OPEN SPACE

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[Our regular feature, "Collection Rotation". Each month or so I invite a local guest to organize lists, groupings, or 'exhibitions' from our permanent collection. This is our second installment, devised by artist & curator Karla Milosevich, who includes notes about her selections along the way. Thanks Karla!]

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LINER NOTES:
When invited to put together a group from the collection, I thought of what a neighborhood florist once said, “Everything matches.” And the chef Giada De Laurentiis, granddaughter of film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who said, “Don’t be careful, just throw it all in.” This is that kind of collection. There is no real rhyme or reason, just artists or things that appeal to me. I hope you enjoy it. –KM

—-When this photo was taken in 1979, I lived 80 miles from here:

Franz Gohlke, Wichita Falls, Texas, April 14, 1979, Looking Northeast, 1979

—-I searched the online collection for all things American Indian, since they too once roamed that area of Texas. I also searched for aliens, UFOs, and other things supernatural:

Jo Baer, Untitled, 1964-1972

Maximilian Franz Josef Cornelius Wolf and Johann Palisa, The Milky Way, c. 1900

Maximilian Franz Josef Cornelius Wolf, Star Map, from the album Photographische Sternkarten (Photographic Star Maps), 1903

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—-I love Martin Kippenberger!—-

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1991

(I am particularly fond of his self-portrait drawings on hotel and mental hospital stationery.)

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1990

Martin Kippenberger, The Raft of the Medusa, 1996.

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Check him out posing for an etching in this video shot in 1977. —So cute!

[Anglik Riemer does some drawing for an etching portrait of Martin Kippenberger in her studio (1977)]

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—-Mind mirror!—-

Dan Graham, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974/1993

—-Rise like a Phoenix, Katharina Sieverding:

Katharina Sieverding, Transformer, (installation/eight slide projections), 1973/1974

© 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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I thought about this song when thinking about Jeremy Blake and how he disappeared into the ocean:

“I’ve just closed my eyes again
climbed aboard the dream weaver train.
Driver take away my worries of today
and leave tomorrow behind.

Oh dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night.
Oh dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light.

Fly me high through the starry skies
maybe to an astral plane.
Cross the highways of fantasy.
Help me to forget today’s pain.

Though the dawn may be coming soon
there still may be some time.
Fly me away to the bright side of the moon and meet me on the other side.”

Jeremy Blake, 1906, from the Winchester series [video with sound/digital animation with sound], 2003

Gary Wright, “Dream Weaver”, from The Dream Weaver, Warner Bros., 1975

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Karla Milosevich is an artist and curator living in San Francisco. She is currently working on a music project and running the Right Window art space with friends.

Posted by Suzanne under Collection Rotation | Tags: Jeremy Blake, Karla Milosevich, Oceans, sorrow, Starmap, Texas, UFOs

Last Friday here at the SFMOMA, we celebrated the opening of one of the most highly anticipated exhibitions of the year: the SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition. In a city where every cab driver is a filmmaker and every filmmaker is a musician is a writer is an artist is an installation crew member, it should come as no surprise that the SFMOMA staff has more than its share of serious artists of all kinds of media and practice. Now in its thirteenth iteration, this year’s exhibition includes 103 artists—twenty-five percent of the staff of the museum. The show takes up four floors of our administrative offices: two in the main building and two in the annex across the street. There’s a lot of great work and it’s fun to get to see what people make and do in their off-hours. Not to play favorites, but who in a cubicle doesn’t covet 1rst Private Office Cube? More pictures, of the opening party, and some installation shots, here. Don’t miss the Simon Blint, 76 and Counting. It’s a bit derivative I suppose, but fine work nevertheless.

Each year a different curatorial team of staff volunteers organizes the show. This year’s curators were Megan Brian, Development Assistant, Heather Holt, SECA Coordinator, and Erica Gangsei, Interpretation Associate. I caught up with Megan & Erica for a little curatorial Q&A:

Congratulations! And thank you for all your hard work putting the exhibition together. Can you give me a curatorial statement about this year’s SFMOMA staff art show? What is the exhibition called?

We really wanted a title that would refer to the role that the staff plays within the museum, but also the hours of labor that staff puts in outside the museum on their own art. We had a few ideas for titles, such as Make It Work (which we got from the TV show “Project Runway”) and My Museum (which we bogarted from the Media Arts department). Ultimately, we went with ART:WORK because it calls to mind both the “art work” one does as a museum professional and the artwork that one creates as a practicing artist.

Is it true that only SFMOMA Staff are eligible to submit work to the SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition?

It is true, only SFMOMA staff can submit work to the SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition. However, we define staff pretty broadly in this case. We accept work from regular staff, on-call staff, volunteers, docents, interns, and contracted employees.

Will you describe the submission and selection process?

We accepted all submissions from staff as long as their piece met installation and size requirements, so there wasn’t really a selection process. Everyone who wanted to contribute a piece submitted a form a month before the show with all the relevant details, and one week before the opening (almost) everyone dropped off their work. We then spent a few days really getting to know each piece and placing the work in the offices. The staff show takes place on four floors: two in the museum building and two in our Minna annex office building.

An interesting phenomenon occurs once the works are placed for the staff art show — people assume that they can “read” the placement of works as a value judgment. Some might think that more notable work might be placed near the Director’s and Curators’ offices and that, therefore, an artwork’s worth can be measured by how near or far it is. From the beginning we, as the curators for this show, rejected that premise. Every staff member and department plays an equally integral role in this institution. No one department is more important than another and no workspace is more prestigious than another. Simply put, there is no so-called “bad placement” for artwork in the staff art show.

How is this SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition different than exhibitions in previous years?

We wanted to take a more green approach than in the past. Usually there are lots of posters around, announcing the show and all artwork is submitted on printed forms. This year we used email and the SFMOMA intranet to announce the show and post electronic submission forms. We were worried that we might not reach as many people through these channels, but in the end we had a whopping 103 artists submit work. This was actually the largest turnout ever in SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition history!

What were some of the challenges and rewards of organizing the SFMOMA Staff Art Exhibition? What was the most surprising? The most enjoyable?

This year was the 13th annual staff art exhibition, and we’ve been joking that it was the cursed year. The night before artwork drop off, one curator got into a bike accident and dislocated her finger, making it difficult to handle art. Another curator had to have an emergency appendectomy the week of installation. The third remaining curator is still intact, but is doing her best to avoid all potentially hazardous situations for the duration of the exhibition.

But “Curse of the 13th Staff Art Show” aside, organizing this year’s exhibition has been truly rewarding. It was a lot of work on our side, especially when you consider that we were doing our regular full-time jobs in addition to the responsibility of curating the show. But it really was a huge team effort. Between Human Resources who planned the opening reception, the Installation crew who hung the whole show, and the 103 artists who spent countless hours actually creating all the spectacular artwork, this exhibition is truly a endeavor that is brought together by the SFMOMA staff as a whole. In the end, the biggest reward for us is to see the community that is created by this opportunity to share in the exceptional range of talent here at SFMOMA.

Posted by Suzanne under News, Profiles + Interviews

[This is the first in an occasional series focusing on people in and around the Bay Area who help make it such a lively place for art & culture. Dear local person and personality, Mr Andrew McKinley, is owner of Adobe Books and a long-time dedicated patron of the arts. Adobe Books in San Francisco's Mission district has been the heart & soul of that neighborhood's artist community for nearly twenty years, and has always been a welcome meeting place for artists, writers, musicians, and people of every walk of life. Thanks, Andrew. And many thanks to Tammy Fortin for fine labors on this project.]

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Posted by Suzanne under Profiles + Interviews, Videos | Tags: Andrew McKinley

[from guest writer Julian Myers]

“I quit the art business in 1967 for about three years… At that time, whenever I’d get any letters about art related events, I’d send them back or throw them out. Sometimes, I’d write deceased on them. I was listed in Who’s Who in American Art and I sent back all their correspondence with “Deceased.” After three years, Who’s Who believed me… So the artist is definitely dead.”

On Monday, July 7, 2008, Bruce Conner died in San Francisco. It wasn’t the first time - in 1960 he advertised an exhibition of works by “the late Bruce Conner” - but it may be the last. Conner’s singular life isn’t really done justice by a list of his many roles and personae – but you need them, if only to understand just what a restless, curious, and prodigious figure he was: prankster, filmmaker, iconoclast, bullshitter, printmaker, performer, punk, sculptor, collagist, romantic, spiritualist, painter, candidate for City Supervisor and much more.

BURNING BRIGHT, Bruce Conner, 1996, Collection SFMOMA

I didn’t know Conner, though I wish I did. Now I won’t have the chance.

I know, and value greatly, his artworks, which isn’t the same thing – but it’s something. He was probably my favorite artist, and created what is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest films ever made: A Movie from 1958.

A Movie was constructed completely of found footage. As he described it, this was a “pseudo-criminal” process that nevertheless was little different than making a painting. Painting, no more or less than appropriating objects, was a kind of theft: “You’re stealing all the past experiences that everyone has had… You’re building on this huge pyramid which has millions of dead bodies down at the bottom of it.”

A Movie was a “new old movie” – it looked antique in 1959. It was a comedic archaeology of progress, and an elegy for American modernity. The twentieth century is pictured, first comically, then with increasing sadness, as doomed charge, a monumental hubris – a zeppelin exploding in midair. The last shot of the film, breathtaking in its context, shows a diver swimming into the hull a submerged ship. He’s exploring the ruins of a century barely half over.

BOOK PAGES, Bruce Conner, 1967, Collection SFMOMA

Conner’s relationship with SFMOMA was notoriously troubled. As Conner recounted in 1979 (in an interview published in Damage and reprinted in Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art), Henry Hopkins, then the museum’s director, had proposed doing a retrospective of the artist’s work to date. But they couldn’t agree on certain things. Conner wanted to take part in curating his own history, and demanded a role in the conservation of assemblages that he’d originally intended to change over time. He also wanted his show to be free – the museum wanted to charge $2 admission fee – or at least to share in a percentage of the earnings from an increased admission.

“[Hopkins] told me that this exhibition would be a terrific boon to my career. It would make me famous and rich. I’ve been told that since I was twenty-one years old… It’s one of the more fraudulent myths of the art business. Whereas, the only way you can make any money is to get a percentage of the gate. The concept that the museum and the galleries have been working on for so long is a 19th century one, wherein you confront a robber baron…who smashed millions of tiny babies into the ground, tore their eyeballs out and disemboweled them; he’s done this his whole life… And he’s built castles around the world.”

“They practically informed me it was a post-mortem,” the artist said - invoking, in part, the avant gardist cliché of the museum as mausoleum, or morgue. More to the point, however, Conner was hoping to retain, or recover, some determination over his work, and his public image. “Everything was being run as if I did not exist,” he declared. Needless to say, SFMOMA never did their retrospective. Perhaps those around at the time will have another perspective.

ST VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE/HOMAGE TO ERROL FLYN, Bruce Conner, 1960, Collection SFMOMA

It’s too bad. It would have been tremendous. As the works in SFMOMA’s collection attest, Conner made some of the most distinctive and intense works of the last century. Works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose productions from the late 1950s are often connected to Conner’s, look by comparison mannered “moves” in an art historical game. Conner’s best assemblages – Homage to Jay Defeo, 1958, The Temptation of St. Barney Google, 1959, Snore, 1960, Looking Glass, 1964 (the last one he made) – leap out of history. They look like rotting encrustations, half-destroyed artifacts of a culture both distant and familiar. They’re also, sometimes, surprisingly femme: When I saw “2000 BC”, Conner’s retrospective at the de Young Museum in 1999, my friend kept saying, of the assemblages, “I can’t believe someone made these. What was her name again?” Sarah, I whispered, Bruce Conner is a boy. “No she isn’t!”

These wounded and delicate almost-objects seem organic, alive, about to crawl away. “I made them vulnerable,” said Conner in 1979, “They were designed with the idea that time, the elements, would change them.” Like a life.

There’s more to say, and so much I haven’t addressed. Hopefully the conversation can continue in the comment box or – as Conner might have preferred – out in the night.

Posted by Julian under Guest Writer, News, Opinion, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: assemblage, autonomy, babies, Bruce Conner, castles, Henry Hopkins, painting, robber barons, theft

[As a timely intermission here in the middle of the JUNE ALEXANDERPLATZ onslaught, we introduce a new regular feature. Each month or so we'll ask a local guest to organize lists, groupings, or 'exhibitions' from our permanent collection, to be presented here on the blog. For our first installment, I invited two long-time Bay Area artists, Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst, who are also musicians, record collectors, and DJs, to select their favorite works and pair them with song clips, a permanent-collection "playlist", our first "Collection Rotation." It's fantastic! You will very much enjoy. Many thanks to Scott and Cliff. A teaser sample just below. Click through HERE to see & hear the full rotation. xo, SS]

Susan Meiselas, Lena on the Bally Box, Essex Junction, Vermont, from the series Carnival Strippers, 1973

Edwyn Collins: “A Girl Like You” Setanta Records, 1994

Posted by Suzanne under Collection Rotation