OPEN SPACE

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

Michelle Rollman’s cat illustrations are totally perverted. They morph between human female and feline female in ways that are truly disturbing, like they are both realistically cute the way cats actually are, not cartoonish, and then sexy the way a femmed-out lady can be, and the chimera is truly grotesque. But cute! And then you feel sort of sickened by the way in which it’s cute, because it’s like the sexy lady part is somehow molesting the cat, even though they are in fact the same thing. Something is being defiled by this Frankenstein’s existence, I don’t know what, maybe me, the viewer. Rollman’s drawings have been compiled into this book, The Book of Practical Pussies, the cover a pink so hot it blisters and then there’s that cat on the front, all wrapped in a corset. The cat looks back, doesn’t make eye contact, but eye contact is aggressive for cats. It doesn’t look ashamed, or come-hither, it’s just a cat in a corset. Don’t you feel weird looking at it? Try gazing at this other one, a drawing of a cat you know just cleaning itself as cats do, its leg flung behind its head but its leg, just that one, is actually a woman’s leg in hose and heels. A human woman, not a cat woman. It’s so creepy and excellent, and the accompanying text is excellent, pieces by Bay Area literary stalwarts like Camille Roy, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Kevin Killian and others. The book was published by Krupskaya, a local poetry press run by Saidenberg and Killian, a great press that puts out good-looking volumes of experimental work.

Here’s a story. Once I got an email asking if traveling French filmmakers doing a documentary about feminist sex workers could come over my house and interview me. I was sick when I got the email, and traveling and overwhelmed and cranky but I said yes anyway and later the French people came to my house and asked me some questions and one of them, a quiet, long-haired woman with introspective eyes told me she’d made another movie and she’d send it to me. And she did, and the movie was the infamous sex-worker shoot-em-up Baise Moi, and the woman who had been in my kitchen had been freaking Virginie Despentes, the radical French feminist who had penned the rape revenge novel Baise Moi and then went on to shoot the film version, casting porn actresses in the lead. I just about died to know I’d had this hero in my kitchen and had been too whatever was wrong with me to get it. Later I was in a performance with Despentes in Spain, watching a video she shot that was overlaid with text from her new book, King Kong Theory. It was in French, a language I do not speak, and so it was with real joy that I opened a package from The Feminist Press this week containing a copy of the English translation of King Kong Theory, subtitled A Manifesto for Women Who Can’t or Won’t Obey the Rules. It opens suchly: I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls that don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick. It goes on an on, a litany of all the people you’d most like to invite to your party, including those who have big bellies, those who would rather be men, brutish, noisy women who destroy everything that gets in their way, those whose shyness is due to their hangups, those who dream of plastic surgery, those who like to get drunk in bars and collapse on the floor. The men she is writing for include those who cry easily, those who aren’t ambitious, men who don’t want to be counted on, ad infinitum. It’s like a new, French Valerie Solanas, thank you Feminist Press for bringing Despentes to America and will you please now translate Baise Moi, please?

OH! PS just heard from the folks at Feminist Press that Baise Moi was put out on Grove like a decade ago, translated by BRUCE BENDERSON! Yes! I am heading over to Modern Times to place my order.

Know what the best thing to eat is? Oatmeal with flax seed oil, Braggs and nutritional yeast. Then you put an egg on it. I was eating this and reading this month’s Harper’s when I hit a review of both Robert Frank’s photography book The Americans and the more recently published Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans, edited by Sarah Greenough. The review, an essay by Francine Prose, opens with the author recounting her first glimpse of segregation in the United States and her mother’s response to it, the text surrounding Frank’s Trolley – New Orleans, 1955, in which a streetcar’s passenger windows are cleaved into white in the front (a haughty woman, a stoic little boy, an upset, littler girl) and black in the back (a plaintive, dreamy man, a slightly grinning woman). The article details the project’s history, in which the photographer scored a Guggenheim (the application’s narrative was ghostwritten by Walker Evans) to travel the United States in the mid-50s, taking photos of all he saw, 767 rolls of film. Among them is my favorite, New York City, a trio of Latina queers looking like character’s from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Another photo discussed in the essay, San Francisco, 1956, shows an African-American couple at the bottom of the frame, turning to regard the photographer with hostility, a city park (Dolores?) stretched before them. Frank’s photos capture the racism and xenophobia of that time and place, and the article details how the photographer himself – a Swiss national, Jewish, traveling with a children bearing the foreign sounding names Pedro and Andrea – was nabbed by Arkansas police on the lookout for “persons illegally in this country possibly being in the employ of some unfriendly power.” He was held for twelve hours and believed had he been a black man the Arkansas cops would have killed him. (more…)

from Corey Keller, SFMOMA associate curator of photography:

On Sunday, December 13, photographer Larry Sultan passed away at home, surrounded by his beloved family. For several months he had been fighting a rare and virulent cancer, one that would not respond to treatment. In a series of humorous, thoughtful, and heart-breaking emails, he kept us abreast of his condition until he finally said good-bye.

One of the unique privileges of working as a curator is the opportunity to work with artists, to engage in extended and frank discussions about their art, and to help realize their vision on the museum walls. As a specialist in nineteenth-century photography, I have this opportunity somewhat less frequently than my colleagues. Yet my first assignment when I joined the staff of SFMOMA in 2003 was to take over the organization and installation of Larry’s exhibition, The Valley. The topic—suburban homes being used as the sets of porn movies—fell somewhere outside my range of expertise, and I soon found myself having daily conversations with Larry on subjects I would not have imagined discussing when I got into this line of work. It became quickly apparent, however, that the pictures in The Valley were only nominally about the porn industry that flourishes in the San Fernando Valley where Sultan spent his youth and adolescence. They were, like so much of his work, an exploration of the physical and emotional place we call home.

The Valley began as a magazine commission to photograph a day in the life of a porn star at work. The film location was a suburban house in the Valley, rented from its upper-middle class owner—a dentist—for the day. Intrigued by the way that the familiar domestic setting of his youth could so easily be transformed into the backdrop for erotic fantasy, Larry went back on his own. Between 1998 and 2003, he photographed on the sets of nearly one hundred adult films made in Valley homes or on sound stages designed to look like them. On set, he kept to the edges, maintaining a physical and psychological distance from the narrative of the film itself. He found his subject on the margins, in the crude seams of the film’s backdrops and in the utter banality of the actors’ working day. By showing the places where the illusion fell apart, Larry’s pictures not only deflated the erotic fantasies of the pornographic picture, but also provided an object lesson in the fictions that even the most straightforward of photographs construct.

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December 6th marked the 40-year anniversary of what’s well known only as “Altamont”—the end of the sixties.  Los Angeles-based independent curator Jenée Misraje talks with two artists (named Sam) who’ve dealt with the history of Altamont in distinct ways.

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JENÉE MISRAJE

1969. It began with Richard Nixon assuming the White House, the last public performance of The Beatles, and the release of Led Zeppelin I. That summer Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and a multitude experienced peace, love, and harmony at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. 1969 ended with the arrest of several Manson family members in connection to the Tate / La Bianca murders and with the controversial free concert that took place on Saturday, December 6, at Altamont Speedway.

Poorly planned and marred by violence, the day-long spectacle was captured by filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and incorporated in the documentary Gimme Shelter (released in 1970). It was attended by over 300,000. There were reportedly four births and four deaths (three accidents and one homicide). The victim of the homicide was eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter, a young black man from Berkeley who was attending the concert with his white girlfriend. The Hells Angels had been hired as the event’s security. Hunter attempted to approach the stage during the Stones’ performance of Under My Thumb. According to the official account, Hunter had pulled out a gun during a fatal scuffle with the Angels broke out. He was stabbed and beaten to death.

Several years ago, while conducting research for my thesis, I began examining the era of the late 60—particularly 1969. I was focused on the art produced in ‘69, as well as living artists whose work was rooted in this moment. I engaged in conversations with fellow curators, scholars and others who had a prominent interest in the late 60s—and among those were the artist Sam Durant and the filmmaker Sam Green.

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[Assistant curator of painting + sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio, on the Utah desert, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and more. Part I is here.]

In August I went to Utah for the first time to continue my art-mediated obsession with desert landscapes. I traveled to a portion of The Great Basin—famous home to the Great Salt Lake, the Mormon Church, the glorious Wasatch Mountains, and the Bingham Copper Pit. My purpose, however, was to see the Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson and the Sun Tunnels (1973 – 76) by Nancy Holt (two earthworks made by artists who were, incidentally, married), as well as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover base (active since 1996).

My journey began with a visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), where my friend and former colleague Jill Dawsey (now curator of contemporary art at UMFA) had organized the exhibition Desert Secrets, comprised of photographs from the museum’s collection. Trevor Paglen’s photos—about the geography of state secrecy—were of course already familiar to me. And although I was familiar with Richard Misrach’s work, I had never seen his stunning photograph Chrysler Newport, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah (1992), of an abandoned old car in the middle of the white, crackling desert, taken in an area in Utah renowned for being so flat and expansive that when you stand in it you can see the earth’s curvature. Misrach has been photographing desert landscapes for over 35 years, and has produced a large body of work referred to as the Desert Cantos, about which Reyner Banham has written, “Misrach’s images are important because they make us see with the eye of art this man-mauled desert that we try not to see in real life, and to see that it is beautiful.” Coming away from the exhibition, I was reminded again of the ominous presences the desert conceals: military bases, nuclear test sites, industrial wreckage. These harbingers of doom are of course interspersed with revelatory moments of natural wonder, making the desert a place rife with contradictions.

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Thirty years ago this fall the artist Jim Pomeroy and SFMOMA curator Suzanne Foley were corresponding about his proposal to include his text “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” in her survey of 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance practices, Space/Time/Sound.  In light of recent discussions on Open Space about the New Langton Arts crisis and the role of nonprofit arts organizations, Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, here revisits Pomeroy’s analysis of modern art museums vs. artists’ spaces. Wonderfully, we are also able to present for the first time a downloadable PDF of his original text and images of their letters.

“To what extent does a larger organization, in absorbing new artistic practices, need to support or point to the smaller institutions that pioneered them?”

In the midst of the debate in August surrounding the pending closure of the San Francisco-based nonprofit New Langton Arts (NLA) writer and curator Patricia Maloney posed this question as part of a larger comment on the perhaps inevitable comparison between NLA and SFMOMA as our blog brought increased visibility to the latter’s predicament. Open Space became a forum for the community to evaluate the struggling institution and speculate on its tactical errors, opening up space for criticism of both organizations.

This end-of-an-era reflection on the blog made me think back to the perceived paradoxes and inherent tensions surrounding SFMOMA’s own attempts, through a two-phase exhibition initiative held thirty years ago, to ‘support or point to the smaller institutions’ that had fostered the breadth of activity associated with Bay Area Conceptual art. In reading Julian Myers’s series of discussion threads on the NLA crisis and the political ethos that generated the emergence of the alternative visual arts space movement in the 1970s, I’ve kept returning to that moment. Specifically, to a text-based piece by the artist Jim Pomeroy (1945–1992) featured in the major SFMOMA survey Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (December 21, 1979–February 13, 1980). The work was in itself predicated on dialogues about the fundamental differences between collecting institutions and the parallel system of artist-run spaces. Entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, the piece consisted of enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, the late Suzanne Foley (at SFMOMA 1968–81) and Pomeroy’s paper, of the same title, written for The New Arts Space conference in Santa Monica organized by LAICA in 1978. It is worth noting here that Pomeroy lived upstairs from 80 Langton Street (what later became NLA) and as co-founder, had been instrumental in formulating its mission and goals. Back in 1978 Langton described itself as a “forum for art work, which requires a more flexible, responsive context and more direct critical/supportive feedback than traditional institutions can provide.”

Space/Time/Sound represented twenty-one of the more prominent artists/artist groups of the time, highlighting the work that came out of sculptural concerns—performance actions, installations, video art, slide projections—rather than the sculpture (objects), drawings, photography, etc. that we also associate with a number of the same artists and the broader scope of the movement. Pomeroy had performed as part of Foley’s Exchange DFW/SFO (1975-1976) at Fort Worth Museum of Art and at SFMOMA. Several of the artists on the Space/Time/Sound checklist had either been in that or other SFMOMA group presentations, and in certain cases had been given solo shows at the museum. Taken together, Space/Time/Sound was trying to tell a story of how often temporal or site-specific work produced in the Bay Area had inhabited a full range of other arts organizations and non-art spaces—university museums, temporary storefronts, alternative spaces, galleries, studios, streets.

Foley’s colleague Rolando Castellón (SFMOMA curator 1972–81, co-founder of Galería de la Raza) had the overall vision for a Bay Area-centric exhibition series that would include Foley’s presentation and would begin in 1978 with a more direct acknowledgement of the achievements of alternative spaces.  He invited the artist-directors of three prominent San Francisco-based alternative spaces—The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Museum of Conceptual Art (Tom Marioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler)—to program at the museum, highlighting their roles as producer, promoter, and publisher. Each exhibition touched on a signature aspect of their respective projects including live events, while activating the transformed gallery space(s)—from a zine library of correspondence art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.

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[Charles Bernstein responds to recent discussions about his review "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?" in last winter's Parkett. --SS]

Suzanne Stein has asked me to make some comments on two posts on Open Space, one by Kevin Killian and then Julian Myers’s response (to which several responses were subsequently posted). Both Killian (whom I know for many years) and Myers (whose name is new to me) focused at least in part on a review I wrote for Parkett magazine of Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, titled “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?“. I wrote my review of Shaw’s book in December 2008 and it was published by Parkett this past winter.

In his post, Killian gently chides me for not giving the original source of my ironic title, which I guess I took for granted. But the sentiment has become a kind of received wisdom, removed from the specifics of Brion Gysin’s original remark:

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint . . . lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be “the very own words” of anyone else living or dead. You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.

Killian and I would both be sympathetic to Gysin’s point—and indeed my “experiments list” (based in part on Bernadette Mayer’s) is deeply indebted to Gysin. Gysin was arguing for a poetry that challenged the conventional norms of “official verse culture”—that would use cut-ups, visual display, parataxis, and appropriated language to create a new kind of poetry. (See William Burroughs/Brion Gysin, The Third Mind.) But it was never true that the actual practice of poetry was ahead or behind the visual arts. Gertrude Stein may get less respect in the mainstream than Pablo Picasso, but the one is neither ahead nor behind the other. Frank O’Hara is as significant in his poetry as Robert Rauschenberg in his art, to take an example from my review. And poetry has one advantage in the postwar period: its publication and criticism is not dominated by market values. (Of course, for the poète chétif this is hardly an advantage at all.) Certainly, naïve conceptions of representations, narrative continuity, and expression (what I once called “ideational mimesis”) have great credibility in official verse culture, but no more so than in the stylistically strait-jacketed critical writing (and enforced copyediting) of the major art magazines. (As I’ve said before: I don’t blame the writers but the market-driven focus of the editors/publishers.) (more…)

[From Elizabeth Gand, SFMOMA assistant curator of photography.]

It’s a sad spring in the world of photography: Helen Levitt passed away at the end of March—quietly, in her sleep, at the age of 95. New York has lost its great visionary poet, who photographed scenes from everyday life with unsurpassed wit and imagination. We feel the loss acutely here at SFMOMA, where her work has been admired, collected, and celebrated. In 1991, SFMOMA collaborated with the Met on Ms. Levitt’s first retrospective—a major event that brought renewed attention to her work after it had been neglected for decades. From a personal perspective, the news of Helen’s death left me stunned and bereft. Partly that’s because I’m writing a dissertation on her work, but mostly because she had become a treasured friend. I had the immeasurable pleasure of spending many months with Helen in New York City: I’d come around in the afternoon, bring her apple or cherry pie, and spend the evening transfixed by her opinions, anecdotes, jokes, and memories. (more…)

[SFMOMA associate curator of Public Programs Frank Smigiel arrived on the scene here a year and a half ago, and in record time he's implemented a whole new SFMOMA programming vehicle, Live Art. This blog has been following his projects with interest, in part because of their boundary-pushing & often community-attentive nature, but also because, on more than one occasion, there's been cabaret involved. Here Frank waxes prophetic (as opposed to nostalgic) on last year's Valentine's Day-era cabaret extravaganza Weimar New York: A Golden Gate Affair, and its seedling relationship to his ever-expanding set of Live Art programs.]

Just before the holiday weekend last year I was immersed in a week of activities surrounding Weimar New York, a radical cabaret created by curator, producer, and all-around downtown New York impresario Earl Dax. The show uses Weimar-era Germany as a rubric & reference to gather burlesque, cabaret, comedy, drag, and East Village-flavored performance artists. The goal: to sing, dance, strip, and think out loud about oppositional politics, sexual identity, dependence and independence, and living, as co-host Justin Bond tells us in his introduction, “between the first terrorist attack and the last.” Weimar’s thematics seemed suited to San Francisco, though SFMOMA as its stage might, at first glance, prove more puzzling. Many museums, seeing a nineteenth-century model of contemplation and civic edification coming unglued in our unending era of mass entertainment, have turned to the more popular models of live music, DJ sets, and Hollywood as a means of pumping new life blood — not to mention new bodies — into the museum-form. Yet it’s also true that many artists today turn to popular, or perhaps what I like to call vernacular, forms as a medium for their work. Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) can run a low-watt, community-based radio station; the Center for Tactical Magic can dispatch its Tactical Ice Cream Unit to deliver ice cream and political pamphlets, tactics, and information; Lisa Anne Auerbach can knit fashionable sweaters that serve as calls-to-arms and not haute couture.

(Above: Justin Bond. Photo: Aimee Shapiro)

I came to SFMOMA with the hope of introducing a live strand of visual arts practice that might complement the gallery-based, exhibition-model SFMOMA has already been doing — for 75 years.  With a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we were able to launch Live Art @ SFMOMA: a series well documented on this blog and so far including Eve Sussman & the Rufus Corporation, Fritz Haeg, Rene Yanez, and Tony Labat. Next month, we’ll bring a version of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses, reconceived by William Kentridge with the Handspring Puppet Company. Other upcoming artists on the Live Art roster include Mika Tajima/New Humans and Charles Atlas; Marie Lorenz , OPENrestaurant, Allison Smith, Rebecca Solnit, and so on. All of these artists, I would contend — and so all Live Art projects — seek to re-imagine relationships with audiences and to explore art-work through this new vision. In this, Live Art follows the model of the recent Art of Participation: 1950 to Now exhibition, and tries, like RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa biennial, to highlight the way live engagements with audiences have, across the last 100 years, revived art practices across visual culture.

But all of this began, for me, in many ways, with Weimar New York — and in Weimar, you can see the DNA of the Live Art series.

If you were one of the 800 + folks lucky enough to see the shows last February 13th (the durational cabaret model, leading cohost Ana Matronic to quip: “this show has now lasted longer than the Weimar Republic”) or the 14th (the tighter model, where Marga Gomez reminded us: “Thanksgiving and Christmas point out what’s wrong with your family; Valentine’s Day points out what’s wrong with you.”), I’m sure you had an amazing time. I am also sure you looked fabulous. But behind the amazing or the fabulous — and all the Weimar folks were amazing and fabulous –  was the fact that Weimar worked: as art, as entertainment, as a reinterpretation of known forms, and as a successful model of community imagined and achieved, even if for only one or two nights.

(Below: The Pixie Harlots, backstage Weimar New York. Photo: McKenzie Glynn)

I might note that before New York and before Weimar, Earl Dax worked as a community organizer, at one time with LilyYeh’s Village for Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia-a highly successful example of neighborhood-arts outreach and local transformation through the arts. Dax approaches Weimar New York as if it were a continuation of this earlier gig. Here’s Dax describing Weimar to Time Out New York: “I often refer to the work that I do as a kind of community organizing, among a community of artists that has been ravaged over the past 30 years by ongoing forces: gentrification, AIDS, defunding of the arts, the culture wars.”

And so it was in San Francisco. In our version, Weimar New York: A Golden Gate Affair, cohosts Ana Matronic and Justin Bond returned to the city where they became who they are; geographically far-flung performers like musical director Lance Horne, Daniel Isengart, Meow Meow, Novice Theory, and NYC-legend Penny Arcade made SF debuts; and SF-based artists like Harlem Shake Burlesque, Kitten on the Keys, Veronica Klaus, Stephen Pelton, Vinsantos, and Paula West showed why everyone should move here in the first place. In my own memory of Weimar, behind-the-scenes and backstage, a small community was born-as I know it was in the performance space itself. No real gulf here, between star and fan. Instead, artist and audience act as co-conspirators, old friends, lovers, or attractive strangers. Weimar brings a certain glitteratti together and suggests that, with just a touch of the right make-up, we’re all back-stage and with the band. Improbably together.

(Right: Meow Meow. Photo: Aimee Shapiro)

I titled this piece “My Weimar” after a Dave Hickey essay in his Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy — but I was re-reading the book yesterday and realized I had the wrong essay. I was thinking of a piece, “Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme,” where Hickey remembers his jazz bohemian childhood in Texas, when his dad gathers an unlikely cast of characters to jam at their house. Hickey’s wife reads the draft essay and tells him “it would be read as an allegory of ethnic federalism in which two African-Americans, a Latino, four Irish-Americans, and a German Jewess seek refuge from the dominant culture in order to affirm their solidarity with the international underclass.”

Hickey “squealed”: “But it was not that way at all.” He goes on to imagine how the scene could be rightly rendered, in all its potential sentimentality, utopian promise, and real-life deal. He decides only Norman Rockwell or Johnny Mercer could have figured this one out, replete as they are “in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement,” albeit one always devoted to the exception and never the norm, one sensitive to the nuance and the individual, one critical of the category.

It is this spirit I always recognize in Weimar New York. Weimar is always many things: entertaining, educational, naughty, satirical, affirmative. It’s about complication and contradiction, not always consensus (though the Boos! at conservative politics are there too). It’s about history and the now. And it’s all these things because of who it gathers: an improvisational, unlikely, even outrageous cast of characters, who cook up a rhythm and riff just so. As my model for Live Art, Weimar nods to projects like these: the jam band that starts together, even if it ends apart.

(Left: The Pixie Harlots, Weimar NY! Photo: Aimee Shapiro)

CODA:
Hickey’s actual “My Weimar” tells the story of his Weimar Theater professor, Walther Volbach. Herr Volbach, a refugee of that time and place, tells his idiosyncratic story: all the 20th century wars draw off the “Aryan muscle-boys” to fight, and when the Aryan muscle-boys get back, they find “the culture of their nation being run by effeminate, Semitic, commercial pansies!” The AM-B can only fight back by seizing public cultural power, via government and universities:

“So all the muscle-boy artists and writers, they will become professors and darlings of professors, and they will teach the young to revere their pure, muscle-boy art, because it is good for them, and they will teach women and Jews and queers to make this muscle-boy art too. And it will be very pure, because they are muscle-boys and they don’t have to please anyone. So there will be no cabaret, no pictures, no fantasy or flashing lights, no filth or sexy talk, no cruelty, no melodies, no laughter, no Max Reinhardt, no Ur-Faust, no A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And nobody will love it.”

He also adds that “nobody will pay money to own it or see it” — because money is “a Jew thing, a queer thing, and a silly woman thing” — though it’s quite the artist’s thing. Herr Volbach concludes: “So all you Aryan muscle-boys down there at the end of the table, Don’t be Aryan muscle-boys! I have seen enough official culture. I will teach you how to hit your marks and set the lights and make the tempo float. The rest you will have to learn from women and queers — out in the dark.”

My Weimar, indeed.

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Frank Smigiel is Associate Curator, Public Programs at SFMOMA, where he designs and implements artists’ talks & public projects, visual arts-based performance, and film.

You can see more pictures of Weimar New York: A Golden Gate Affair here.

Tell us about Your Weimar!

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.

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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.

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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.

[This Saturday, as part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and timely to our winter holidays, we'll be screening Bay Area filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Winner of the prestigious Critic's Prize at the Rotterdam International film festival, this real-life documentary comedy follows Zahedi on a road trip to Las Vegas with his father and half-brother, in an attempt to prove the existence of God. When it isn't going in the direction he would like, he attempts to force God's hand by trying to persuade his father, half-brother and a heart-sick sound recordist to take Ecstasy with him. All thanks to Caveh for this backstory introduction to the film:]

When my first feature, A Little Stiff, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, I took the opportunity to pitch a dozen or so ideas to film producer James Schamus (now co-president of Focus Features). Of all the ideas I pitched him, his favorite (which he offered to produce) was also the least commercial — a film about taking a road trip to Las Vegas with my gambling-addicted Iranian father and teenage half-brother. Career-wise, it was so counter-intuitive to make that my next film that I decided it must be the right thing to do.

Since I didn’t really know how to write a script, I decided to travel to Las Vegas with my father, my half-brother, and a tape recorder. I figured I could just record our conversations for three days, transcribe those conversations, edit them down to a ninety-page script, and voilà. Which is exactly what I did.

I submitted the script to James Schamus who tried but failed to raise the $200,000 needed to make it. After two years of rejection letters, I finally got a grant from the American Film Institute for $20,000 to shoot the film. Because much of the film took place in a Las Vegas casino and some of it took place underwater (in the casino’s swimming pool), it wasn’t possible to shoot the script that I had written (or, more accurately, transcribed) on that budget. What to do?

I called the American Film Institute and explained my predicament. I also explained to them that while waiting for the funding to come through, I had written another script entitled I Am A Sex Addict which I would rather shoot instead, if it was okay with them, simply because it was more recent and seemed more commercially viable. They explained to me that I could depart from the original script as long as I kept the title and the original premise — in this case, a weekend road trip to Las Vegas.

I was broke at the time and didn’t want to say no to $20,000. So I agreed to shoot a film with that title and premise, and set about trying to figure out how to do it for $20,000. What I decided to do was to throw out the script and just re-enact anything interesting that happened on the trip, immediately after it happened. This quickly proved impossible to pull off, mostly because it became clear almost immediately that my father couldn’t act.

So the film became a kind of documentary about this second trip, although this time there was a camera crew who became the secondary characters in the film. I brought some Ecstasy along to spice things up just in case nothing interesting happened, and what actually did happen I never in a million years could have imagined.

I spent two years editing the film (which was shot in 3 days) and submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival. Because I shot and edited on film, the tape splices broke during the projection and the Sundance programmer, angry that I had wasted his time, called to tell me that I would have to send him a VHS copy. I later heard through the grapevine that he HATED the film, and that he spoke vituperatively about me and the film for years afterwards. I soon learned that he would not be the only person to HATE my movie.

Whereas my previous film had been bought by both the Sundance Channel and German Television, this film never made a penny. It basically destroyed (irrevocably?) my once-promising film career. Despite winning the Critic’s Prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival when it premiered there, the film was panned by almost every single American film critic and reviewer. One rather eminent critic called me a “twerp.” I was depressed for a year.

A few years later, I met Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M.  I told him how much I loved his songs, and he asked me if I was the guy who made I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore. “You’ve seen it?” I asked him. He told me that he had, and that it had become a cult film in Athens, Georgia. That was the first time I’d heard anyone talk about that film as a cult film, but I heard it again and again over the years.

The film is almost impossible to find. It has never been released on DVD, and it has long since been out of print on VHS (the company that distributed it eventually went broke). I couldn’t even get the master back from the lab because the distributor never paid them and they were holding my film as ransom.

But time has a way of changing things. What is unquestionably my least successful film ever is, in the eyes of many, the best film I ever made. Many people who hated the film when they first saw it have since come around and now like it. I’m not sure how to explain this. Was it ahead of its time? Has the world caught up to it? Was it just bad timing?

In any case, it’s a film that is very close to my heart. I started dating my current wife after she saw the film and fell in love with it. Without this film, my life would have been completely different.

San Francisco
December 2008

Caveh Zahedi received a B.A. in Philosophy at Yale University and an M.F.A. in Film Production at the UCLA School of Film and Television. His feature-length films include A Little Stiff (1991), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), In The Bathtub of the World (2001), and I Am A Sex Addict (2005).

[We're a lot about Derek Jarman on the blog of late. It's been for many of us in the theater a process of discovery and rediscovery, and if the conversations I've participated in and overheard are a good barometer, even for those who are more familiar with Jarman's oeuvre it isn't as much meeting an old friend as re-encountering a familiar stranger you're not quite sure what to do with. James Mackay, who produced numerous films with Jarman, writes here about the production of The Angelic Conversation, the first feature they made together, detailing especially the development of Jarman's signature use of lo-fi film mediums including Super 8 mm and video. Mr. Mackay has also sent some fantastic snapshots taken on location during the shooting of The Angelic Conversation. We'll be screening that film this Saturday at 3pm. Enjoy.]

Left to right: Derek Jarman, Philip Williamson, Ken Bolton. Taking a break from filming The Angelic Conversation (1985). Photo: James Mackay.

The first I heard about Derek Jarman was at an exhibition of Expanded Cinema at the ICA in 1974. They were showing a three-screen version of In the Shadow of the Sun. I didn’t meet Derek until much later, however, at the London Filmmakers Co-op in the late 70s, when I invited him to show some of the many Super8mm films he’d made. That night Derek showed some twenty films, projecting them himself from two small Bolex projectors he’d brought with him, and accompanying the films with a selection of music from commercial audio cassettes – like a DJ really. He kept the audience enthralled for almost three hours.

During the prep for that show we’d discussed the merits and disadvantages of working in Super8mm, especially the problem of fragility, and when we met again it was mainly to talk about preservation of his S8mm films. At the time however Derek was also very excited about the two features he had in development – Caravaggio and Neutron – and every time we met he would read aloud from each revision.  Using my contacts in Europe, I was able to raise funding to have a 16mm negative made from the Super8mm original of In the Shadow of the Sun. This was Derek’s first magnum opus and the result of four years of filming and many layered composites.

As we spent more time together I was slowly drawn into the production process, from script consultant to development producer on Caravaggio. However, as that film was proving difficult to get off the ground Derek continued to work on other projects with the more accessible medium of Super 8 mm. TG Psychic Rally in Heaven (1981) was our first film conceived to be shot on S8mm but then completed on a more distributable format, in that case, 16mm. This was followed by a series of films mixing S8mm and 16mm. Our first foray into large-scale production started during a session at the ICA, where we were preparing a selection of Derek’s early S8mm films for a run in the cinema by transferring them to video. We were doing this by projecting the S8 films onto a white wall and reshooting them with a video camera. Halfway through the second day we started to get a bit bored with this process and began to experiment with a large tarnished mirror and the projectionist, Steve Randall. Derek projected the image on to Steve and the mirror while filming the scene with the video camera. This was an exciting new departure, and the material we filmed that day was the first step in making The Angelic Conversation.

Derek Jarman, Ken Reynolds. On location for The Angelic Conversation, Somerset. Photo: James Mackay.

With Agfa selling off its colour stock cheap – £2.5 for a cartridge, including processing – it was decided that our new project should be something more ambitious than a short. The combination of low-cost stock and Derek’s preferred shooting speed of 6fps meant that a little stock went a long way. There were to be two central characters. Derek had met Paul Reynolds at the Bell in King’s X and somehow I found Phillip Williamson. The idea was to create a free-form love poem with these two young men at its center.

We filmed the sequences for the new work gradually over the course of a summer. As our resources were very limited – neither of us had any real income at that time – we could only afford to film one or two days at a time. Derek chose all the locations. I devised the smoke and flares. Ken Bolton or another friend would drive and as there was only room for four, with a driver, Derek, & myself there was space for only one of the principal actors on each location shoot! The only time the actors were filmed together was for the bed scene in Derek’s Charing X Road flat.

Other scenes, with extras, were filmed in the ICA cinematheque. A video-only sequence was filmed in Derek’s flat. After each shoot the film was sent off for processing. As soon as it came back we would borrow a U-matic recorder from the British Film Institute on the other side of Charing X Road and then video the films off the wall. It all sounds a bit amateurish but we were deadly serious. (more…)

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[A special election-week Collection Rotation by San Francisco-based artist & curator Chris Sollars, whose experimental documentary C RED BLUE J will be screening in the Wattis theater Nov 4. All works collection SFMOMA & listed in detail at the bottom of this post.]

At Home in Red & Blue Brother Sister America

Growing up, my sister Jennifer was Red and I was Blue, between the colors of objects in our rooms, beds, clothes, and backpacks. Looking back, I think it’s strange that growing up during the 70s and 80s Reagan’s Republican America appropriated Socialist RED from the USSR.

The opening dream of my recent film C RED BLUE J was a playful way to study the color red used in politics: A Red Phone rings and alerts us of the Enemy—the British Red Coats, The Red Man (not Karl Marx, but he is next), Soviet Red, Red China—and is intercut with a Red finger painting from my childhood, Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds, and Red USA Olympic Athlete Jackets. The USA Formal Athlete Jackets, ironically, are from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, boycotted by the Soviet Union. I almost think it was a conscious decision to appropriate the “Enemy’s” color as a way to diffuse or re-appropriate it.

In the title C RED BLUE J,  C is for Christopher, J is for Jennifer and the RED & BLUE is between us. It also is a play on words: to See a Red Blue Jay, something you would never see but could imagine. Here to coincide with the election I am using C RED BLUE J as a model and method for selecting works from the SFMOMA collection.

I’ve squeezed some of my favorite artists from the collection into the mix. Gordon Matta-Clark, Hans Haacke, Pipilotti Rist, Phillip Guston, Robert Gober, and Edward Kienholz. New favorites from recent visits include Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] and Tim Gardner’s Untitled (S with Mt. Robson). (Not only is “S” holding a Mt Beer can in front of a mountain, the beer is a BUScH!)

I’ve included Nauman’s Study for Hologram, in part because of his influence (along with William Wegman’s)  both on my work and my voice in C RED BLUE J.  There my voice is presented by cutting back and forth between close-ups of my eyes and mouth while talking. Here, Nauman’s Study suggests to me ideas of self-censorship in America. Friedlander’s House on Highway and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (one of my favorite works of all time) have changed for me, both from reconsidering the construction and deconstruction of my childhood homes, and since the housing market collapse. It’s great that these works are so accessible and constant but continuously shifting and changing in meaning as the world does.

The personal narrative in this sequence of works is further activated for me through the inclusion of children. Boys and Girls as Brother and Sister add a playfulness to the RED & BLUE pairings. This also allows for my sister and I to be included in the series of works selected from the collection.

Enjoy,

Chris Sollars

[Works, in order of appearance: Mathew B. Brady, Untitled (Portrait of a Brother and Sister) ca. 1850; Ellsworth Kelly, Blue/Red-Orange, 1970-1972, © Ellsworth Kelly; Bill Owens, 4th of July Parade, Livermore, California, 1970s, © Bill Owens; Hans Haacke, Blue Sail, 1964-1965, © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Unknown, Untitled [Baby on Red Velvet Chair] ca. 1870; Ann Hamilton, Indigo Blue, 1991/2007, © Ann Hamilton; Barry McGee, Untitled, 1996, © Barry McGee; Thomas Frederick Arndt, Inauguration Parade, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1989, 1989, © Thomas Frederick Arndt; Tim Gardner, Untitled (S with Mt. Robson), 2002, © Tim Gardner; Pipilotti Rist, Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004, © Pipilotti Rist; Philip Guston, Blue Light, 1975, © Estate of Philip Guston; Shiro Kuramata, Cappellini, Manufacturer, Revolving Cabinet, 1970; Rineke Dijkstra, Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, 1993, © Rineke Dijkstra; Bill Owens, Tidy Bowl, Walnut Creek, 1979, © Bill Owens; Anna Atkins, Ceylon, ca. 1850; Edward Kienholz, Tomorrow’s Leaders Are Busy Tonight, 1961, © Edward Kienholz Estate; William Heick, Thomas, Red Arrow Dump, 1949, © William Heick; Robert Gober, Rat Bait, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Gerhard Richter, Spiegel, blutrot (Blood Red Mirror), 1991, © Gerhard Richter; Robert Gober, Newspaper, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Karim Rashid, V-Soul, 1999, © Karim Rashid; Emmet Gowin, Elijah and Donna Jo, Danville, Virginia, 1971, © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Bruce Nauman, Study for Hologram, 1970, © 2008 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Lee Friedlander, Colorado, 1967, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Lee Friedlander, House on Highway, 1975, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting,1974, © 2008 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Unknown, Untitled [African American Woman with Two White Children], ca. 1860; Alexander Girard, Salt and Pepper Shaker for La Fonda del Sol Restaurant, New York, ca. 1960; Unknown, American, Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] * n.d.]

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Chris Sollars‘ work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of public space through urban interventions, the results of which are integrated into mixed media video installations. Chris is also director and curator of 667Shotwell, which he started in 2001, during the wake of disappearing San Francisco art-spaces. The recently completed C RED BLUE J is an experimental documentary featuring his sister, who works for the Bush Administration, his Born Again father, and his Lesbian mother to illustrate the complications of division during the 2004 Presidential election.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris & Wim,  North Adams, MA

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

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

[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.

[In what will become a regular feature, we'll invite a local writer, artist, visitor, or observer to respond in whatever manner they choose (given the limits of blog-hosting technology) to an exhibition, public program, film, or object on view. In this first installment, poet Eleni Stecopoulos reflects on the An-My Lê exhibition, Small Wars, on view now through May 4.]

SMALL WARS: THE AMERICAN CHRONOTOPE

Eleni Stecopoulos

An-My Lê; 29 Palms: Mechanized Assault, 2003-04; Courtesy Murray Guy Gallery, New York

American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line…this perennial rebirth…this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

- Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. - Ambrose Bierce

At the 5th anniversary, the war in Iraq remains “over there”—an abstraction for many Americans, despite the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not over one million, Iraqis. Americans have had the luxury of regarding war as something that takes place in other people’s countries.

By documenting large-scale exercises in artifice that uncannily relocate foreign wars to American landscapes, An-My Lê’s Small Wars and 29 Palms pose imaginative provocation to this illusion. Pine forests in Virginia stand in for the jungles of Vietnam. The Mojave stands in for the desert outside Baghdad or Basra or Kandahar. Lê turns her gaze on two American regions, the South and the West, perhaps the most mythologized in the nation, which themselves hold historical battlefields and spaces of conflict.

Much of Small Wars was shot in Virginia, home to Manassas, Appomattox, and more battles than any other state in the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. The Civil War was the first major American war to be photographed and covered by the media on a large scale. It was a war that took place at home, where families combed the battlefields to recover the bodies of loved ones. Although the legacies of the Civil War remain grossly evident throughout the nation—in race relations, politics, and culture wars—only the South actively remembers it.

On the ground of the world’s “first modern war,” Virginians reenact what became known as “America’s longest war.” In an artist’s talk, Lê confirmed that these men often begin as Civil War reenactors before “moving on” to World War II and then Vietnam. Their reenactments take place on land that bears the memory of its own war, land revered as hallowed ground.

The South holds a space of memory, preservation, resistance to change. It plays the past in American mythology. And across from it stands the West, a space of invention and self-invention, the infinite possibilities of the future.

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote the poet Charles Olson. (more…)