OPEN SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will you describe the submission and selection process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Suzanne under News, Profiles + Interviews

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

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

[from guest writer Julian Myers]

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

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

BURNING BRIGHT, Bruce Conner, 1996, Collection SFMOMA

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

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

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

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

BOOK PAGES, Bruce Conner, 1967, Collection SFMOMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desirée Holman, The Magic Window (still), 2007; © 2008 Desiree Holman; photo courtesy of the artist and the Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

[Last Thursday SFMOMA assistant curators of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio & Alison Gass announced the 2008 SECA Art Award recipients. The SECA Award is an extremely competitive biennial prize with a long local history: since 1967 sixty-two Bay Area artists have been honored with the Award, which includes an exhibition here at the museum, an accompanying catalogue, and a cash prize. Hundreds of artists are nominated but only four are typically selected. Ali & Apsara agreed to answer a few questions about this round's selection and award process. I don't believe in all the years the award's been given there's been a vehicle like the blog to make this process transparent, and to allow us to open it up to discussion. So, a first. Many thanks to Ali & Apsara.]

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SS: Let’s start by illuminating the basic frame of the SECA award process, since many of our readers will be unfamiliar with how it works. I understand that only artists who are nominated are eligible for consideration. Who nominates the artists? Who selects the finalists, and based on what kinds of criteria?

AG and ADQ: We work with a large pool of professionals in the community to generate the list of artists nominated for SECA, including local curators, art historians, gallery owners and directors, former SECA artists, SECA members, SFMOMA staff, patrons, and alternative spaces. Once we compile this list we send out a letter that specifies the parameters of the SECA award and invites them to nominate up to five artists.

After we receive these nominations, we then we send a letter to each artist nominated, inviting them to apply for the award. Surprisingly, some artists chose not to. We then review each of the applications, ultimately narrowing it down to approximately thirty finalists with whom we do studio visits.

SS: Really? Some artists who are nominated choose not to apply? I’m curious about this. Do you have any insight why they might choose not to?

ADQ: I know. We were surprised ourselves to learn that. I’m not sure why they didn’t but it would be interesting to find out. Really, it could be anything though, bad timing, busy schedules, fear of rejection, they don’t like the process, anything.

SS: It would be interesting to hear from artists who’ve declined to apply. What happens once you’ve narrowed the field to the thirty finalists?

AG and ADQ: Then the SECA chair, Dick Drossler, works very closely with the SECA coordinator, Heather Holt, to generate a schedule of studio visits. They try to group the finalists geographically so that we can do five or six consecutive visits each day over a period of about four to five months. In the end we did thirty-one studio visits on six different Saturdays from the end of January to the beginning of May.

SECA is funded by a terrific auxiliary committee at SFMOMA, people who are committed to both the development of Bay Area contemporary art, the support of local artists, and who are committed to SFMOMA’s engagement with the community. As a reflection of this community spirit SECA members also attend the studio visits. The group of about sixty who go on the visits are divided into two groups and as curators, we each go with one group and pile onto charter buses to go to each studio together.

SS: Will you describe the series of studio visits?

AG and ADQ: The visits are really the best part of the process. As the curators, we talk more on the bus about the artist we are going to see. We then squeeze into the artist’s studio or selected venue. If the artist has an exhibition up, we often meet at his/her gallery to see the work. We imagine it can be a little overwhelming for the artist to suddenly have to host 30 people (twice in one day!) in what is often times a tiny studio space. Then we have a conversation with the artist about his/her work. Each studio visit is only 20 minutes, so there is often a lot of information to cover in that time. Overall, it is a very open process, and anyone who has questions for the artist is encouraged to ask. After the five or six visits, we all head back to SFMOMA where we have lunch around a giant table and discuss what we saw that day.

SS: What was the most surprising part of the process for each of you? The most enjoyable?

AG: I am consistently amazed at how much you can learn from visits like this, despite their short length. Each of the artists is so articulate and generous with their time. They give so much of themselves to the visit and I always leave feeling like I want to thank them profusely. I would definitely say the most enjoyable part is seeing the work in person and learning more about the work firsthand. It is an honor as a curator to get to stand in front of work with the artist there.

ADQ: Absolutely. I truly enjoy the chance to speak with each of the artists we visit and learn more about their work. We are really putting them on the spot and invading their spaces during these visits, and they are consistently engaging, generous, and welcoming. It is a very special thing to be able to take part in this kind of dialogue with an artist and with a group of people who care so much about the artist and his/her work. We take it very seriously and greatly respect and appreciate the artists for how much they give of themselves during the process. We have also just begun another enjoyable aspect of the process, which is collaborating with the award winners to produce the exhibition. This is when we are able to take the dialogue to the next level.

SS: You’re both east coast transplants, and through this round of SECA visits have had the opportunity to see quite close-up a nice cross-section of the artists who are working here. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen here in the Bay Area that is different or similar to art practice in other parts of the country?

AG: I would say I came here with a little New York-centricness, which is hard to admit and makes me feel bad. However, I can say it because I was totally astounded by what I saw. San Francisco has a thriving, world-class art world. At SFMOMA, we spend so much time looking at the contemporary art trends from around the world, it is important for us to have SECA to EXPLICITLY focus on the work right around us. I think both things are important, because SFMOMA (and other institutions in the Bay area) do a great service for the local artistic community I hope by bringing art from everywhere here, so artists working here get a chance in their own back yard to see their work in context and can then dialogue with history as well. But, I have to say, it was important for me to realize that I can see fantastic work without getting on a plane. I would say the biggest difference I have felt in San Francisco from New York is a real artistic community. In New York it is so fractured and fragmented without a sense of communal identity at all. I would say that this newest generation of artist in San Francisco seems to be doing a terrific job of maintaining a sense of supportive community, without cultivating regional identity (I mean while still being very connected to artistic practices from other places).

ADQ: Yes, this seems to be an ongoing stigma San Francisco has to contend with: the regional. I think overcoming this stereotype is important not only for the artists who live and work here, so that their work can be seen within a larger, global context, but it is also important for San Francisco itself. Upon arrival, I repeatedly heard people describe San Francisco’s art scene as “provincial”, which was a very disconcerting thing to hear, when in fact, New York can often actually be more insular in its myopic tendency to only look at work being exhibited in New York galleries. I think what is often lacking in New York is an international or even national perspective. Since I arrived two years ago, this city has had a great mix of important international artists come to the Bay Area and display their work, such as Allora and Calzadilla, Felix Schramm, Lucy McKenzie, Rosalind Nashashibi, and many of the artists in the ongoing Passengers exhibition at the Wattis, not to mention Jeff Wall, Douglas Gordon, Olafur Eliasson, and those others who come as part of SFAI’s and CCA’s excellent visiting artist lecture programs. To my mind the San Francisco Bay Area seems to be more international and thriving than New York in many instances. It troubles me to hear the word “provincial” ascribed to the Bay Area. If artists living in San Francisco are to be seen in expanded contexts and in other cities, it is our duty as art professionals to stop using this word and to get out there and look at as much work being made in this community as possible, and then to bring that work to larger audiences. One way we can do this is through implementing these kinds of awards, such as SECA (which has been occurring biennially since 1967), and producing exhibitions that are devoted to highly sophisticated work being made by artists living here, and then to internationally contextualize the work with other work being made today. This is something Ali and I have kept in mind during this process and is something we will continually strive for as we produce this exhibition. The other thing that would help is to havean international biennial in San Francisco, but that is another conversation with an entirely different set of problems…

SS: I’d be curious to take up the question of an SF Biennial up in another interview! In the meantime: Winning a SECA Award can have a substantial impact on the career of a developing artist. This highly competitive award is coveted by local artists, and emotions often run high around the selection process. Surely this is true for the artists themselves, but I imagine it is also true for the SECA committee and for you as well. As curators for this award, can you talk a little bit about the difficulties and rewards in making final decisions?

AG and ADQ: Yes, this is the really challenging part of it, making that ultimate decision of who to select, which necessitates having to exclude so many talented artists who are also deserving. We had rigorous discussions about each artist’s work after meeting with them, with the SECA members and then with each other later. In the end, we could have given the award to more people. Each of the 31 finalists was very talented, which made the decision especially difficult in the end, and it was something we both lost a lot of sleep over. It is not a decision we took lightly. It was wonderful to be able to tell the winners that they won, but after having the finalists open up their studios and their practices to us, it felt really hard to have to leave people out.

Ultimately though, we feel very confident with the four artists we did select: Tauba Auerbach, Desiree Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen–who are each making exceptional, truly innovative work. SECA was an amazing experience for both of us–completely positive in the sense that we directly experienced the richness and strength of this artistic community. And we hope to be able to continue the dialogue that we began with so many of artists we were able to visit with this time.

Posted by Suzanne under News, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: SECA

Last Friday at noon, an attractive couple of museum visitors dressed in gray suddenly took off their shoes and performed what turned out to be a pretty spectacular and moving guerrilla dance duet, to the surprise of the handful of people who happened to also be in the Atrium in the middle of a sunny workday.

We were tipped off the day before by a post at SFist. A few more pictures are here; if I can figure out how to get the video off of the camera, we’ll post a clip up tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s what Kara Davis, dancer and choreographer, had to say about the piece and why they wanted to do this in our Atrium:

Hi Suzanne! this week is National Dance Week and that particular duet just happens to be nominated this year for an Isadora Duncan Award - the ceremony of which is this Monday at the YBCA forum. Anyway, my partner Nol and I were participating in a festival called “Dance Anywhere” which is organized by a woman named Beth Fein. Dancers from all over the world dance in different public places at the exact same time…

…The title of the duet is called “Exit Wound”. There is an original score that was composed for it as well but my two musicians are opening a play at Berkeley Rep this week so my dance partner and I decided we wanted to do the piece in silence. I started out with the idea of “two-steps-forward-one-step-back”, this leads into a waltz where the couple’s limbs wind and unwind in different knots, weight is shared fairly equally throughout (meaning - the man isn’t always supporting the woman), the minute that we become dependent on one another to “hold the other up” there is a breaking point that leaves us facing two different directions, ultimately we continue on the initial path which we began. Our costumes are gray - the color between black and white - the “middle color” that, to me, represents the place where most of us are operating our lives - not knowing what’s next, not living in extreme love or hate, war or peace, truth or falsity, etc. My dance partner Nol and I have danced together for over 10 years and he played a huge creative role in the making of this duet. I’ve always wanted to dance in the [SF]MOMA and the fact that the floor is different shades of gray I think frames the dance really well. My experience of seeing the work curated at the [SF]MOMA, as well as just BEING in THAT building, always conjures up my most extreme emotional internal landscapes…I draw alot of my ideas from experiencing other art disciplines… Many of my creative ideas have come out of experiencing exhibits such as Kiki Smith, Yoko Ono, the Rothko paintings in the permanent collection, the “snapshot photo” exhibit, and the Chuck Close exhibit. Thanks for asking about the piece and I’m glad you enjoyed it! Let me know if you need anything else for your blog! Cheers - kara

Tammy Fortin said, “It’s obvious something’s about to happen when you see a barefoot dude reach up to the sky…”

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany, News, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: Dance Dance Rev, Musée Mechanique