Image: A salt desert, looking toward the center of the Spiral Jetty. Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

[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.

Well-stocked with water and fuel, Jill and I set out for the Spiral Jetty. Smithson realized this monumental earthwork with the help of two dump trucks employed to move 6,650 tons of basalt rocks and earth from the shore of the Great Salt Lake into a spiral formation that stretches out into the water. This work helped to redefine physical and conceptual art practices in the 1970s, so my sense of anticipation was high. On our way we stopped to see the Golden Spike Monument, commemorating the spot where the lines of the first transcontinental railroad meet I was struck by the Spiral Jetty’s canny proximity to this historic monument, just twelve miles north of the earthwork. The natural, entropic patterns of the environment—the rising and falling water levels, the changing density of the salt crystals, the shifting visibility of the red micro-bacteria—and the lake’s relation to industry all enfold into Smithson’s idea of the work, meant, in part, to remind us of our own human and cultural relationship to monumentality.

I expected to see “the countless bits of wreckage” and the “fragments of junk” Smithson recounted upon first visiting the site, vestiges of the oil drilling that once took place nearby and that threatened the work’s preservation even just a year ago. But surprisingly, the industrial imprint near the Jetty was relatively invisible. Instead, I was bemused when our rented truck was overtaken by a herd of horses crossing the dirt road right in front of us, about nine miles away from the site. There must have been twenty of these beautiful beasts, a vision that colored my experience more romantic Wild West than industrial wasteland. A couple miles away from the site, we found ourselves discussing details like, what was the appropriate music to be listening to when the Jetty first slid into visibility? I thought back to a conversation I’d had with Julian Myers, who once told me Smithson owned several Elton John albums and a Black Sabbath LP. No, those wouldn’t do. We opted for the more ethereal, earthy sounds of Bay Area art band Coconut. Finally, at Rozel Point, I found myself pleasantly distracted by the profusion of little wild sunflowers dotting the shoreline.

Image: Horses, just before they crossed the dirt road leading to Rozel Point. Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

Outside, the atmosphere was dry and dizzyingly hot. About a decade ago the Jetty was rendered invisible by high lake waters; now the waterline is so far receded the terrain looks more lunar than lake-like. Jill and I trekked over the black basalt rocks lining the shore and out into the center, faithfully walking the entire 1500 foot length of the spiral. White salt crackled beneath our feet. We noticed a faint pink tinge to this scorched salty earth—the only sign of the lake’s signature red algae (and an important factor in Smithson’s selection of the site). I wondered if this was evidence of the ecosystem’s demise. Once in the center, we read aloud Smithson’s essay, The Spiral Jetty (1972), and I understood what he meant by “the mirage faded into the burning atmosphere.” I felt the blistering rays of the sun seep into my skin listening to Jill read, “Between the heat lightning and heat exhaustion the spiral curled into vaporization,” and I was blissfully enveloped in both Smithson’s language and the atmosphere he described. The essay ends with the artist’s notes delineating the dialectic of the Site (a place in nature) and the Non-site (nature displaced into a gallery/container)—one of his most significant conceptual contributions to art. Upon leaving, we playfully ruminated over what the Spiral Jetty’s “Non-site” might be, if such a thing existed. The film he, Nancy Holt, and Robert Fiore made after finishing the work? The ever-growing collection of Jetty documentation disseminated as its afterlife? The 2005 Smithson retrospective in New York—the center of the art world? We couldn’t decide. As we were walking back to shore, a stranger arrived and clambered down across the rocks. Looking out again from the lakeside we could see this lone flickering figure hovering above the spiral; his small human scale threw the Jetty’s monumentality into relief.

Image: The Stranger on the Jetty. Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

The next day, we set out for Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, by way of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), the self-described “research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface.”  For this adventure, we were joined by another former colleague of mine, Stephanie Schumann, a Utah native freshly arrived from New York. Many people travel to Holt’s Tunnels via the northwestern route around the lake, visiting CLUI afterward. We reversed this order and went to CLUI first, driving four hours from Salt Lake City to Wendover, a small town heavily saturated with casinos, situated on the border of Utah and Nevada. Passing through this desolate land made me think of Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays (1970), with Maria speeding down lost desert highways, eventually ending up in some forsaken casino, recklessly searching for an anchor.

CLUI’s facilities consist of two primary exhibit halls in nondescript former military barracks, and a residency facility where artists intermittently live and work. These buildings are scattered throughout a fenced area that appeared depressingly deserted—ruins of a once-thriving military compound. As we surveyed the area, we passed two foreboding hangars, one of which, we later learned, sheltered the Enola Gay bomber that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. This realization cast a surreal and deathly specter across the desert land. Spending time perusing CLUI’s informative displays of maps, photos, and written documentation on the surrounding landscape heightened my uneasy feeling. I came across one particularly unnerving schema of the Dugway Proving Ground, the nation’s primary testing ground for biological and chemical weapons. The label described it as “one of the most unusual, complex, and mysterious landscapes in the nation,” and indicated that some of its facilities were still active. And to think this invisible, menacing presence was only about fifty or so miles southeast of us, concealed by three mountain ranges. It was familiar to me because I had seen Paglen’s photo that attempted to document it from a distance of 42 miles away (in SFMOMA’s collection). CLUI’s displays reinforced many of the ideas present in Jill’s Desert Secrets exhibition, but looking at these documents and plans while actually being in the correlative desert space made it a profound experience. Though it seemed as if I was in the middle of nowhere, it became quite clear that I was decidedly somewhere.

Image: The Enola Gay Hanger. Photo by Stephanie Schumann

After CLUI, we headed directly for the Sun Tunnels; they were only about an hour away.

The Tunnels are notoriously difficult to find. We knew of people who had failed. Even with CLUI’s helpful directions, locating them proved a challenge, but I now understand that this difficulty is an inherent and significant part of the work. While still about ten miles away, Jill pulled out a chapter of Julian Myers’ dissertation she had printed out from the university library, evocatively titled “Scattered and Shining: On Nancy Holt, Lucin, Light, and Death.” She read us portions of it; namely a section that explained that Holt conceived of the Tunnels in Texas, just after Smithson died in an accidental plane crash in 1973, while she, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi posthumously completed Smithson’s earthwork Amarillo Ramp (1973). This, too, cast a melancholic, yet wistful tone to the excursion. The Sun Tunnels are located four miles from the town of Lucin, but it isn’t until you are veering left onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere that you realize the “town” consists of a railroad crossing, an abandoned white shack, and a signpost. As we passed “Lucin,” Smithson’s multiple mentions of it in the essay we’d read the previous day echoed in my thoughts. Holt says she searched areas of New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, looking for the perfect location for the Tunnels, and I couldn’t help but think that the location she ultimately chose, in the Great Salt Desert just about four hours away from the Spiral Jetty, was not a coincidence. And upon further reflection, there are more threads intertwining the two sites: the nearby railroad tracks (and the implied demise of the railroad), the Great Salt Lake versus the Great Salt Desert (the later seems an inversion of the former), the disorienting, bumpy dirt roads crisscrossing the landscapes, the inescapable heat. Yet, if Smithson’s intention was to highlight our relationship to the monumental, perhaps Holt’s was to demonstrate that the unmonumental can be just as profound.

Image: Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

From a distance the Tunnels appear so small one must vigilantly scan the landscape in order to find them. Just as we started to wonder whether we were lost, Jill spotted them. We stopped the car and fixed our eyes on the distance. They were so faint we could have easily missed them. I tried to zoom in on them with the lens of my camera. Whether it was due to my excitement or the disorientating nature of the desert, I’m not sure, but somehow I unwittingly left my camera on the roof of our vehicle. Of course, I realized this only after we had already driven two or three miles back to the correct turn-off. Silly as it seems, the experience of spending the next hour or so searching for it in on the sides of the dirt road, amidst the desert shrubbery (and actually finding it!), focused our attention on the minutiae of the landscape and kept the presence of a camera at the forefront of our thoughts. This was significant because it helped us to reach the important collective conclusion that the Tunnels act as lenses unto their environs, framing the horizon line and the mountains in the distance.

Image: Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

Image: Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio

Black lines strafing the interior. Photo by Apsara Di Quinzio.	Bullet holes in a nearby sign. Photo by Stephanie Schumann

“My land is in a large, flat valley with very little vegetation—it’s land worn down by Lake Bonneville, an ancient lake that gradually receded over thousands of years. The Great Salt Lake is what remains of the original lake now, but it’s just a puddle by comparison. From my site you can see mountains with lines on them where the old lake bit into the rock as it was going down. The mirages are extraordinary; you can see whole mountains hovering over the earth, reflected upside down in the heat. The feeling of timelessness is overwhelming.”

Image: Reading “Sun Tunnels,” by Nancy Holt. Photo by Stephanie Schumann

Time is, indeed, a primary element of the earthwork, operating on many levels; Holt discusses this throughout her essay. I thought back to the year it took her to find this site, the several years it took her and others to build the work, and about how the work’s alignment with the constellations marks a universal, cyclical time. And I reflected on the day we spent traveling to the site, the amount of time the Hermit has spent isolated inside a nearby cave, and the shifting light and shadows we witnessed both inside and around the Tunnels—reminders of the earth’s physical movement, its rotational turn and revolution around the sun. As Holt remarks, “’Time’ is not just a mental concept or a mathematical abstraction in the desert…. [It] takes on a physical presence.” But this presence is not just witnessed in the environment; it evolves on a personal level too. As one of three women nestled inside a concrete tunnel, I was also again reminded of scale, and our own minute presence in this expansive desert land. The intimate experience inside the tunnel, reading Holt’s essay in the waning sunlight, was in great contrast to the vastness that enveloped us as we stepped outside. Driving away I fixed my eyes on the Tunnels and watched them dissolve back into the landscape, “into the mirages in the distance,” and I thought to myself there was no better way to experience the desert.

–Apsara DiQuinzio, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture

Jim Pomeroy performance announcement card Exchange DFW/SFO , January 23-March 7, 1976, SFMOMA. Photo: Jimmy Jalapeeno

“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.”

The bible of Bay Area Conceptual Art, published in 1981 by SFMOMA.

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.

Foley’s invitation letter to Pomeroy expresses interest in showing the panel from his sound-based performance Composition in D, 1974, a work she refers to as ‘pivotal’ and which “was important for me, as was the series [South of the Slot]. It would be good to have it represented though this piece.” A group of artists had generated the two-month South of the Slot series at 63 Bluxome in San Francisco, and its word-of-mouth success was partly what informed the desire for a continued alternative space, and the decision by the San Francisco Art Dealers Association to assist with the formation of 80 Langton Street.

Jim Pomeroy, Composition in D, a cantata for string trio and twelve music boxes. Participants: Howard Fried, Jim Pomeroy, Paul Kos, November 4, 1974, in “South of the Slot”, 63 Bluxome Street, San Francisco. Photo: Richard Alpert

I found the Foley/Pomeroy correspondence, and a copy of the conference paper, fortuitously, misfiled in our unprocessed exhibition archives, and after I stopped looking for it. Before this, I’d only ever seen citations of the project, and the full text was absent in related publications. I’m therefore happy to be able to present both documents in full here on the blog, at the end of this post. Whether or not Pomeroy’s piece achieved its potential for acting as “a kinetic situation, inviting dialogue and thought processes on the issue raised” as he hoped, given the text-and-photo-panel-heavy exhibition design, there are signs that his point—that it could not be ignored that one of the major and definitive changes in contemporary art of the 1970s was the self-determination and expanded role of artists in the founding of new arts spaces—was taken. A concern he had expressed in the paper was that “all too frequently, a museum or gallery will represent with massive publicity and documentation exhibitions or performances presented at artists’ spaces and fail to acknowledge the previous source of exposure.” Foley explicitly supported Pomeroy’s pro-artist premise, dedicating a full section of the comprehensive Space/Time/Sound catalogue to the ‘new alternative visual arts spaces’ and to the phenomenon Pomeroy refers to in his paper as the new ‘artist consciousness’, as well as including profiles in the exhibition on all of the Bay Area-based spaces including 80 Langton Street represented in the conference.

If Composition in D involved firing slingshots to silence alarms then Pomeroy’s Viewing the Museum took aim at various art world practices and its individual players. His biting anti-SFMOMA remarks—complete with quoting then-Director Henry Hopkins—go unmentioned in exhibition texts. Exemplifying Pomeroy’s wit and penchant for title punning, the piece was instead contextualized in didactics with the rest of his artistic practice as “approaching the subject much as he examines phenomena and objects, taking them apart, examining them and putting them back together in juxtapositions that make wry parodic comments on themselves.”

While sorting through this material, I came to realize that the way museum staff and colleagues often talk about Space/Time/Sound suggests a positive read of the exhibition, despite being allegedly unpopular within the museum, with the public, and in the press. We tell a tale of an exhibition that was ‘pivotal’ in generating primary research and documentation of how our brand of Conceptual art had manifested in the region. Foley and Castellón’s exhibitions have come to signify for the museum a productive collaboration with Bay Area artists, a bold curatorial risk in comparison to regular museum programming of the time, and an attempt at confronting the challenge of translating peer-oriented work to a museum’s more general audience. Artists speak fondly of the curators who championed them at a key turning point in their careers. Having digested the press clippings right before reading the Foley/Pomeroy exchange, I initially felt a bit protective of Foley, but with each rereading appreciated Pomeroy’s letter and his position more broadly. His assertion that most of the significant activity of the decade occurred outside of the museum was both a point that needed to be made as well as a point of contention for those who objected to—on principle or in practice—the museum historicizing the scene. In fact, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s scathing exhibition review dismisses the survey’s “slight tip of the hat to alternative spaces [that] suggests none of the richness of the network of personal relationships, underground institutions and events that shaped the development of Bay Area Conceptualism.”

Then SFMMA Assistant Director of Art George Neubert summarized in his wrap-up report for the NEA: “The critical response to the series of exhibitions and events was quite mixed and in some cases negative and derogatory. Because it was controversial to be treating “alternative” art in an “establishment” museum situation it was not easy to obtain private or corporate funding support.” Of course some of the complaints were just thinly disguised attacks on idea-based art and the non-commercial object rhetoric of the period, while other criticisms reflected a resentment of the way museum recognition is interpreted as ‘progress’ or ‘maturation.’ The latter anxieties are evident in Pomeroy’s paper: as he put it, the museum’s “posture of benevolent patriarchy” towards artists. In general, a recurrent sentiment of the time was that static documentation of past events was a poor substitute for first-hand experience, and thus despite the best of curatorial intentions, the museum had indeed become the mausoleum for the local avant-garde.

Even back then Pomeroy refers to his original paper as “a real period piece.” In reading it, we can identify obvious shifts in the art world since then, including the art market’s later embrace of once non-marketable artistic forms. There is a general climate of increased opportunities for emerging artists, productive moments of collaboration between museums and other nonprofits, and the rise of other models like artist-run galleries, not accounted for in his schematization, that would also absorb the experimental curatorial methodologies promoted by alternative spaces. Blogs are but one sign of the constant reevaluation of arts organizations in their relationship to artists and their audience. In contrast to this potential to alter one’s institutional image, the case of Space/Time/Sound speaks to the limits of what we might want an institution to represent.

13 September 1979

Suzanne Foley, Curator San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Dear Suzanne,

Thank you for your letter and invitation to SFMMA’s exhibition, “Space/Time/Sound-1970’s”. I will be happy to participate. I will, no doubt, be communicating with you shortly regarding the show, but wanted to initiate my proposal in writing, for reasons explained below.

Since this exhibition is described as an “end of the decade” reflection, I feel it is, indeed, appropriate “to take a look at that important aspect of Bay Area creative activity that extended the traditional definitions of art.” Your choice of concentrating “on artists whose expressions come out of sculptural concerns” is well founded, and I agree “a thoughtful look at a few artists can make a succinct statement which then sets the tone for all the other activity in the decade.” The fact that most of the significant activity of the decade occurred outside of the museum context is a point which must be made. To wit, I would like to include a work which I feel is indeed “pivotal” and in the sense that it remain pivotal, I would like to activate the museum and the spectator as co-respondents.

Proposal: Exhibit in the form of enlarged reproductions, my article “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog”  commissioned by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art for the conference The New Arts Space held in Santa Monica in April 1978, accompanied by copies of your letter of invitation to this exhibition, this letter, and your letter in response (as well as any other significant documents relevant to the work). All documents to be enlarged to the same size and exhibited as a suite of prints. The reproduction will be expedient and graphic (Photostat) and something like 11/2 to 2x original size.

Many of the reasons I feel this work to be pivotal or significant are stated in the article itself. For me, at least, it acknowledges a relatively new stature, posture, attitude, or identity for the artist—a position which seizes a responsibility for autonomy, often clumsily but assertive nonetheless, and determination which previously resided in more remote and dominating roles. Principally, these roles were administrator, critic, curator, director, publisher, agent, and significant audience. Most of these were not occupiable by artists, and seem to be closed to many others (like community representatives) as well. The major aspect of change in the arts in this decade is the explosion of considerable alternatives to traditional norms. Not style, as in ‘movement’ but movement, as in ‘away’. The reason that most museum directors and senior critics complain about doldrums in the seventies (and that most museum exhibitions justify that complaint) is that they can’t see the changes, because they’re not stylistic changes, but linguistic changes. If this exhibition is to be accurate in order to “set the tone for all the other activity in the decade”, it must confront that issue.

In the year and a half since I wrote the article I have learned many things to change its utopian tone. One rude awakening has been the realization that not all these new arts spaces are as democratic, altruistic or ethical as I would like. Many are clumsily administered, leaving much of the burden on either the artist or the audience. Yet, despite these trespasses, I still feel that this is my arena and the arena of responsible growth—and I mean growth in the sense of maturity, not in the sense of ‘progress’ as is so often used in our mercantilist hierarchies. Since I wrote the article, it has become clear that profit plays an increasingly important role in museum directions. Programs are filled in around shallow, pretentious, and over-publicized blockbusters like “Tut” and manipulative PR shows with monster budgets and miniscule scholarship and content. All too frequently, selection of important critical functions is made on the basis of this kind of “support”. Meanwhile, there are the built-in responsibilities to trustees and collection, leaving little room, time, or budget to ‘reflection’. Invisible as it may appear to our ‘elders’, this is one of the major crises of our decade.

Reading back over the article, I feel awkward in terms of scattered organization, points which could have been clearer or better made, analysis which settled for “art-world” gripes (and avoided deeper social questions of ‘what exactly is the place of an art-world in our culture?), or the previously mentioned disappointments with more promising milieu. However, these faults, like drips and slips on a painting, are indicative of a time and a process; and comprise an important part of the whole. They are transparent enough to allow at least the intended essence to be read. It’s a real period piece and must (and will) stand on its own. So I swallow my awkwardness. I don’t think anyone else will choke on it either.

I don’t expect the museum to agree with my views or to assume liability for them. I grant the museum its position and take responsibility for my own work. I do expect the SFMMA to reciprocate by hanging this work. After all, if I am wrong or out of place, I risk playing the fool (and the museum certainly commands significant evidence to the contrary). If there is found to be some agreement with my views, then perhaps a productive dialogue will result. I address these remarks to ‘the museum’ because your response in this matter will constitute ‘museum policy’. I do not intend to compromise your position or our friendship; but this is an official and professional relation.

Obviously I have questions about Institutions, Spaces, Alternatives, Criticism, Assessments, Decades, Art, Artists, Audiences, Support, Et Cetera, Et Cetera. I would like these questions to be the sound that is heard in the time of my space.

This is the only work I wish to place in the exhibition.

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

Jim Pomeroy

Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog [downloadable PDF]

November 14, 1979

Jim Pomeroy
74 Langton Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Dear Jim:

Needless to say, I was surprised to receive your response to my letter, indicating your wish to be represented in the exhibition “Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area” by your paper published in the summary of The New Arts Space conference sponsored by The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1978. As I read it, the essence of your thesis is that the artist in the seventies has taken active responsibility for defining his/her place in the art world by assuming the roles previously held by the administrator, critic, curator, director, agent and significant audience. From my research on the exhibition, I can agree with you that this an exceptionally important point in understanding what has happened in the arts in this decade. It is much more appropriate to have your personal conviction elucidate this point than to have it rationalized in Museum reportage.

I suppose the institution, could it but speak with a single voice, might say in response to the thesis of your paper “you are flattering to suggest that the Museum’s sole purpose is to serve the art community; would it were that simple!” As an institution, a Museum is an admixture of an established commitment and the dynamics of all the individuals who make it happen, the staff, the supporters, the visitors and—the artists; it is a sociological phenomenon. As you have pointed out, the artist in this decade has realized, matured to the extent, that he/she, too is a sociological phenomenon. So the place that we—institution and artist—find the most dynamic is where our “worlds” overlap. The Museum is not the be-all and the end-all and it is idealistic to expect that to be true. That’s what the seventies have told us about our idealisms of the sixties.

Here’s to the eighties!

Warmly,

Suzanne Foley
Curator

————————————————-

Jim Pomeroy, Apollo Jest: An American Mythology (In Depth), 1978, 1983 (still)

Continuing to be a key spokesman for the artist community, Pomeroy later turned a critical eye to the rigid genre division in art schools, the institutionalization of alternative spaces, and the dependent relationship on the NEA. Before he left San Francisco in 1987 to teach in his home state of Texas, Pomeroy participated in several exhibitions and events at Langton including the seminal performance Byte at the Opera (1977) with Paul DeMarinis, who would later co-organize with then- Executive Director Susan Miller the 1999 posthumous Jim Pomeroy: A Retrospective on the occasion of NLA’s 25th anniversary. The show celebrated from all accounts a much-loved and missed figure known for his work across media—sculpture, performance, new music, sound art, video, and stereography and anamorphic photography—as well as his incisive critical writing on technology in culture. As a testament to a longstanding relationship with an artist, it was the type of exhibition and publication that an old arts space like NLA could do.

–Tanya Zimbardo, SFMOMA assistant curator of media arts

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.

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.)

The aspect of Myers’s post that interested me the most, and that I found most relevant to my review, was the tone. I have talked with Michael Fried about the relation of his art writing to his poetry, in the discussion following his University of Pennsylvania poetry reading, which we’ve made available at PennSound. On James Meyer: it was good see the acknowledgement that if poetry was not adequately addressed in his introduction to the collection of the writing of Carl Andre, that would be a problem. And indeed Meyer does little to situate Andre’s poetry into the context of related poetic work, either radical modernist or contemporary, and prefers not to address the formal and aesthetic issues foregrounded by Andre’s poetry with reference to the considerable body of critical writing on poetry (including visual poetry) that explores similar issues.

No one owns art. You can own the objects, but no one—not museums, not artists and not art critics, not art historians or poets—can contain how they come to mean in the world, what they mean to us, what we make them mean. What I value most in art criticism and art history (the two are as if one intertwined figure) is thinking that defies the established norms, that refuses to bow to received values, that reinvents the aesthetic at every turn.

A critical writing that is dialogic rather than proscriptive. (But is that itself a prescription?)

Art criticism and art history, just as literary criticism and literary history, are made up of words and can’t avoid poetics, can’t avoid the problems of representation or the implications of tone. When art criticism represses its own writerly investments, then it falls prey to the same naïve positivism as the most conventional representational portrait, no matter how sophisticated it claims to be. The modes of representation in art criticism are just as much at issue as they are in a work of visual art or a poem. That’s, of course, where O’Hara comes in.

I hadn’t given that much thought to the significance of O’Hara’s art criticism until I read Shaw’s book. I haven’t seen anything else that makes such a compelling and complex case for O’Hara’s art writing and its interconnection to his poetics. Shaw’s book is primarily, or at least at first, about “coterie”—a term he turns from dark to light, a feat of transvaluation that is at the center of this exemplary historical study. Killian makes the crucial point that coterie has been used homophobicly, belittling those stigmatized with it, from O’Hara’s circle to Jack Spicer’s, and there is a lesson to be drawn from that, well known, but relevant: that it is often those who claim to be free of “special” interests that have the greatest vested interests. It occurs to me that you could look at art criticism in terms of coterie too, but by reversing the stigma, pointing how much the tone of interest-free imperious authority, self-assured knowledge, and doctrinaire aesthetics functions because it is … coterie criticism.

We are all coteries now (only some are in more denial about it than others and they are the ones that trouble my sleep).

My idea is not that we should all get along, and certainly not that the same things should be on our radar, but rather that we’d be better off not to cast our disagreements in terms of the ignorance of those with whom we disagree. This is harder than it may seem. Stigmatizing aesthetic or ideological disagreement as if it were the results of ignorance, fraudulence, or insignificance is too often the way both art (and poetry) business is conducted by those who fiercely police what they too often regard as their own turf.

No Trespassing!

Don’t get me wrong: I am ignorant, I make mistakes at every turn; it’s my awareness of that, to the degree I can be, that is my guide.

I am as partial and partisan as anyone. Preference and selection are a necessary part of aesthetic judgment. Yet, my radar might be the exact map of another person’s exclusions, just as another’s exclusions might begin to map my paradise. The relation of these two ideas (conviction in one’s aesthetic judgment and its inevitable limitations) is not irreconcilable but dialectical.

The axiomatic wounds art. And yet art seeks this wound and deepens in relation to it. The fashion of the day is almost never fashionable enough unless you make it so yourself. This is as much a problem for poetry as for visual art, for poetics as much as art criticism.

It is the same problem.

—Charles Bernstein

N.B. As Killian notes, I was in the Bay Area in June for a reading, with Judith Goldman, at the terrific New Reading Series, curated by Alli Warren and Brandon Brown. Happily, the reading was recorded by Andrew Kenower and is posted to his superb archive of Bay Area readings, “A Voice Box“, so you can listen to an mp3 of my reading, and Goldman’s, at the web site. I also read at Moe’s in Berkeley for a launch of Goldman’s and Leslie Scalapino’s new issue of War and Peace; there’s a good review of this event at Omnidawn’s blog. Susan Bee, coeditor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, has the cover of the new War and Peace and that brought us to Leslie Scalapino and Tom White’s house for a slide show of her recent paintings and collaborations with poets.

It was in Oakland.

Helen Levitt, New York, 1959. 1959, printed 1991

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.

Helen Levitt, New York. 1942

Levitt started photographing in the mid 1930s, a young woman from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sorting out the possibilities before her. Unlike Walker Evans (who became her friend and was among her few peers in accomplishment) Levitt didn’t emerge from social or educational privilege: no extended stay in Paris, no Ivy League education. She got her start with a marginal gig as an apprentice in a Bronx commercial portrait studio, working for a photographer who was amiable and capable but, as she put it, a bit goofy. So she set out to educate her eye. In line with her ambition and intelligence, she availed herself of an extraordinary classroom: New York City, then the incubator of a major photographic renaissance. Levitt took herself to the Film & Photo League to see what the politically engaged photographers were doing, to learn darkroom and enlarging techniques, and to get acquainted with the Soviet avant-garde films being endlessly discussed. She frequented museums to learn how painters compose. She gorged on cinema: Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, Dzigo Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, among her favorites. The breakthrough came between 1935 and 1936, when Henri Cartier-Bresson breezed into New York, bringing his 35 millimeter Leica, his sophisticated French artistic sensibility (he had studied painting in André Lhote’s studio), and his ardor for surrealism. “In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing,” Levitt once told me. “It was a period of floundering around—I saw Cartier-Bresson and it clicked.”

What clicked? First, it was the technical possibilities of the 35 millimeter camera, and then the sense of a new modern style—casual but graceful, relying on quick-footed movement to yield surprising juxtapositions. More than that, she got from Cartier-Bresson implicit permission to blithely undercut the assumption that photographs are objective documents, giving straightforward evidence: just the facts, ma’am. She saw that her medium, for all its persuasive powers of realism, is most fertile when divulging reservoirs of fantasy lurking within everyday life. As the poet Paul Eluard put it, “There is another world,/ but it is within this one.” This paradoxical insight constituted the backbone of surrealism. Levitt grasped the point wholeheartedly without ever joining the surrealist clique or kowtowing to their garbled male-biased theorizing. She wasn’t one to succumb to the self-importance that beset the Andre Breton types. Modest to a fault, she’d say “I’m no theorist” if pressed to explain how she produced her singular body of work. “Just look at the pictures” (and we surely will, for years to come).

Helen Levitt, New York, 1940. Gelatin silver print

The pictures reveal Levitt’s subtle and humorous feminism, remarkably forward-thinking for its time. Levitt claimed the freedom to conceive street photography as a pleasantly transgressive pursuit, one energized by vulgarity, playfulness, and ribald laughter. She disguised her transgressiveness in plain view by making child’s play her leitmotif. Children: aren’t they cute and sweet? Not in Levitt’s pictures, where they are as complicated and contradictory as adults, ingenious and foolish, capable of gentleness and crassness, displaying folly and dignity. William Blake would have appreciated Levitt’s scenes of children playing in city streets, for their recognition that Songs of Innocence and Experience are contrapuntal tunes.

People were Helen Levitt’s great subject, and she had an unparalleled affinity for those imperfectly socialized, unpredictable people called children. She was endlessly fascinated by their mixed-up silliness, vulnerability, rudeness, resilience, inventiveness, and immeasurable complexity. Levitt, who couldn’t resist a mischievous joke, enjoyed puncturing the expected image of her as the grande dame of photography who must just love little children. Dining at a restaurant last summer, she glanced over to a noisy gaggle of frolicsome youngsters disrupting the quiet and declared, with a perfect poker face, “I hate kids.”

Yet her photographs admire the self-forgetfulness children display when completely immersed in their private play worlds-so much so that her best pictures seem to transform children (and adults) into characters from Shakespeare. The boys in this photograph might be the unruly players from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, restaged in Spanish Harlem in the midst of the Great Depression, on the brink of World War II. Levitt would pooh-pooh the notion that her work merits comparison with such august company. But if you look carefully at her photographs, you’ll discern a deep and abiding sense that life is comedy mingled with tragedy, or sometimes just a comedy of errors. Levitt photographed the city streets as theatrical spaces because she knew all the world’s a stage.

Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

—Elizabeth Gand

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

———–

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!

[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″

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.

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.

Initial Freecell design proposal photographs

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.

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

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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

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.

Having completed filming in the late summer of 1984 we began to edit, using a simple two-deck VHS system. About this time, Derek was greatly annoyed that Channel 4 (the new TV station) were funding Peter Greenaway to make a series of shorts from Dante’s Divine Comedy, but had completely ignored Derek’s own petitioning them with the idea of making a series of shorts based on Shakespeare’s sonnets. It suddenly dawned on him that it would be an even better idea to combine the sonnets and The Angelic Conversation.

Around this time we’d done some tests on to 35mm to see how the images would hold when blown up, and the first couple of tests were ropey indeed. Then we met Fred Weinal from Colour Film Services lab and he put the material through the new machine that he’d built and that worked.

Manfred Salzgeber invited us to show the film at the Berlin Film Festival the following year.

Angelic Conversation is less of a home movie that became a feature and more a feature conceived and made using home-movie technology. S8mm gave us access to the tools of cinema despite the fact that we were both flat broke.

There was an air of anarchy to London in the early 80’s. Thatcher was running roughshod over our culture. We had sentimental drivel such as Chariots of Fire in our cinemas. The gay press was more reactionary than the right-wing newspapers. But the music was good.

While waiting for the money to come through to finish Angelic we made Imagining October (1984), a 27-minute meditation on state censorship and repression. (Imagining October recently ran for eight weeks as an installation at Tate Britain.) This was made in the same way as Angelic, but much faster—we only had six weeks to make it before it was to be shown at the 1984 London Film Festival—but we managed it and got the first print back from the lab on the morning of the screening. Sitting in the Lumier cinema on Saint Martin’s Land we were so apprehensive I could hear both our hearts beat. We were really pleased it worked, it was what we wanted, we’d seized the means of production. Cinema was ours.

There was a wind of change at BFI Production and less tolerance to experimentation. They wanted to do a film with Derek, but on their terms. It was still fun but coming from an art school background the kind of costume drama that Caravaggio was becoming didn’t really interest me. I wanted something more contemporary, more urgent, and so we made The Last of England – just Derek and me and our friends. We paid for the shoot ourselves out of money we’d raised making music videos for the Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys. Only after we shot and edited the film did we look for money to make the 35m print and pay for the music. We made it under the auspices of someone else’s company. That turned into a slightly steep learning curve but fortunately I had a good lawyer! Anyway it’s still my favourite film!

After that experience I set up my own company, which produced The Garden and Blue. This enabled Derek and I to have complete control (and ownership!) over the films. Blue was surprisingly hard to finance, although the budget was quite small, around £90k. People had difficulty getting their heads around the idea: A blank screen. Some just laughed. But Derek was right and it worked splendidly.

[Born Inverness, Scotland in 1954, James Mackay studied film at North East London Polytechnic (now University of East London). After graduating he became Secretary of the London Film-Maker's Co-op and then Cinema Programmer. In the late 1970's Mackay produced a series of programs for the Edinburgh International Film Festival titled New British Avant-Garde films and programmed similar for the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival later he would revisit curating as Film and Video curator of the B2 gallery 1981 - 83. He began producing in 1981 through Dark Pictures, the firm that he founded as a production and marketing company for new films and video, beginning with a series of shorts by Derek Jarman.You can read more about him here. Filmography here.]

All photos courtesy James Mackay. Photo of Mr. Mackay: Brook Dillon

[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.