OPEN SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imin Yeh is a printmaker and recent graduate of the MFA Department at the California College of the Arts.  Her practice deflates cultural stereotypes and addresses issues of labor and consumerism through a critical and humorous lens.  Yeh’s piece “Everybody Loves a Skinny, White Boyfriend” was included in the exhibition For Lovers and Fighters that I curated at The Spare Room Project in February 2009. We sat down at a coffee-shop together last Friday and talked about her recent projects, her relationship to local art institutions, and the politics and negotiation inherent in making work that is deeply rooted in one’s own experience and identity. Yeh was a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson award.  Her piece “Good Imports” is featured in the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennial 2009 and in a satellite installation in nearby storefront at 710 Kearny Street until August 23rd.  Her work will also be included in Intersection for the Arts Benefit Auction on June 13th.

Adrienne Skye Roberts: I thought we could start by talking about your two recent projects in the MFA exhibition at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the Present Tense Biennale at the Chinese Cultural Center.

Imin Yeh: I graduated with two succinct but related bodies of work: one is lovingly titled “Good Imports” and is a part of the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennale and the other project is “The Legend of the Power Animals” and was my MFA exhibition at CCA. Both projects have to do with the things we buy being the focal point of what we know about other cultures. Every object we have has a dual story of who made it and who ultimately consumes it.

ASR: Can you describe the installation “Good Imports”?

IY: There are a few pieces in the gallery at the Chinese Cultural Center and I was also given a storefront in Chinatown to do whatever I wanted—which is a perfect place for “Good Imports.” The installation consists of objects—laptops, televisions, children’s toys—that were all made in China and either found or donated to me.  They are installed in an excessive pile and each object is individually covered in hand-printed fabric. The pattern of the fabric is taken from the boxes that souvenirs from China are shipped in. I work at the museum store at the Asian Art Museum and our back storeroom is filled with these boxes. I always loved these boxes growing up and when I would go back and forth to Taiwan or China as a child I would keep these boxes much longer than whatever came inside them. At the museum gift shop, whenever someone buys a $20 tea pot or whatever and I bring out the box to put it in and they are always so excited because they feel like they are buying an authentic object.  The pattern of the boxes becomes a superficial identification of something Asian or something that is Chinese.

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

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

Happy Mother’s Day! The rooftop sculpture garden is open at last, it’s a lovely spot, and this man definitely deserves a glass of champagne. This concludes our week-long experiment with DirectorCam. We’ll follow up in weeks and months to come, of course!  More soon. xxoo, SS

I know by now you’ve all seen President Obama’s Official White House Photostream on Flickr, launched just last week. Yes? I thought I’d take the President’s cue and do something similar with our director, Neal Benezra, especially this week, as Neal, along with the whole staff, prepares for the opening of our brand new Rooftop Garden. Thus: SFMOMA DirectorCam!

For example:

And why not follow the gorgeous Blue Bottle cakes and coffee all week too? (they start serving May 14):
The garden opens to the public this Sunday, May 10th. Mother’s Day! And it’s also Koret Museum Day, which means the museum, and access to the brand new sculpture garden, is FREE.

(You can follow updates to DirectorCam here. More to come!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, 1970 – 2008, 1979 installation view at SFMOMA; © 2008 Tom Marioni; photo: Paul Hoffman

Part two of my conversation with Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, on The Art of Participation. Yesterday we covered some specific projects in the exhibition and what an ‘art of participation’ might be; today we’re talking about the build-it-yourself cardboard furniture in the Koret Visitor Education Center, and the particular challenges and delights of putting on an exhibition like this one in a museum setting.

Let’s start with the transformation of our Koret Visitor Education Center and the Freecell commission. For the run of the exhibition, the ed center is being turned into something called “D-Space.” Can you talk about that?

One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.

So, if I understand you correctly, you’re talking about a way we might mirror artistic practice, by attempting to blur the boundaries between the education spaces, the lecture halls, and the galleries of our own institution.

Right. My initial concept was to create a core zone, an open educational and performative space, right at the center of the whole show in the fourth-floor galleries, but for logistical reasons we had to relocate to the second floor, to our current educational center. So we thought, well how can we take the spirit of the show into that space and transform the space? We can ask artists to interpret that situation and to provide a different solution. We wanted to have a space that could be transformed by visitors, also by staff members, and be transformed for different uses, different functions, with the idea being that it could always be set up differently and so always provide a different experience.

Based on who was using it and for what purpose.

And you would never know quite what to expect before you get inside. So we asked an architectural and design group in New York, Freecell, to design pieces of furniture or some kind of reconfigurable structure based on a do-it-yourself model. They came up with a series of cardboard panels with perforations and instructions, to be folded into furniture. In the beginning they will be just rectangular shapes leaning against the wall, in an empty room, almost like pictures in a gallery, but that are to be taken off the wall and used, turned into something else-that is a truly participatory act.

So if we want to sit down to read a book or have a conversation or listen to a lecture in the center, we have to first build our own furniture, but we can also put it together however we like or in a way that will suit our particular desire or need.

Right, and these objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain functions, but they might also be reconfigured and used in ways that we can not foresee. I was always saying, why should we reinvent the table when the table is such a clear and successful structure? Precisely because we might embrace the idea of dysfunctionality-the fact that it becomes more difficult to do something maybe is what makes it more interesting-and provide an open situation.

We’ve been talking here about the blurring of boundaries in the physical spaces of the museum and the change in the way a visitor will experience art in this exhibition. Something that’s interested me over the last 18 months or so while The Art of Participation has been in development is that this work also impacts how the museum itself operates, and not just for the duration of the show, but perhaps over the long term as well. Can you speak to that?

Sure—we are a museum that has departments with clearly assigned roles. The moment you try something new, we have to figure out how to deal with that. The curatorial team and the exhibition department are collaborating with the education department in transforming our educational center, but the responsibilities and distribution of labor is all of a sudden totally unclear. I think we have to reinvent ourselves and analyze what happens, and hopefully come to a different structuring of our processes. Perhaps a more open way of doing things. What happens in a museum—timing and controlling of processes—is so much based on the idea that you select things, you ship things, you unpack things, and you exhibit them and return them.

It’s about objects.

Right. So how can we turn the museum into a site of production and into a site of live events and into a site for different social functions, maybe temporarily. It is still a museum of course and not a clubhouse, but we know that artists have for some time now been turning the gallery into a discotheque or a lounge or restaurant or school, confusing barriers and functionalities, inviting confusion and instability. Indeterminacy becomes an inherent part of the artistic experience.

But which is perhaps antithetical to an institutional one.

There will always be a clash between the needs of a sustainable structure (like planning a budget) and the kind of improvisation that artists would like to do in a museum. To not do it, to not embrace this kind of practice, I think, would be the wrong answer. But there are challenges. There is a famous historic example of an exhibition by Robert Morris in 1971, at the Tate in London, that had to be closed after a few days because people were destroying some of the objects. There is an urge and an eagerness to do something and to participate that can be counterproductive to the usual aims of a museum.

Which are in part to collect and conserve.

On a broader level I would say collecting has become much more difficult. Collecting ephemera, or collecting works that evolve over a long time is inherently difficult for an institution. We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties of exhibiting the kinds of work that require participation, just in terms of sustainability. A lot more players are involved, in terms of making something happen. It’s not just the artist and curator and the exhibition crew, the works are more fluid and they change, and that is something that’s hard to plan for. We have to be ready to embrace things that are not planned to the minute detail, and perhaps think of an artwork as a quality rather than thinking of it as something that is unfinished or that needs to be finished. Other implications for a museum of modern art might be in part about the expectations our public could have—do they expect to come and see great artworks on the wall, or will they complain if they don’t see that? We do want to offer the public different experiences of what modern or contemporary art is.

In the exhibition catalogue, you ask whether or not we’ve come to understand the radical implications of participatory work; my question is, can we view this work as radical now? Or is it absorbed into the fabric of what we are now comfortable calling artistic practice and therefore part of the status quo? Can open or participatory practice today still carry the implications of radicality that it once did?

There are two issues that we need to address: one is the institution’s ability to deal with open and process-based works, and that has been and will also be in the future a structural conflict. The institutional solution has often been to either close the openness of the work, even fetishize it as an object, or to not show the work. And I don’t think that is an option because this kind of work has become such an important aspect of contemporary practice. The second issue is that, within the discourse of art, media art and contemporary art are often on two distinct and separate trajectories. They do not talk to each other. I would like to bridge this gap. You’d be surprised to hear how many art world practitioners still take issue with technology, or vice versa, how many media art practitioners take issue with the institutionalization of art. Both sides need to take into account that 60s and 70s notions of radicality are already challenged when networking and communication are mainstream practices in our everyday life. “Radicality” is perhaps not the key idea here, but instead, various degrees of participation in the public realm.

Something else striking about the exhibition of course is that a lot of the works are FUN, and funny. It will be a pleasure to engage with them. I’m really looking forward to the show.

I think a lot of people will agree that. One of the things I think we should have in our life is fun. Life should be more fun and not just work. How can you make that happen in a place that is maybe not geared for “fun”? Would we contribute to the “entertainment” industry in a museum? I think we should be able to provide something that only a museum can provide. Perhaps a more dubious, ambivalent, but culturally fascinating experience. When I perform a sculpture by Erwin Wurm, I’m sure I’m going to look ridiculous in the perception of others, maybe in my own perception as well. But having allowed that one moment of looking ridiculous, but actually performing an artwork, I think that’s a unique opportunity.

On a more subtle level, take George Brecht, who was a key player in the Fluxus movement. We’ll be exhibiting some of his instruction cards, and you will be able to read them-one piece is called Exit, and the card just says “exit.” So the moment you exit the show you might think of it as you performing this piece. Your life becomes, temporarily, an artwork. Blurring the distinction between art and life has been a dream for many artists, especially in the 60s. It is clear that life will always be different from art; but perhaps infiltrating life with artistic moments and experiences is something the museum can provide.

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The Art of Participation opens Saturday, and the public preview, open to all, is TONIGHT! Thursday.

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

A few weeks back I had the chance to talk with Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling about The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, rolling in this Saturday. The exhibition looks at ways artists have been engaging audiences as collaborators in the art-making process over the last sixty years; of its many distinctive features, “AoP” (as we’ve been short-handing it back of house) will change form and content as people contribute to it. I wanted to ask Rudolf some specifics about the exhibition, and also get his take on what happens when you try to set a big, mutable, participatory exhibition down in an institutional setting a tiny bit more used to the object-on-wall approach than double headsets & DIY cardboard furniture. It was fun, & we talked a lot: I’ll post this in two parts, today & tomorrow.

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Rudolf, let’s start by my asking a very basic question: what is an “art of participation”?

That is my question as well, and really the question we are exploring with this exhibition. We know what it means to participate in politics or school, and sometimes know what it means to participate in a work of art if we get clear instructions. However there are some projects where it is unclear what exactly is asked of you, or you can only find out by actually doing something. The work requires your input and your act of contribution.

But the term can also mean an open situation. The idea of “the open work of art” goes back to a 1962 book by Umberto Eco, in which he reflects on developments within contemporary art and music where the results of the artwork were not predefined, but rather could change over time, or change by interpretation. He said, in the whole history of art, the act of looking is a kind of interpretation; it’s always different and each one of us sees art in a different way. In this exhibition, we’re interested in ways people can contribute to a work not only by looking—but also by interacting, participating in a group dynamic, or contributing to an artwork. We go, in other words, beyond the viewer.

What does it mean in this context to contribute or participate? Is it a physical action or something else?

Let me give you two examples that are quite physical. The artist Lygia Clark is a pioneer of what we would call today relational aesthetics. I believe she invented the term “relational objects” –objects that relate to people, to each other, or to a group of people. One example is a net made of rubber bands. There are no specific instructions for use, but together with other people you can test the possibilities of the net. You can stretch or play with it, in a joined, cooperative initiative. By doing this with others, you are dependent on the dynamics of the group; this could lead to something very deeply felt and intense, or it might not even work; for example, if you can not communicate with anybody.

Another example is Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. Wurm offers a series of tools and objects which you use by following instructions—and these tools are exhibited as if they were sculptures. However, the artwork is not the set of objects on the white platform, but the moment a visitor performs the sculpture according to the instruction. You have basic material and the instructions are clear, but it is not so easy to do. Balancing a series of objects against a wall with your body is physically challenging. And performing the sculpture will look different with every single visitor, so there’s always a new sculpture being performed. What I like specifically about this work is that the sculpture is only temporarily enacted. We think of sculpture as something very solid, an object, and then we think of performance—of theater—as acted on a stage. Here these two concepts are mixed.

Lygia Clark’s work seems obviously relational, it requires multiple people, but these One Minute Sculptures require only one?

It’s too limiting to think that participation is about only two people interacting, or one person performing. Participation also means that you watch others and others watch you, but as you do so you become aware of the potential that you might also do it, or not do it.

Ok. So why should we participate?

It’s a very fair question: why should I participate in the first place? There are a number of works where this is open–instructions as concepts for example–but there are also works where there is nothing to see unless you become part of it. There is a work, called Delayed, by a German artist, Matthias Gommel. You just see two headphones with microphones attached to them, suspended from the ceiling and facing each other; this is a situation for two people to talk to each other. Obviously, just watching it, you can’t hear, and what you do not hear is that the mode of communication is delayed to an extent that the participants continuously interrupt each other and start talking at the same time. This is a very simple situation, but when you actually do it it’s a different experience. Likewise, you can watch someone perform a sculpture and that is fine, but doing it yourself will give you a different understanding of the piece.

Even when you’re faced with instructions that perhaps you cannot perform, you can try and realize the limits you are facing. It’s something I find very interesting about the art of participation: it can provide a very deep sensation, almost a sensual experience, but can also provide a sense of failure.

I always think of participatory art practice as somehow messy or uncontained; spilled out all over the place and you don’t know what’s going to happen. How can a museum be messy, or uncontained? It seems beyond institutional comfort zones.

Well, the fact that a museum of modern art has a mission to document and show a range of contemporary art practices means that we need to address all aspects of contemporary art-we need to address the participatory nature of the work—the openness of these works or even what you call messiness—and we need to think about how to do it in a sustained way. Some of the works challenge the way a museum operates, an example would be 1st Public White Cube, by Blank & Jeron, with Gerrit Gohlke, where you will be able to bid on Ebay for the right to make an intervention into an artwork. For us working at SFMOMA, it’s certainly posing a lot of questions in terms of the value of the work, if you can actually pay to get your work into the museum! But this is one of the important reasons a museum of modern art should do such a show—testing itself—while also fulfilling its job of recognizing and acknowledging the history of contemporary art. Another question is, how much does this kind of practice suffer from being transported or displaced into an institution? How many works are out there that can function successfully in a museum over a length of time, and what does that mean for our procedures?

And of course there’s a question about works that perhaps can’t be absorbed into or presented in an institutional context at all.

Well certainly we were looking for works that would work out over a length of time; however we are also including work that is performative by nature. We have a New York artist duo called MTAA who are proposing a performance that is voted on by the public in every single detail. The voting public decides collectively on the title of the performance, on the location, on the props, on the length of time, on the content, on every single item of the performance … and at the end of the show MTAA will then do an actual performance interpreting a script that has been written, in a way, by the public.

How do people participate in the MTAA project? Do they vote in the gallery?

They can vote in the gallery; they can also vote online. We will have a special display in the D-Space on the second floor where you will be able to see the state of affairs. E.g., people have already voted on the title, we know the performance will happen in the gallery, or in the atrium, or in the elevator, and then on the basis of that you can decide how to cast your vote for the next detail. Voting perhaps is not a very creative way of participating, but the way that the choices are set up is quite interesting, and the way the artists will then have to interpret the result requires a lot of creativity on their part. For instance, what if they’re asked to perform for 24 hours, but the museum is only open for 8 hours?

What will the museum do?

I don’t know at this point. This is also posing questions for us working in the institution. We’re now required to adapt or participate in a different way as well, and this is being done with the help of artists.

More from Rudolf tomorrow, on build-it-yourself cardboard furniture, and what happens to standard operating procedures in a museum when it takes on a playful, participatory, mutating exhibition like this one. Do come back! [part two is here]

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………Photo: Ramona Labat

On November 4, we’ll be screening two democracy-themed projects by Bay Area artists. Chris Sollars’ documentary C RED BLUE J explores the red state/blue state divide of 2004, as Chris juggles his beliefs with those of a sister working for the Bush administration, a born-again Christian father, and a lesbian mother. I Want You (Auditions) is Tony Labat’s new work, culled from footage of the original I WANT YOU performances. I asked them to interview each other for the blog & they typed their conversation together in real time in Tony’s studio Weds afternoon. Chris & Tony, thanks! and xxxooo, SS

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2:00 PM Chris leaves his house at 21st and Shotwell. Tries to go to the Mission post office to mail a DVD of C RED BLUE J to Kentucky and Portland, Oregon.

2:03 PM At the post office.  Only two postal workers and all self-service equipment disconnected and missing. Worst post office in the city and possibly the country.

2:09 PM Chris rides past construction at Mission and Cesar Chavez (Army) on the sidewalk where Tony Labat recorded immigrant workers from his studio across the street. The workers are no longer here but there is an ISO container with pipes attached.

2:11 PM Chris rings the Buzzer for Tony’s Studio and enters the building.

2:13 PM Tony offers Chris a beer and sits down to complete an email. Chris picks up the California Biennial Catalogue. It includes imagery of Tony’s surveillance of immigrant workers, a video still of a tank passing on a train (Blur 2007), and a photo of Tony standing next to a Wax Museum sculpture of Fidel Castro.

2:15 PM Tony “NO MORE JFK!” I am coordinating my flight with a gallery I am showing at in January and the last time I flew into JFK it cost me five grand for holding a Cuban passport and an American green card.

2:20 PM As Chris types Tony unloads a clip from his Black pellet gun, firing around the studio.

2:25 PM The phone Rings. Chris laughs…Tony shouts “TIMMY what do you think of Chris? Chris and I are think-tanking for this writing about both our projects for SFMOMA.“

2:57 PM Chris is just making up the time-lapse, but that’s okay, that’s the nature of time…impressed by his skills at typing, I’m a one finger (or two) typist…the phone rings it is Jennifer Locke…she is letting me know that she has cleared the problem with my check from St Mary’s College…Chris has a nice little gallery…Jennifer says “don’t say little.” Why? “Because he may be a little sensitive about size.” Am I getting my money? Yes…it was a mistake so it was a good thing you called me…Thanks Jennifer…

3:06 PM Chris asks about my sketch for an installation, he thinks that it looks like a voting booth…I find that very ironic…

3:07 PM Chris, Why did you make C RED BLUE J?

3:10 PM Just like political debates, before addressing the current question I will first address the comment made earlier, “Little”:  The exhibition space of 667 Shotwell is compromised by existing in a private home.

3:11 PM Interrupted by Tony swinging a dirty towel around the studio swatting flies. Caliber and quality of works: from democratic dinners voted by and prepared by the People with Jerome Waag, the whole backroom of 667 Shotwell turned into an XMAS present to sit on Santa’s lap (with Pat Rock as Santa) Brian Storts, or the 50cent beer machine in the same room a couple years later by Rock and Storts, and most recently the show 10 year itch of SF underground music (videos, outfits, posters by John Dwyer, T.I.T.S, Numbers, Erick Landmark, and Mike Donovan of Sic Alps amongst others. “Little” in size, but busting at the seams.

3:18 PM OK Tony is now done with that towel. Anyway a lot of the music in C RED BLUE J is by John Dwyer and I integrated it into the film since I was listening to his music all during the past four—

3:20 PM But Chris…Why did you make C RED BLUE J ?

3:21 PM Probably as a way to cope with my sister… “Jennifer” working for BUSH. Turn it into something positive. To have a window into her life and ideology and to look at how she could work for HIM after the way we grew up. Mom is a lesbian. I always thought it ironic or fitting that here I am an artist in SF and she is working for Bush in DC… couldn’t be much more split than that. Family is often where we are confronted with opposing Political discourse.

3:23 PM RING Tony: Did you vote for Obama? You did already? Oh come on…

3:24 PM Felipe: “Chris, you have a nice ass”

3:25 PM Tony speaking in Spanish so as to hide his conversation from Chris…NUMERO UNO… Miami… XMAS… get Mom to LA… Fantasy…

3:25 PM “Havana to Miami, No way …then I am involved with Homeland Security again..”

3:31 PM Tony puts in the DVD for I WANT YOU.

C The HD makes them look as good as politicians on TV. Did you change the order in the editing?

T The order happened naturally. I wondered if it was going to have to be edited, but the order was so organic and natural I stayed with it.

C This gives new meaning to SPOT Light.

T The performer can’t see us, just the light and that darkness. And the X on the floor.

C It also almost feels like an interrogation. How was the project publicized?

T It was listed online, on Facebook, Craigslist, and with posters. This generation is protesting more online than in the streets. I wanted to create a space for this NEED to demonstrate. Narcissism seems to be the nature today. In front of the camera but without the voice.

C I keep thinking that as our world becomes more and more digital I need to stay physical too. Tell me a little more about the I WANT YOU process.

T Part one: private auditions in front of the judges. Part two: I took myself out and the audience became the judges, American Idol/The Gong Show style. Part two became the spectacle. When I watched I kept thinking of what lines would be good for the posters. And was the audience rewarding the performance or the message? Part three will happen Monday Nov 3, when the posters of the winners go up all over town.

C Your film is totally inclusive. The good, the bad, the ugly; it also reminds me of the structure of the Democratic Convention when they invited average workers to speak their concerns, no matter how scripted.

T The posters come from the idea of common man propaganda. They use the voice of the everyday, like the participants. Similar to Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber is symbolic, but it didn’t work because it is Fake. Not a Joe, not a plumber.

C The symbol is effective though…

T But once Joe became tangible there was disappointment. Same with Sarah Palin: the “Hockey Mom” who then shops at Bloomingdales.

C Hypocrisy.  I WANT YOU is also similar to your work as a performer on the Gong Show. You went from participant to host. What year was that?

T 1978

C What month? (Chris is thinking that his sister was born that same year.)

T Ehhh?

C What season? Jennifer was born in June.

T In the Fall.

C Tony, watching I WANT YOU, I can’t help but think about performance and being on stage. I moved here in 1999 from the east coast, and one thing I wanted to ask you about is Performance. I myself feel like I make Actions, not… “I want to Perform”. For example, at an event put on by Brian Storts in March 1999, I wanted to intervene, and not be on stage. A lot of the artists I was meeting at that time were putting on performance events. One after the other…Perform…My audience for my actions has always been in the streets. It might not be as prevalent as it was in 1999, but why all this performance art in San Francisco?

T Wow…That’s IRONIC. I came to San Francisco in 1975 to study out here. Chris Burden, Tom Marioni, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, and I, I think we all were against “the stage.” Theater vs performance. In Studio 9 at SFAI in the 1970s there were all of these performances going on. At my core was a desire to deconstruct and investigate this apparatus, “the stage.” It was around this time I went on the Gong Show. I saw the Gong Show as a bridge between performance art and TV/theater on stage. What would it be like to have Karen Finley or Tony Labat on the Gong Show. Total subversion of the stage. I wanted to consider the potential of these other venues/ platforms or spaces. Karen and myself were using the stage as a platform. The stage is a pedestal. Just like in sculpture. Here in the film the stage and X marks the spot, becomes a soapbox/platform.

ON THE TV: A person bound in brown with tape around body is placed on the X on stage. There is a total breakdown with this. And The person starts screaching and screaming. The person walks to the edge of the stage and the crew comes back to keep the individual from falling off. The bound person falls to the floor and continues to thrash back and forth with screeching.

T The museum staff didn’t know how to handle this person…when to end or stop it. This person became a liability. Is this person in torture or is this performance? What do we do? The only way to end it in this context was, after several minutes, for me to say “thank you” and she stopped…I don’t know who it was. It seemed as if she wanted it to stop but was dependent on the context of the situation for it to end. It could have gone on for hours. This trust between performer and audience is similar to Acconci’s early works. Potential energy, possibility, and the “what if”…What if this energy is transferred… (more…)

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.

[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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[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.

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.

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…”

Self-installation in the SFMOMA galleries is a project after my own heart, & I thought it would be interesting to talk to the person or persons behind this intervention. There is of course a long history (and currency) of museum interventions and examinations, from Andre Cadere’s Barres de bois rond of the early 70s to Andrea Fraser’s institutionally sanctioned and hosted performative critiques of those same institutions. Some of my colleagues suggested this video must have been an art-school project; I was not convinced. Straight to the source. Via YouTube mail, of course.

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Full name: Lou Huang
Age: 25 now, 23 at the time of the installation
Occupation: Designer at an architecture firm

Lou, my colleagues and I have had a bit of discussion about your possible motivation for self-installing the artwork “Man Leaning on Wall” in the second-floor permanent collection galleries, but we cannot agree. Why did you do it?

This is an interesting question to start with because it’s also the most complicated to answer. In a way I was making a statement about art and that in itself became the art. It has to do with a question many people have when looking at art, especially modern art, which is “how is this art?” I know that’s a question the SFMOMA gets quite a bit, because I remember some years back there was a display explaining why the SFMOMA features so much of those large canvases where all you see is a single color. There was also a story I read in the news once where a museum night janitor threw out an installation created with bags of trash because he thought that was actually bags of trash. So I wanted to push that line between “art” and “not art” around a bit. I got around to thinking whether it was possible for me to create a realistic label, take it to a large, respected museum, then stick whatever I wanted on the wall with the label next to it, and see if people would give it as much respect as anything else on display. From there it became, what if I just had some normal guy leaning on the wall? Is that art?

Also, I thought it would be funny. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t funny.

How did you decide which gallery, and among which artworks, to self-install?

It couldn’t have been a specific gallery with a theme because I wouldn’t have fit. We actually did a reconnaissance visit a few weeks earlier to look for potential spots and see how the labels are made, and the second floor is where the MOMA keeps a lot of permanent collection pieces, which had enough variety for this to work out. Other factors included blank wall space that wouldn’t crowd out other displays, and where the docents usually were so that I could install myself without them noticing.

What did you use to affix the object label to the wall?

We used reusable putty adhesive. I couldn’t actually drill into the wall or do anything to damage the wall, of course, but it also [had to] stay on for a while. Putty adhesive held up for over a day on our tests, so that’s what we went with.

What was the most common visitor response to the art object “Man Leaning on Wall”?

Interestingly enough, most people just accepted the fact that I was supposed to be there. I think the most common response is the same any piece of art gets– they look at it, think about it a little and then they move on to the next one. The other thing I noticed is that people tend to be a lot less comfortable getting up close to an exhibit when it’s a real person.

What was the most unusual visitor response to the art object “Man Leaning on Wall”?

I’m not sure how unusual this is but the best response I can remember was this girl who actually blogged about me. There were a few people who did come up really close, and then they would laugh when they took the time to read the entire label. I had to try really hard to ignore them and not respond, because laughter is infectious. Well, this one girl did laugh, and apparently I had to laugh too once she had left, but her boyfriend was still there and he saw it. So she wrote a blog entry about how she was “mocked by art.” I found it one day after looking up “man leaning on wall” on Google just to see if anyone had written about it.

The guards seem quite cordial to you, and it appears you were sent on your way with wall label in hand. What did they say to you?

They were actually very professional, very nice about the whole thing. The guard I was talking to told me they couldn’t have people touching the walls, it would get dirtier over time and then they’d have to repaint it. At first I told him I was supposed to be there, and he went away to check on my story (presumably). Twenty minutes later he returns and tells me he couldn’t get anyone to corroborate my story and I had to go. Actually, he took the label with him, probably to make sure I didn’t try it again. I don’t have it anymore, unfortunately.

Tell me something else about the project that we can’t tell from the video.

We had about 9 people who were “planted” as normal visitors who would try to lend believability to me as an art piece. In the video you see our group walking into the museum really briefly, but after that you don’t really see many of them again so it’s not clear what their roles were. They were included in the plan from the start because I didn’t know how other people would react, or if they would even notice me, so I had to make sure something else would draw their attention. I told them to make comments to each other or to other people, for example “Oh, I’ve seen Cornswallow’s work before” or “I remember this exhibit, it was in New York last year.” They didn’t necessarily have to act like they were aware of the work, and I left it up to them how they wanted to do it. Naturally they had to pretend they didn’t know me and they pulled it off very well; I don’t think any of the guards or the docents had any idea that I didn’t do it by myself.

I wanted to give a quick shout out to my buddy Christian Fernandez who’s the cameraman for the video. It was especially hard for him because film and photography isn’t allowed at SFMOMA and someone did notice his hidden rig, and they asked him if he was with me. Of course he said he wasn’t.

The first thing Jennifer Sonderby, SFMOMA Head of Graphic Design, said when she saw your video was, “Oh my god! Did he use Benton?!”. What font DID you use for the object label?

Aha! So that’s the font you use. No, I didn’t use Benton. I had forwarded the recon photos (taken with a low quality cell phone camera) of the actual labels to a typography whiz I found on Flickr to see if he could help me out, and he guessed that you were using Franklin Gothic.

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Thanks, Lou, for answering our questions—