the mannequin titled Heroine of the People is one very clear example), the women in the Crystal Frontier, like myself, are not especially observant. They practice yoga regularly though.

You commented in an interview with Paul Van Den Bosch and Giovanni Carmine that “The text is the nebulous network of significations that describes the Crystal Frontier. A thing can be related to the Crystal Frontier, connected to it, without it being necessarily spelled out in an actual, readable text.” Can you say more about the network that comprises the Crystal Frontier — what it is made of and how your thinking about it has evolved as the project has grown?

I think what I meant there is that the artworks, taken together, create a kind of text, even if it is not spelt out in explicitly written stories. One of the things that I discovered, after working for a certain amount of time with these two layers of a written story and the objects, the artworks in a traditional sense, was that the existence of the text in some way came to overshadow the complexity of the objects themselves. I had never meant to split the experience of the work into two parts, the objects and their explanation, the signs and their signification.

Is there a greatest conflict in The Crystal Frontier? What motivates the ‘citizens’ there? By that I mean is there a goal other than independence?

It is probably different for each individual. I don’t think there is a homogeneous goal beyond trying to be happy and to survive. They are looking for something, but like all of us they don’t know what it is exactly.

Can the arrow of time be reversed in this realm? Is there time travel?

Do you mean our realm? There is time travel through books and the mind, I guess. On a deeper level, time, like everything else, does not exist, it is an illusion caused by our mental structure (at least if you believe the Buddhists we talked about earlier). I was always very bad at physics in school, but my limited understanding of the theory of relativity would tend to substantiate this view. One day, there could be time travel in this realm.

(Right:Mai-Thu Perret Unsold goods a thousand years old, 2008; glazed ceramic;  courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; photo: Christian Altengarten; © 2008 Mai-Thu Perret)

How does ‘money’ work in The Crystal Frontier? Is there an imagined system that the products of the women are destined to become part of? Is it barter, or more like an exchange based on numbers? Does number itself relate? (Sometimes I imagine that numbers, even writing itself, were/was devised by women to keep track of stored crops and other practicalities that came up once hunting and gathering became agriculture.)

The Crystal Frontier is so small, it’s barter between themselves, and also money which they use when they are out in the regular world, where they sell their products for example. In one of the stories they discuss the trust fund of one of the members, on which they have been living for a while. The Crystal Frontier is not a perfectly functioning utopia, they still depend on the larger world for a lot of things, and this dependency, while convenient in man ways, is the source of many heated arguments between the women.

Your idea reminds me of a book by Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones. She argues that women have always been close to technology, and uses the example of the jacquard looms, traditionally used by women in weaving factories in the north of England, which are the ancestors of the first computers.

I am fascinated by the mescaline teapot. Is there a visionary or ritual aspect to the culture of The Crystal Frontier?

Yes, some of them experiment with psychedelic drugs to see things they would not be able to see otherwise, or maybe simply for fun.

The teapot is also an art gallery, when you walk inside it is a perfectly plastered round room, with 5 small abstract paintings hanging inside. There is this complicated structure, just to entice you to look at the simplest kind of paintings.

The teapot also looks like a spaceship, don’t you think?

Do you have any desire to, or is there any possibility of, creating a site in the Southwest as part of this project?

I could see myself living there for a little while, and doing things there, but as far as the Crystal Frontier goes, I have no desire to make the commune a reality. If I tried it in real life, it would be very, very different, I am sure. It is very much about fiction and the possibilities it gives you.

And finally, speaking as a fan, are there plans to make a text version of The Crystal Frontier more widely available?

The text was published in my monograph, Land of Crystal, published by JRP-Ringier in 2008, which is a quite widely available book. We have discussed making a paperback version of only the texts, so maybe one day…

—————

Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, where she continues to live and work. She received a BA in English literature from the Univerity of Cambridge, England, and attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Laura Moriarty is the author of A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 from Omnidawn Publishing and An Air Force, a chapbook from Hooke Press. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. She is findable online at A Tonalist Notes and elsewhere.

‘Morning to all of you Saturday readers. I’m Aimee, the Education Associate for School and Youth Programs. I will be a regular contributor for the next few months, documenting SFMOMA’s 2009 Teen Mural Project. Today’s our first day! As the program moves along, I won’t be the only one you’ll be hearing from. Our teen participants will be blogging, posting photos, and making sure you know how much fun they’re having.

Here’s the run-down: SFMOMA has commissioned renowned artist Kerry James Marshall to create two murals for the museum’s Haas Atrium. The murals will live on the two walls previously occupied by the very colorful Sol Lewitt paintings that once hung on either side of the grand staircase. The murals will be on view from February 26, 2009, through the spring of 2010. For over thirty years, Kerry James Marshall has explored issues of racial identity, urban experience, and the Civil Rights movement in his work. These themes will also show up in the works he will create for SFMOMA.

Over the next five months, SFMOMA will be working with fifteen teens from three Oakland high schools in a program inspired by Kerry James Marshall’s Atrium commission. The students will be working with Precita Eyes, a San Francisco-based community mural organization, to design and produce a collaborative ‘response’ mural. The students’ mural will be the backdrop for the center stage at Town Park, a skate park and art center located in DeFremery Park in West Oakland. Students will meet and interview Kerry James Marshall as well as local artist Brett Cook to discuss artistic process, themes of history, race, social change, and the importance of community. Then, in May, SFMOMA will host a party at Town Park (complete with DJs, MCs, local artists, and members of the Oakland community) to celebrate the unveiling of the students’ mural. Artwork produced during the planning and design process will be exhibited in the Koret Visitor Education Center at SFMOMA.

Now that you have a general idea of what we’re about to embark on…I leave you with this BEFORE shot of Town Park. We’re building a wall above the skate ramps, which is where the mural will be. Check back here on Saturdays for pictures and updates on what we’re doing.  And, come May…a picture of Town Park AFTER.

Here are the guys from Ant Farm, at last night’s Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule) sealing ceremony, recording the video message to the future about the contents of the time capsule. A recap: Since November 5th when The Art of Participation opened, the Media Van’s HUQQUH (that green device with the steering wheel around it, and pronounced “Hookah”) has been capturing digital files chosen at random from museum visitors’ electronic devices (cameras, cell phones, iPods). Those captures are what’s being sealed up in the van (whole van sealed up) — to be accessed again only in 2030.

The men, left to right: Bruce Tomb, Curtis Schreier, Chip Lord [ANT FARM], plus Paul Rauschelbach, who did technical genius on the HUQQUH. (If I’ve got that correct.)

Part of the evening’s festivities also included THIS:

A signed one-page print-out, kind of broadside-style, showing a sequence of some of the four thousand one hundred and eighty-seven randomly captured files. All of the print-outs were different: my copy shows files 2335 through 2370, and each thumbnail includes the date and time of upload, and, in the case of music files, artist and song title. I feel like such a kid: THIS IS SO COOL! Bigger shot here; you can see the thumbnails better.

A few more pics of the event are here.

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Just one more One Minute Sculpture video, to take you to the weekend. All the rest, here.

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Unsubstantiated office watercooler rumor has it that an especially exuberant visitor tried to fulfill Wurm’s “Keep a cool head” instructions to the letter of the law in ways that are, shall we say, incompatible with current museum policy. More One Minute Sculpture videos here.

And, tonight: The formal closing ceremony for Ant Farm’s Media Van v. 08 (Time Capsule), with Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier & Bruce Tomb in person, starting at 7, right after the Marioni salon. Again with the rumor having it, supposedly a “very famous” person is tonight’s beer-salon guest reader. I have no idea who, as believe me I’d leak it. Which is probably why I have no idea who. See you tonight!

Bay Area artist Stephanie Syjuco weighs in here on the successes and pitfalls of ‘participatory’ art, and takes a close look at New York design firm Freecell’s Stack-to-Fold project, currently in use in our second-floor “D-space“.

“(T)hese 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..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.” — SFMOMA curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling

The term D.I.Y., or “Do It Yourself,” has become something of a buzzword lately, an ethos. The acronym was spawned from early 1950s home repair manuals, grew to refer to alternative punk and hardcore music, and now encompasses everything from the burgeoning indie craft scene to the Slow Food movement. Doing It Yourself, it seems, is pretty darn cool because it means you can really “have it your way” and the term wears itself like the ultimate democratic and even populist statement. We are all creators! We are all designers!

However, left to their own devices, humans can be an unruly lot, especially when it comes to following a given set of instructions. Take it from someone who once worked as a designer at a hands-on science museum: a large part of my day was spent trying to design instructions and images to coax museum visitors into doings things a “certain way” (push this button) to get a “certain result” (make it go). The trick was to frame the instruction in a friendly and “rewarding” way that would make the visitor feel they had gained something (”I learned about quantum physics! Neat-o”), or had done something correctly (”I followed the instructions and the whirly thing spun around”). These were the basic goals, with conveying complex concepts falling at one end of the success spectrum, and delivering simple physical results falling on the other.

Mind you, these were the best outcomes one could hope for. What usually happened, comically enough, was a lot of museum visitors randomly banging around on high-tech machinery, buttons being pushed willy-nilly out of sequence, and the lovingly designed graphics ignored and thrown to the winds of instructional irrelevance. What I learned, essentially, is that humans are a messy, anarchic lot that, on the whole — and despite your best-designed intentions — will revert to a herd of cats with incredibly short attention spans.

Of course I’m being more than just a little cheeky here. For every fifty people who “do it wrong,” (or don’t do it at all) the one person who does it “right” may really get the right “something” out of it. And who says there’s no success in eliciting joy from randomly pushing buttons anyway? What is right, anyway? And what is, for lack of a better term… wrong?

Initial Freecell design proposal photographs

All of this is a rather long-winded way to begin a rumination on design group Freecell’s Stack-to-Fold , commissioned by SFMOMA for the Participation exhibition. Visiting on a crowded Free Tuesday at the museum last week, I encountered gorgeously designed cardboard panels available in the museum’s D-Space area for visitors to punch out (they are perforated) and assemble into different modular types of furniture-like structures: bench-like things and wedge-like table-things. Depending how the assembler wanted to interpret it, each person could design for themselves different useful components out of basic building blocks: perhaps a bench to sit on to watch the movies being projected in the space, or a comfy corner to sit against, or perhaps a platform to peruse a book on. In a prior blog interview the designers touched on the notion of dysfunction as inherent in their design setup and this is what intrigued me the most during my observation of their installation.

How do designers and viewer/participants gauge “success” when it comes to open-ended or participatory experiences? Especially when the viewer/participant is called upon to follow a given set of rules but also to bring in their own creativity (or even lethargy) and possibly do something unforeseen or deemed “unruly” by the designer? In other words, are all outcomes — especially the ugly — ones… good? Does inviting someone to respond to a work only to have them merely scribble graffiti on it a valid invitation-response exchange in itself? Should designers nod approvingly when their works get turned upside down? To take a well-known and ongoing online example, I wonder how much of the “crappy” or “wrong” responses end up online at the “Learning to Love You More” website by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July and how do they get weeded out as so? I assume that not every response is deemed a “right” response.What an artist/designer hopes for is a response to their solicitations for participation. But I suspect they also expect something in particular. How does a sliding scale of success become formulated?

OK, back to the unruly public:

I can appreciate when the best of intentions goes a bit haywire. Structured (or even semi-structured) situations like Freecell’s project have the potential to elicit the most interesting and off-the-wall end products simply because the public responses defy expectation.

I feel for anyone in the designer’s situation who finds themselves inviting a type of open-ended response but may also have a rather specific vision of what they want the outcome to be. As someone who has also tried her hand in projects that elicited outside participation, it was an interesting personal barometer as to what I deemed “acceptable” as a result. I have been both amused, shocked, and humbled by the off-the-wall end-products generated. The Counterfeit Crochet Project solicits crafters all over the world to hand-make designer products and then send me photographs of the results. These have ranged from stunning feats of verisimilitude and skill to the most banal or strangely made objects. And while I’ve been impressed at the “good” ones (interesting proposition: can you really counterfeit “correctly”?), it’s the “bad” results — the lumpy mistranslations, the not-so-perfect outcomes, the Christmas ornaments, doilies, and non-designer results that actually give me more insight into the real customized DIY experience, one that reflects personal tastes, concerns, and a “this is what I want to do, not so much what you want me to do” attitude. In the end, I keep all the results, promise to show all the items in some way, and have learned that you never can tell how people will interpret your proposition.

Left: original image of Coach handbag. Right: counterfeit crochet version, never finished, by Carrie Suchman from Ohio.

Institutional limitations

Suzanne Stein, SFMOMA community producer, pointed me in the direction of this video snippet showing SFMOMA visitors using Lygia Clark’s interactive work Rede de elástico (Elastic Net) as a jump rope in the galleries. This work requires visitors to collectively knot together individual rubber bands to create a “net” of sorts; life as a jump rope was unexpected and had to be quickly discouraged as it may have interfered with or bumped into other works in the gallery. To be fair, in an earlier Open Space blog interview, Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling acknowledges that there are always institutional restraints that keep artworks from getting too unruly and that may even hinder a fully “active” participatory experience. Clark intended her work to be actively played with. It’s just that SFMOMA can’t accommodate all the ways in which that can happen.

“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.” – Rudolf Frieling

Freecell’s initial plan was devised for a minimal room with no other furniture in it, in which visitors could construct the modular units. But “D-space” is also the Koret Visitor Education center, and purity just wasn’t possible: Stack-to-Fold bumps up against a video projection area, and coloring/drawing area (The 1000 Journals Project), creating a bit of confusion as to what one is supposed to focus on or pay attention to. As the exhibition progressed, it was also apparent to the museum staff that folks weren’t utilizing the space “correctly” by making their own seating area and tables out of the Freecell units, so they added actual chairs and a formal sitting area with tables. This may have discouraged folks even more from thinking of their constructions as functioning as utility items. From my visit, it looked as if the Freecell units had become surfaces upon which to graffiti on or stack like Legos. It certainly looked like a far cry from the clean, platonic, designed experience originally depicted in their mock-ups.

The Participation show, and the Freecell project in particular, invites viewers to take part in a specific set of circumstances; artists/designers as well as the museum then have to stand back and hope that they have constructed a proposition that is both contained yet still open to interpretation. What’s interesting to me are the divergences that occur, the trajectories and unruliness that can come about from the public choosing to reinterpret or even ignore a given set of conditions within a participatory artwork and just “do it themselves” in their own way. Also, actual institutional circumstances (space constraints, budgets, etc) can hinder the execution of a “pure” vision. I’m curious if there’s such a thing as “failure” in these types of works, and if so, how do we evaluate this? As artists and curators, we try to frame our participatory proposition to the best of our abilities, and then it is up to us to step away and watch what happens when set upon by that fabulous, inventive, unruly, and chaotic public. Whether we like it or not.

……………………………………………………………………………

Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist based in San Francisco. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. You can view her work at http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com.

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Happy Monday! What did you dream about this weekend? Come down and try it yourself. More on Erwin Wurm & the One Minute Sculptures just below.

Tomorrow! Bay Area artist Stephanie Syjuco, on DIY cardboard furniture, and ‘participation’ in art museums…

As the Art of Participation exhibition winds down — or ramps up to wind down and close ( Feb. 8 ) — we’ll be posting up a series of text & video of various kinds of interaction, examination, and reflection on the participatory experience at SFMOMA. Following on from last week’s investigation of How Do You Participate with an Ant Farm Media Van, we also did a set of test-cases with Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. These sculptures present a series of objects on a platform, with text instructions and picture diagrams indicating what you’re to do in order to enact the sculpture: for one minute. A very nice line from Kathrin Herzog at ArtFacts.net: “Contrary to Duchamp, Wurm designs not readymades, sculptures fixed into an unchanging form, but works that are constantly ready-to-be-made.“

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We’ll have more of these in days to come. In the meanwhile, as it turns out, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are Wurm fans too. Here’s their take on his deal:

[update! less than 24hrs later, video pulled from YouTube for copyright claim. Bummer. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the song & the video, and here’s a “Pretty Cool People” interview with Wurm.

Dear reader,

This is Tammy. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. You might think I’ve been laying low — just kicking back on autopilot on some tropical island with the man or woman that I love. But no way! I’ve been sitting right here in this cubicle, in this chair, in the exact same position, for weeks now. So when Suzanne asked me if I would go on assignment in the galleries to cover the public’s interpretation of the many participatory pieces in the enigmatically titled exhibition, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, well, I was thrilled. Lucky for me, Megan Brian offered to help. (She’s the kind of person people instantly open up to.)

Our mission was simple: “How does this thing work?” The first object under our studious lens was Ant Farm’s Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), a gutted van with hookah-styled plug-in station for uploading digital files from your own phone, camera or iPod:

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The electronic time capsule will be soon be sealed, to be opened again (’accessed’) only in the year 2030: CLOSING CEREMONY FOR THE ANT FARM MEDIA VAN V.08 (TIME CAPSULE): January 29, 2009 7:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.: Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, and Bruce Tomb in person. FREE! (with museum admission…)

Martin Puryear, Brunhilde, 1998-2000; Cedar and rattan. Collection the artist; © 2007 Martin Puryear; Photo Richard P. Goodbody

One of the things I love about art is the relief I feel, when looking, from having to always think in language. This leaves me a bit at odds with the demands of a day job — in an art museum no less — that requires at least some amount of thinking through writing. I often take walks into the galleries to catch my breath, & to rest by walking, looking, and seeing. Of late the best rest has come in the fifth floor galleries: Open, expansive, and with fantastic light from the new glass wall which will look out onto the sculpture garden, the fifth floor is beautifully laid out right now with the Martin Puryear exhibition. The sculptures, large in scale, and strange, tactile and approachable, do remind me of one of the reasons I took a job in a museum in the first place: to look. However, my fifth-floor visits have also been fraught with a follow-on frustration: I am always left speechless, and the job does require I occasionally find something to say about the art.
Over the last fourteen weeks, ever since the wagon wheels (left) for Ad Astra were first uncrated in the Atrium, it’s been a sequence of false starts, as I’ve attempted to say something — anything — about Puryear. I’ve been into the galleries countless times. I read the ‘literature‘. I watched Art21. I took the docent tour.

Finally, though, it strikes me that my own slow unwinding of a beginning isn’t unlike Puryear’s painstaking process of making these works. Puryear, who began first as a painter, turning early to sculpture, and who has spent a life as a sculptor learning and refining woodworking processes from all over the world, often works slowly.  It takes time to bend a strip of wood, to split a sapling. The docent said, He’ll keep a piece of wood in his studio for years, until — like Michelangelo and the proverbial block of marble — it reveals something that lets Puryear know what to do with it. Those wagon wheels — found on a farm in France — were in his possession for fourteen years before he made Ad Astra. This kind of labor takes time. You take one part, you work it, and you put it together, eventually, with some other kind of part.

There’s something present in the many metaphors current in the media right now, of the ‘hard work ahead’  and the need for patience, vision, and labor, that continually evoke, for me anyway, the labor of hands, specifically the labor of hands in relationship to ideas, and this hasn’t been far from my mind while looking at these sculptures. Puryear uses a lot of natural materials (among them tar, rawhide, wire mesh, stone), but wood especially always seems to me to be something we understand in an almost familial way, its workability seems — if properly labored at — open to anyone. It’s the renewable, combustible engine of that foremost human centralizer and organizer: the hearth, and almost everything we have to rest on or shelter in has some presence of, or relationship to, that material. And the hand-working of the wood in these sculptures is often visible. In Brunhilde [at top], up close, you can see the many tiny holes left behind by staples used to help bend the wood into shape.  A hand stapled the strips of cedar and a hand pulled the staples out.

In an interview with David Levi Strauss in the Brooklyn Rail, Puryear described Ad Astra, and discussed the provenance of the title: “…the new piece has a very long sapling attached, like an attenuated shaft for the wagon, stretching upward “to the stars.” There are two Latin phrases the title derives from: Ad astra per ardua, meaning “to the stars through difficulty,” and Ad astra per aspera, which translates as “to the stars through rough things or dangers.”

I’m the hopeful type; I like transcendent metaphors. Standing in front of the work A Distant Place, the docent said, quoting Puryear, You begin in one place and you arrive at another, by slow process. It took a little time for me to be able to know what to say adjunct to the sculptures of Martin Puryear, but how about this, as a well-wishing for a new year, new presidency, new economy, in what are supposedly dire times: ad astra per ardua, ad astra per aspera.

[Martin Puryear is on view through January 25. Closing day program: Joinery: Poems on the occasion of Martin Puryear, featuring David Levi Strauss and Bay Area poets Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, Aaron Shurin, and Susan Thackery.]

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.

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.

Left: Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, Male itch mite, ca. 1853–57; Salt print; San Francisco Museum of Art. Right: Wilson Alwyn Bentley, Snowflakes, before 1905; Printing-out paper prints; Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.

[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.

Image above right: Henri van Heurck, X-ray of a hand with a ring, 1896; Printing-out paper print; Courtesy Galerie GÉRARD-LÉVY, Paris

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.

Arthur E. Durham, Photomicrograph of a flea, 1863 or 1864; Albumen print; The RPS Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, England

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…)

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.

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!

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!

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.

Matthias Gommel, Delayed, 2002; closed-circuit sound installation; photo: courtesy the artist; © 2008 Matthias Gommel

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]

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

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.

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)

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.

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.