Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima, Ordeal by Roses #6, 1961-1962. Gift of Howard Greenberg © Eikoh Hosoe

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.

Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled (Yokosuka) , from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate). 1966, printed 1974. Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu

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.

WSD: Looking at a lot of these pictures, I can admire them, and like them as pictures, and there’s also always a feeling of being behind a kind of cultural plate of glass. Something between me and whatever is transpiring before the lens. What about you? Why your attraction to this work?

SP: I saw a show when I was in New York in 1974 that John Szarkowski had put on, called New Japanese Photography. It seemed to me so different from anything else I’d seen that I’ve been trying to figure out what it’s all about ever since. It wasa a culture riven by its experience with America, both attracted to and made distraught by it.

I think there’s something fascinatingly ambiguous about a lot of these pictures. The question, what is Japan now? Is it something to be proud of or something to forget? What is the role of the American presence? And the destructiveness of the Americans? Our culture is so strange and ambiguous. How astounding it must be to see it through another culture’s eyes. I mean, we are amazingly violent and amazingly free. That’s something that’s been very liberating for the Japanese to digest, I think.

WSD: Yes, it’s a curious thing. In a sense these photographers were liberated by certain American things, like car culture. Or take this picture of Yukio Mishima [at top]—to my eye, it is as far as one can get from militaristic culture. What are those things wrapped around his neck?

SP: It’s a garden hose. You know, Mishima was a very wealthy man. And he lived in a neo-baroque or rococo palace, almost, with a very elaborate garden. So, when that picture was made, the photographer, Hosoe, who was very involved in dance, found this hose, wrapped it around him and made this strange and wonderful picture.

Katsumi Watanabe, Untitled , ca. 1970, printed 1985; Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust © Estate of Katsumi Watanabe

Shomei Tomatsu, Coca-Cola, Tokyo, 1969, printed 1980. Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu

SP: She’s probably on acid or something. The picture appears in a book Tomatsu did about a part of Tokyo called Shinjuku, where all the wild nightlife was. The Golden-gai, as it was called, was made up of old barracks left over from the war—a holdover from the occupation. There were tiny little bars for all the different groups—the people who admired French New Wave movies would have their own bar, and the photographers like Tomatsu and his pals had a bar. And they’re tiny places, and you can only fit maybe twelve people, they’re just crammed in, but there are gazillions of them. And there were also movie theaters there, and after the movies were over, street performers would be out doing their thing, too. Tomatsu’s book is about the small theater groups that evolved on the street and the rebellious student activity that took place there, and the drug-taking and the sex and, you know, just being in the sixties.

WSD: Another thing that strikes me is there’s an extreme phosphorescence to the light in a number of these photographs.

SP: A lot of it is night light.

Takuma Nakahira, La nuit 5, ca. 1968. Promised gift of a private collector © Takuma Nakahira

WSD: A lot of it is night light, and sometimes the light barely seems to have a shape; like in Takuma Nakahira’s La nuit series. He’s letting light explode, you know?

SP: Yes, the light in Nakahira’s pictures is amazing— kind of blindingly disturbing. Nakahira is a very interesting guy. He was very interested in Sartre and the French sixties student rebellion. For a very few, wonderful years, he made these amazing pictures, very large, which are not, strictly speaking, photographs. Politically, he didn’t want to make fine art objects, and instead produced what are really more like big posters. They’re original, one-of-a-kind pieces, meant to be tacked up on the wall. We’re very fortunate to have them.

And you’re right, there’s a really consistent interest in light, especially non-natural light, in a lot of this work.

WSD: Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi #31 is a fantastic picture. There’s that light again. The human presence seems to be something that is just sort of momentarily visiting.

Eikoh Hosoe, Kamaitachi #31, 1968, printed 1971. Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust.

Or consider Nobuyoshi Araki, who is famous for being the most prominent erotic photographer of Japan, and interested in the fragile, momentary beauty of women’s bodies. However he’s more complex than just that. He also made, especially when he was a younger person, pictures like this one, which I find so strange, from the Pseudo-Reportage series:

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from the series Pseudo-Reportage, 1980; Accessions Committee Fund © Nobuyoshi Araki

WSD: The picture shows a very tanned man carrying— Is that a woman he’s carrying? Can you tell?

SP: I can’t tell, for sure, but I think it’s another man he’s carrying out of the sea; it looks like he’s being rescued from drowning.

WSD: It only seems. It suggests a narrative, but doesn’t give you one. It keeps its secret.

SP: Yes, that’s true. Which is maybe why it’s so compelling.

WSD: These pictures by Yamazaki, are these time-lapse pictures?

Hiroshi Yamazaki, The Sun Is Longing for the Sea, 1978, printed 2000; Promised gift of a private collector © Hiroshi Yamazaki

SP: It’s a series called The Sun is Longing for the Sea. The odd effect is produced by the photographer moving the camera.

WSD: This reminds me of something Moriyama said, that he often wouldn’t even look through the viewfinder, but just carry a camera around and snap pictures. His whole body became the camera. This idea of being in motion, that what the camera is recording is the motion of the body of the maker, and not even necessarily the eye of the maker is something I find really interesting.

In this Moriyama picture from the Eros series:  What’s going on here? Did he hire a model? Or did he find a prostitute to pose?

Daido Moriyama, Hotel, Shibuya, 1969. Gelatin silver print. Promised gift of a private collector.

SP: I think this is a girlfriend, actually. And I think this was taken in what are called ‘love hotels’. In this series the pictures are all slightly out of focus, and very beautiful. They were published in a magazine called Provoke, which was the most important magazine dealing with photography of this period—the alternative photography of the late sixties, early seventies. Provoke only lasted, I think, three issues, but these were published in them.

WSD: They almost look like he’s trying to find a way of taking certain kinds of pictorialist values and do something new with them.

SP: They’re very erotic pictures, and a little bit raw. And by taking them a little out of focus, he makes them, I think, exactly what you say, kind of pictorialist, in a way. Kohei Yoshiyuki is a photographer who was also part of this moment, or a little bit later. He made totally voyeuristic pictures, taken after the invention of the infrared light bulb, of people in public parks, usually having sex, or in places where there is sex, or has been sex.  For example, this untitled picture [below] was taken in a park in Shinjuku, where urban development was newly underway.

WSD: It’s a make-out spot as well?

Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled, from the series The Park, 1973; Anonymous Fund © Kohei Yoshiyuki

SP: Yes. It’s amazing! You can see the lights in the distance.

WSD: Well, this wasn’t taken with a long lens! He must’ve been pretty close.

SP: He was definitely close. [They laugh.]

WSD: The halo lights of the city appear almost as if they’re watching. It looks like a scene out of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s so bucolic.

SP:  Simone, of these Japanese photographers, who most interests you?

WSD: The two that really capture my attention are Moriyama and Hosoe. I feel a certain sympathy with Moriyama, because there’s so much about him that was contrary. I think he wrote somewhere that he’s not against consumerism, he’s not against America, he’s not against American culture: he’s against photography. I find that most appealing. The work feels to me like it is coming out of a kind of resistance—whether the pressures are formal pressures or social, political pressures. And there’s a real urgency to all of these pictures, as if the photographers can’t possibly take in as much as they really want to take in, and so are moving as quickly as they can.

SP: This is a cultural moment that’s specifically Japanese.

WSD: What’s our equivalent here, a period when American photographers might have felt similar compulsions?

SP: Maybe the thirties, when things were so vulnerable and life was changing, and not what it was before. People were coming to California from Texas and
Oklahoma and living in tents. It seems to me there was a very profound cultural reaction to real events, both physical events—you know, the climate—and economic events. Maybe that was, in some way, equivalent to what the Japanese were trying to deal with during the postwar period.

Sandra S. Phillips and W.S. Di Piero photo: Winni Wintermeyer

WSD: That makes a lot of sense to me. There was also a sort of visual voraciousness, to take in as much as possible of what was happening.

SP: To try and understand it, maybe.

WSD: Yes. I think the understanding always comes later. First you make the archive, and then you try to figure out what has happened.

The new bridge to the rooftop garden, and Rosana Castrillo Díaz's mural. Untitled , 2009. Photo: Don Ross

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 Diaz, Tape Drawing (detail). 2004

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.

JB: Was the UCSF piece the first time you worked directly on the wall?

RCD: One of the first. A couple years before that I was in a show at the Drawing Center where I was drawing on the wall.

JB: Using what material?

Rosana Castrillo Diaz, Untitled, 2004. Graphite on paper. Collection SFMOMA

RCD: Just pencil. But again, it was very small, very detailed work that you could miss very easily. It was work that required you to walk around slowly, or to be nearby to spot it. One of the drawings was a book, just the outline of it. And another was a little piece of a photocopy from a book. The open pages of the book were made out of the shadow around it, and almost nothing more.

JB: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the development of your ideas for the design of the bridge mural. It relates in such an interesting way to the fact that the Rooftop Garden will be used primarily for sculpture. The design has an incredible sense of movement. The imagery seems to relate to, say, folds of drapery in classical sculpture.

RCD: I would like to be able to tell you that I thought, “Oh, a rooftop garden, of course, sculpture!” But actually, I thought first about the palette and the reflectivity that I wanted to be there, and how I wanted something really white or light. And if I could’ve gone with values that were even a touch lighter, I would have. But it would have lost reflectivity, which is a key to the overall design and to having the work be extremely white when light hits. I also thought about Renaissance marbles, and turn-of-the-century Camille Claudel marbles, and the way that light models marble and is reflected by marble. And I wanted a design that would have a downward flow to it. As I went back and looked into imagery of marbles, draperies just kept coming out.

JB: Did part of your wish to have some kind of flow have to do with the fact that the bridge is a passageway and a ramp?

RCD: It’s a passageway, and the ramp is long. I knew that as you walked down it, the way you saw the design would change. I felt it needed to flow like water.

Rosana Castrillo Díaz, Untitled, 2009. Photo: Ian Reeves.

JB: Yesterday we were looking at it and remarking upon the fact that when you’re at one vantage point, you see the different values of the whites very distinctly. But if you look at the very same spot on the wall from another vantage point, they collapse into each other and you don’t see the distinctions at all.

RCD: I love that moment when they collapse into each other and it just disappears. It comes to completion, in a way. It’s fabulous.

JB: How would you describe the four different paints that you are using? At UCSF, the entire piece was done with mica, right?

The UCSF mural. Untitled, April 5, 2007. Rosana Castrillo Diaz, 2007.

RCD: It was mica. I mixed the mica in different percentages until I came up with one that gave the most reflectivity. For this project, my goodness, I went through so many micas. I went through commercial micas, like Benjamin Moore reflectives, and through artist paints of all sorts—You’re not going to believe much money I spent on just trying the right micas, the right whites. I wanted micas that would have a neutral palette to them and I tried to come up with values that were at a distance from each other that I was comfortable with, not too separate in value; but not too close, either.

JB: And did you determine the background paint? Or is that just “SFMOMA white”?

RCD: I just worked with SFMOMA’s white. I also tried it on super white, but it was too cold.

JB: It’s also nice the way it blends at the edges and at the top into the rest of the space.

RCD: What I learned from all of my research was that, while I first thought the highlights would be the lightest value, as it turns out I had to paint the design in reverse, in negative. So actually the highlights are the darkest color, because that paint is the most reflective. So there was an element of surprise there. Luckily, it works.

For me the painting has two sides to it. There’s the reflective side, and there is the concrete side to it. There’s the side where the piece is playing with the light and is all about reflectivity, and the side where you see the actual paint on the wall. I think it works both ways, but that was a great risk for me, painting it in reverse. It was not comfortable. Because you really don’t know what it’s going to look like until it’s up there. I tried to mimic the effect on the computer, I tried to mimic it on my wall. And then I thought, Should I do this? Should I paint the highlights dark gray? Or dark mica? And then I thought, let’s go for it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just have to change it.

JB: It seems like it’s working.

The mural from the other direction. Rosana Castrillo Díaz, Untitled, 2009.

RCD: You know, it’s working perfectly. I am very happy with it. I’m not sure how much can you read “fold” or “drapery” from the design, but because it’s so large it doesn’t matter what is negative or positive.

JB: Another issue I know has been a big one as you’ve been developing this project is, how to make the piece in such a way that it can be redone at some point in the future. Since the museum is hoping to acquire the piece for the collection, but not necessarily planning to keep it up indefinitely(as there really isn’t anything here that’s permanent), we would want to be able to install it again. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the things you had to think about, given that it’s not necessarily just a one-time installation, but something that we’re hoping could be repeated,, like the wall drawings that we own by Sol LeWitt, for instance.

RCD: I’ve been trying to think all along about how I can make it easier for you to reinstall this. I think it would be key to be able to project it, and I think you could, by just making a simple grid on the wall. But that is like having a hard copy of it. I would have projected the whole thing at the start, but I thought it would be interesting to have a hard copy of the original design, with any last-minute changes added to the hard copy as we were working. Then you would have a basic record or template you could always go back to and say, Well, this is how she did it. There was also an issue of the hand of the artist. Amanda, one of the conservators, asked “How are we going to draw this? It won’t be you.” If the museum ever works with it again and they have to draw it themselves on the wall, I’m okay with it. Somebody else’s hand, well- it would still be handmade, and that interests me much more than, Okay, that’s my hand.

JB: And you do have quite a few hands involved in the making of this piece, right? You have a group of people that are helping.

RCD: Right. I have six people helping. It’s actually quite nice to have all those people involved and having these all hands—it ultimately kind of proves that we’re not that important. [laughs] You know, I’m from Spain, where artists are appreciated but not revered. It’s very interesting to be in this culture, where if you say you’re an artist, there’s all this awe and hush. And on the other hand, the museum does have to be true to what the artist’s intent was. But it’s also really nice to know that you can involve several people and still have a work that is by you.

Janet Bishop & Rosana Castrillo Diaz

JB: It’s almost like being a composer.

RCD: Right.

JB: You write a piece that will be performed in the future, and it will be different every single time, but it will still be the piece.

RCD: Right. And I was afraid that the tape used to mask out the piece would make it cold, but everything’s working well. It’s not—the lines are not cold or tape-like.

JB: Well, it’s great to have you back at SFMOMA for the installation, and congratulations in advance. The piece is—already, even in its incomplete state—a really wonderful work of art.

[And some pleasant news: The mural was unanimously approved by SFMOMA's accessions committee on May 13th. Do come down and see it, and many thanks to Janet & Rosana for talking about it here.]

Imin Yeh posing infront of her installation “The Legend of the Power Animals” at the CCA MFA exhibition

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.

A homemade box made by Yeh photographed in the storage room of the Asian Art Museum.

ASR: So to the consumer, the box becomes a symbol of authenticity.

IY: Right. If it comes in the box it is a “good import.” It is something we want from China, whereas a lot of other things we don’t want. There is a lot of anxiety about imports from China. Ten years ago it was Taiwan, thirty years ago it was Japan; it will always change when different countries come into power. There are a lot of racially charged comments made at the museum. People assume that if the products sold in the museum store are cheap then they must have been made in China. The problem is that the idea of what China is and what makes a “good Chinese import” is caught in a really exotic, ancient, static idea of Chinese myths. “Good Imports” is about expanding upon that idea and the idea that something is safe to consume because it looks different to you when we’re not all that different and we’re intertwined.

ASR: It also speaks to the contradictions in the search for authenticity, in general.

IY: Yeah, my work pokes holes at the myth that is authenticity. The idea that there is even something authentic to search for when buying things is what I consider a contemporary myth.  It is totally made up.

Yeh's “Good Imports” installation at 710 Kearny Street, part of the Chinese Cultural Center's Present Tense 2009 Bienniale

ASR: How have people responded to the storefront?

IY: The response has been great. It has been written up in a couple newspapers and I was asked to do an interview in Chinese about the installation, which may kill my parents! What was really rewarding was after I installed the work there were all these smiling, older Asian women that had this look on their faces like they got it or they appreciated it. It was great since they aren’t people who frequent galleries and probably haven’t been to art school and yet, they understood the work in a totally different context.

ASR: I’m interested in how your work has changed through your relationship to the institutions, the Asian Art Museum and CCA. Let’s start with the museum, were you making work about the politics of labor and identity before you started working at the museum?

IY: Yes, I was making similar work. I applied to the job at the Asian Art Museum with a sort of secret identity because I knew working there would fuel my practice. A few things about my practice have changed a lot due to both the museum and graduate school. I used to try to reappropriate stereotypes very obviously. I realized that no matter how much I try, people are always going to read things the way that they want to read them, so if you try to reappropriate something and think that you are being so smart and subtle and that clearly your work is a joke or a political move and then it continues to be consumed as an “Asian thing,” it is really frustrating. There is almost no way around it.

ASR: How do you negotiate this?

IY: I’m trying two different techniques-one is abstracting things as in “Good Imports” where I focus really closely on one thing like the pattern of the boxes without trying to be preachy or didactic, but really getting so far into the pattern that it abstracts everything else. In the other project, “The Legend of the Power Animals” I’m working with cultural invention as a more productive way to be political. Instead of just talking about those problems and getting angry, the project is rooted in being whimsical and poking fun at the greater systems that operate.

ASR: Which is different than trying to somehow undercut an existing stereotype.

IY: Right, by making up your own stereotype that is so much bigger than the ones that are already out there it sheds light on the absurdity of the stereotype that does exist. It gives people the license to laugh at something.

ASR: …and then be uncomfortable and question why it is that they are laughing.

IY: Right, which is very different than just lecturing people.

ASR: I think that strategy that was successful in your piece “Everybody Loves a Skinny White Boyfriend” because it invited gallery visitors to play and interact with your homemade skinny, white boyfriend pillows. There was an opportunity to reflect on the commodification of identities. There is an immediate playfulness that bridges that gap between the piece, its message, and the viewers.

Gallery visitor at The Spare Room Project participates in Yeh's “Everybody Loves a Skinny White Boyfriend” installation

IY: The playful approach has been a lot more positive and fruitful. It opens the work up to a lot more people. There are a lot of layers to it. It is funny that you can get a whole group of people to be like “Yeah, a skinny white guy!” which is the one group of people that no one ever talks about in art school because they are the norm. When really it is political to even say the phrase: white man. There are a lot of misreadings of my work because of my name. If you have a name like Imin Yeh, people are always getting the ethnicity wrong or the gender wrong, or you know contemporary Asian art is so hot right now that they are trying to read or impose that story on me, which isn’t my story, so what do you do when you have an object like a skinny white boyfriend pillow and you figure the artist is an Asian woman, an identity that is constantly fetishized. Instead of continuing to make things that repeat the stereotype, like the Urban Outfitter’s merchandise line “Everyone Loves an Asian Girl,” which the piece is based on, I’m trying to point out this stuff.

ASR: Your work often involves institutional critique. When I was at the Asian Art Museum recently I was struck by the description of “What is Asia?” and was actually pleased that it was more comprehensive than I was expecting. It spoke about Asia in relationship to specific geographical histories and colonialism. It made me wonder if that questioning is ever inherent in the exhibitions themselves versus just the rhetoric surrounding them. Do you think there is a space for institutional critique within the Asian Art Museum?

IY: My experience with the museum is that the store is really great. My co-workers and boss are supportive of the work I do outside of the store. But there is very little interest in expanding the idea of Asia beyond the past. There are a lot of reasons for that, a lot has to do with endowments and the history of the collection.  The story of non-Western art in the United States and how it was acquired is complicated. These things were stolen. It would take years and a lot of money and interest to have show that goes beyond just what the collection has. It is like an uphill battle with every institution to do something that is more relevant. The Present Tense Biennale is the first show where they have reached out to include Asian American kids and contemporary Chinese artists abroad and non-Chinese artists and it has been an astounding success. The Chinese Cultural Center is smaller than the Asian Art Museum and they were finally able to mobilize this one show in the city of San Francisco. We’re not taking about the Asian Art Museum at Wisconsin-Madison, we’re talking about San Francisco, a city with a Chinese Cultural Center in the larger Chinatown in America, for God’s sake! The Asian Art Museum is still worlds behind in ever doing that.  If the museum is suppose to be a place to educate and empower, you would think there would be a place to empower people who have a history and relationship to this history and language.

“Year of the Three Toed Sloth” from Yeh's “Legend of the Power Animals”

ASR: Let’s shift to your MFA work and experience in graduate school. Can you describe your “The Legends of the Power Animal” project?

IY: The “Legend of the Power Animal” mimics the Chinese zodiac but the whole thing is functioning from a merchandise point backwards. I started with placemats and I’m fleshing out the story of the zodiac more and more, claiming that there were these weird beasts and auspicious jewels. I rip off a lot of cultural Asian myths where everything has a meaning and is authentic. It is interesting because the Chinese zodiac is such an enabler of ethnic kitsch consumption, people buy their zodiac animal year and all the sudden they have a collection of pig stuff or rat stuff. It is just so consumable.

ASR: At the MFA show opening your work was installed as though it were a shop and items were for sale.

IY: Yeah and it was crazy because even then people really wanted a pin of their zodiac animal and I tried to make it obvious that the whole thing is made up and if you want to be Blue Footed Boobie, even if it’s not “your year,” you should just go for it! Why should you adhere to anything because a placemat told you to! My point is that the animals and zodiac have already been through so many turbulent re-mythifications, they have been re-established again and again, mostly with a commercial motivation but people still see it a Chinese thing!  Even though it is all a ploy to make things cost more.

“Year of the Blue Footed Boobie” from Yeh's “The Legend of the Power Animals”

ASR:  How has the Chinese zodiac already been re-invented?

IY: In San Francisco, during the Cold War, the celebration of the Chinese New Year was exaggerated. Community leaders made a decision to exaggerate the traditional Chinese stories as a way to improve the ghetto that was Chinatown. Some statistics show that since embracing the older tradition in an American format such as the street parade, shops and restaurants in Chinatown did 3-5 times better. That has been super interesting to me. These Chinese holidays were Westernized.  So I thought I’m going to make up my own zodiac animals with the coolest things I can think of.  It isn’t such a political move, its functioning in the same system.

ASR: But it is meant to throw a wrench in what we think are stable categories.

IY: Yeah, when I introduced the idea originally there was a lot of concern that it was going to be offensive.  Heaven forbid I have the subjectivity to make up something and have fun with my own culture and inherited history. People were reading it as, “how dare you do this.” It’s hard to work in an institution set up to fear work that is political or personal with people thinking I am so lucky that I can “fall back” on talking about my own identity, as if that is a choice. I don’t think it is. It was rewarding because the project just made people happy even if I lost a little bit of the criticality of it, I don’t have the extra burden of putting something in the world that is full of anger or ignorance. I’m trying to hit that balance of playfulness and criticality.

ASR: Can you describe the brand you developed that accompanies a lot of your work?

IY: I’ve been working with the “Iron Chink” brands for a while. The Iron Chink was a machine used at the turn of the century in Northwest America. During this time the salmon industry wanted a lot of cheap labor, so they brought Chinese laborers to skin and can the fish until they developed a machine to do this that they called the “Iron Chink” machine. The laborers could go back to China because, you know, the machine, didn’t get tired! I had the unfortunate experience of going on an Alaskan cruise with my family and as part of a tour we saw this machine. We were the only Chinese family there and we took the awkward photo in front of the Iron Chink machine.

ASR: So you have now appropriated this name as your own “brand?”

Yeh's “Seal of Authenticity” and brand name “Iron Chink” accompanies most of her work

IY: Yeah, I like the brand name being on everything because I think it is a site of criticality. It is a site where I am mediating these things and saying although these objects are so consumable, the brand exists to mess with you. But I’m at a point where its like an inside joke with myself and I’m concerned that the brand doesn’t mean anything and people might think, “Oh if she is Chinese and she says Chink, than it’s all good.” And there is no energy or power behind that brand anymore.

ASR: It goes back to what you were saying about the double bind of reclaiming or reusing stereotypes that already exist in our culture. I see the same thing happen with offensive terms being reclaimed in queer communities. It brings up the questions of who has license to say it and at what point are you just contributing to the same thing that you’re trying to critique.

IY: Absolutely. It is a tiring project. But at the same time it has to be there.

ASR: How did you navigate an institution with the climate that you just described?

IY: I wonder how well I did, actually. I came to San Francisco to go to art school and I didn’t think I would be the only Chinese-American person in my program, but I was. This is city that is what, twenty or thirty percent Chinese-American? And it’s not just the institution.

ASR: …although it is indicative of the institutions’ lack of diversity, in general.

IY: It is indicative of any master’s program, of private institutions, and the art world, in general. It is indicative of a community that is very anxious to embrace any of their people who pursue art. I’m the only artist in my family and that is a story you see reiterated in bad television shows and Joy Luck Club like things and it is true. In a lot of cases we are a new group of people. It is a scary thing for a new group to embrace, so its indicative of a lot of different institutional things. Plus, I was one of the only people at CCA working with printmaking. There is an anxiety about people who are doing feminist art or as a person of color, there is a concern that you’re just falling back on some personal story. The decision to do politically minded work or identity-based work is an organic one. There is a lot of pressure to shut up, but then there are students every year that come to the same conclusions and try to talk about the same things and if an institution refuses to acknowledge that history and refuses to talk about it than that work is going to get worse.

ASR: What do you mean by worse?

IY: If strategies for making political work aren’t being taught then it takes longer for people to make critically engaging work. There is a way of saying, “identity politics only happened in the 1980s.”  People want to say that we are post-racial and that feminism is dead.  As much as it might be considered a trend, it’s not. So you might as well teach the strategies that make it a successful practice. I think that is my biggest frustration.

ASR: Yes. I think a lot about how art history curriculum’s are taught in general, and also particular to private institution and one that lacks racial diversity. I wonder about how we can dislodge the term “identity politics” from being a bad word regulated to the 1980s.

IY: What makes me sad is that when I went to graduate school was the same time I learned that identity politics was a thing and not just a weird quirk of my personality and one day later I found out that it would be a horrible way to describe my work, and it would pigeonhole me. It was like falling in love and then getting dumped within 24 hours.

ASR: Do you think that is because using the term “identity politics” is so heavily associated with the controversial work of the 1980s or is it the content of the work itself that illicits that reaction? We give names to things and they become the only way that we know how to describe them and then those names become passe and take on all these negative connotations, maybe we need a new language.

IY: I think it’s both. I agree that when words are associated with an era or a past thing, a static thing, they aren’t allowed to evolve.  You say a phrase and people have an idea of what they think it means based on the past.

ASR: Right, which may be a similar reason as to why some people don’t want to identify as feminist because of what that word meant during a particular time period to a particular group of people.

IY: Right, at the same time I don’t think the work being made today is all that similar to the work from the 1980s. There should be room for all these different subtleties, every strategy and technique is so different.

Detail of Yeh's “Good Imports” installation from the Barclay Simpson Award exhibition at the Oliver Art Center, March 2009

ASR: I always think of the phrase from creative writing classes “write what you know” and if what you know are these experiences of yourself in the world, then it is frustrating to then be pigenholed.

IY: Yes. What happens if my day to day experience continues to reaffirm these experiences and my conversations with like minded people are fantastic because this is an interesting issue that affects a lot of people and is super relevant outside the art institution, how do you turn around and say, thanks for saying that I’m passe when every day I’m re-energized to make the kind of work I do.

ASR: Where do you see your work going now that you have graduated with an MFA?  Any upcoming projects?

IY:  I’m interested in doing a whole installation of all the computers.  So many of our laptops get shipped all the way back to China to get recycled at a great envrionmental and physical cost to the people who do it, the country, and the land. Computers are such a luxury item at the time they are bought. Especially Apple computers, they are at the height of the design of our generation and at the moment you buy a computer it is already worth less that what you bought it for, they loose value immediately and are only built to last a couple years.  I figure every computer that is taken out of that cycle of being shipped across the country and is made permanent in a sculpture or installation could stop that cycle.

ASR: And make that cycle of consumption visible.

IY: Yeah.  It could also add more value to through more labor and creating a mass produced luxury item into a unique art object. I’m trying to meditate more on the computer and its meanings, it being subject to all the design and fashion trends, technological trends.

ASR: I’ve thought similar issues with the US/Mexico border, in respect to what can cross between the border. When objects come to the United States we don’t see the labor that is attached to them and when they leave the United States we don’t see the way that they are disposed off.

IY: We are completely removed from it and yet, computers are such an integral part of what we consider work. We all sit behind computers. Computers are the center of how we communicate and access information. It is a privilege and a luxury that so many American college students have a computer. Everyone can check out all the stuff they want from all over the world, whereas the people who are making the computer are still in a country that is highly censored. It is like this informational, one-way tunnel. You know, we don’t think where the end of the life of our objects are. All these objects were made in China and there is a good chance that they will return there.  I think it is a really interesting object.

To see more of Imin Yeh’s work visit her website and particpate in her downloadable crafts, lantern project.

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

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

Helen Levitt, New York. 1942

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

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

Helen Levitt, New York, 1940. Gelatin silver print

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

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

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

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

—Elizabeth Gand

DirectorCam: with champagne. SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra, in front of Barnett Newman's Zim Zum I (1969). Our operations manager Jim Weber, on walkie to the right.

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

DirectorCam: With video crew, and Senior Graphic Designer James Williams, waiting for Ellsworth Kelly and the SFMOMA Oral History Project team.

For example:

DirectorCam: Cabinet meeting

DirectorCam: In the Pavilion (with Deputy Head of Conservation, Michelle Barger)

DirectorCam: With the press

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

“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.

——————————

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?

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

———————

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

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.

—-

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]