OPEN SPACE

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

[Part two of a conversation, keyed to our One on One series, between Michelle Barger, deputy head of conservation, and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, on Robert Overby's Hall painting, first floor.]

Michelle Barger: How did you come to chose Hall painting, first floor for your One on One talk? Were you familiar with Overby’s work as a commercial designer prior to becoming an artist, and did this play into your decision?

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher: In 2000, I was working at the UCLA Hammer Museum as the curatorial assistant when Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969 was exhibited, so I have been familiar with all the various strains of his work since then, including the graphic design. However, this was before switching from a curatorial interest in contemporary art to architecture. When I was combing through the permanent collection database recently in search of works for an exhibition proposal, I was thrilled to discover that SFMOMA had one of the Barclay House casts.

Even though Hall painting, first floor is in the Painting +  Sculpture collection (and not Architecture + Design), I think it brings up interesting issues related to capturing and displaying architecture. I abandoned the exhibition proposal once I learned that it was on view in Vincent Fecteau’s show, but I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time thinking about this work and how it relates to Architecture.

As you know, an A+D department in an art museum is always working with secondary materials. We can never exhibit a building, only representations of a building. Of course, everyone experiences architecture every day, especially how it defines space and program. Hall Painting, first floor offers an impression of a familiar piece of architecture—a house—using a method I’ve never seen in the field. By creating a cast of a detail from the house—the hall where a painting was on the first floor—one is given a very personal view of an interior. This impression captures details that a photograph cannot—the paint from the walls and pieces of the burnt wood, which reveal an intriguing history of the house.

MB: Doorways and architectural passageways are represented in other early works by Overby, bringing up the relationship between the body and points of access. Can you talk about this relationship in Hall painting, first floor?

JDF: I hadn’t really thought about the door represented in this piece, because I consider this work a fragment of the larger project of capturing the whole Barclay House. But, of course, you are right that most of the other casts are only of doors or windows, and he also did concrete casts of doors. As you mentioned, it also relates to Overby’s other works and interestingly, even the later paintings of (mostly) female body parts with rubber S&M apparel, where the orifices are either covered by latex or are the only body part revealed. I’ve always considered the rubber casts as images of spaces special to Overby;  however, writer David Rimanelli wrote that Overby considered the casts as process art, in which case the works stand as an index to the action. To get back to your question, I wonder about the bodily action in “masking” the house (and finding parts of the house’s skin—plaster, paint and burnt wood—embedded in the cast) as a pseudo sexual act.

I look forward to speaking about the notion of the work as an index a bit more during the One on One talk on Thursday, November 5th at 6:30pm.

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. This week and next, Michelle Barger, SFMOMA deputy head of conservation, & Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, together take on Robert Overby's Hall painting, first floor.]

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher: I was so excited to learn that Robert Overby’s large latex rubber cast of Hall painting, first floor from 1971 would be on view, because I had been working on an exhibition proposal that would incorporate this work that, to my knowledge, had not been on view at SFMOMA since it was acquired in 2003. When the One on One opportunity came up, I knew I wanted to talk about this piece, but only recently noticed that Michelle Barger, Deputy Head of Conservation, has also selected this piece. As luck would have it, the talks were scheduled one week apart: a great opportunity to highlight on the blog the many different interpretations and voices within an institution on a single work of art.

Michelle, we know that Hall painting, first floor was a cast from the Barclay House, which was a recently burned and abandoned building in Los Angeles. As a conservator, what do you think of Overby’s attempt to preserve an imprint of house surely slated for demolition?

Michelle Barger: It’s interesting to explore Overby’s Barclay project as a sort of preservation project. I often think of the surfaces of Hall painting, first floor as topography maps—literally a one-to-one record of every hill and valley in the flaking paint and loose plaster. In the field of conservation, we are always attempting to document the life of a work of art: what are the materials, how did the artist manipulate them and create the work of art, what are the best display conditions, are those conditions variable, how will the materials age, and is this acceptable, etc. It’s interesting to think of Hall painting, first floor in the way one can think of documentation for performance art—a record that proves or confirms that an event existed and happened. It becomes a second-hand version of the real thing. But in this case, one can consider Overby’s documentation as the performance.

JDF: I imagine that the fashion for entropy in artworks from the 1960s and 70s can complicate a conservator’s role in preserving a work that is supposed to “fade away’ eventually, especially if it is a valuable work in a museum collection. In contrast, Overby appears to be attempting to capture the house before its demise, yet the material—latex rubber—used for the casts must be particularly hard to maintain, especially as it is embedded with bits from the house—the paint, plaster and even charred wood. How do you treat such a piece? Are the artist’s intentions taken into consideration, even when there is no documented conservation plan from the artist?

MB: The conservation staff here is very committed to understanding artists’ intent for their work; we consider this information to be an integral part of developing a preservation plan for works in the collection. Yet, as you note, we don’t always have the luxury of knowing an artist’s thoughts for how a work should age over time, particularly when the artist is no longer alive. In such cases, we may work with our curators, colleagues at other institutions who are familiar with the artist’s work, and family members and studio assistants to better comprehend the best course for treatment.

On the subject of Overby’s material specifically, we were fortunate to have spent many hours studying and examining the work of Eva Hesse—so much of her later sculptural work incorporated latex rubber—in preparation for our 2002 retrospective of her work. During the subsequent tour of the exhibit to Wiesbaden, Germany, and London, I had the wonderful privilege of handling and installing her work, and observing the qualities and limits of aged latex rubber. One very basic thing I learned is that you can extend the life of an artwork made with rubber by simply storing it in the exact configuration in which it is displayed. In other words, rubber will eventually become hardened and brittle, causing the work to “freeze” in whatever position it happens to be in at that point in time. Many of Overby’s rubber wall paintings from the Barclay House are so large that they must be stored rolled on a cylinder—in much the same way that large tapestries or rugs are stored. Luckily, Hall painting, first floor is small enough that we can store it completely flat and still fit the crate into our freight elevator, through gallery doorways, and into storage.

As for the bits of paint, plaster, charred wood—and even a telephone wire—in this work, they are remarkably well-adhered to the rubber surface. Flexing of the work during handling and installation could compromise this, especially as the rubber continues to become more brittle. But we’ve worked out an excellent system where the storage crate also serves as a tray to support the work when moving it from a horizontal to vertical position.

I’ll be speaking about Hall painting, first floor in a One on One talk this Thursday the 29th at 6:30, and will specifically address the challenges we face in preserving works made from latex rubber. I’ll bring some show-and-tell items—including some samples of rubber and cheesecloth panels—so please come on by!

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling.]

Do only fans truly understand pop culture? Anyone who has been a fan of one of our global pop stars knows it is the fans that make the star. Candice Breitz has explored—in four different parts of the world—how fans “become” their beloved idol, be it Bob Marley in Kingston; Madonna in Milan; Michael Jackson in Berlin; or, finally, John Lennon in Newcastle, England. I saw Candice Breitz’s Lennon-portrait-as-working class hero three years ago, when it was first shown in Vienna. Today, installed in the Media Art galleries on SFMOMA’s 4th floor, I’m still struck by the way twenty-five ardent Lennon fans have taken on the challenge to sing every single song of his first solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The record was released in 1970, the same year the Beatles split up; Lennon was deeply involved in global politics at the time, and working through the traumatic loss of his mother. Breitz’s impassioned “chorus” sings for 39 minutes and 55 seconds (the exact length of the album). Displayed on twenty-five individual screens, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006), synchronizes the fans’ performances in off-kilter harmony; the album’s first song “Mother” linking this piece of collaborative acapella performance to Breitz’s second work on view, entitled precisely Mother (2005). For this second exploration of pop culture iconography Breitz edited film performances by Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Meryl Streep, creating a revealing composite of the Hollywood cliché of the difficult mother.

While our series of One-on-One talks is typically hosted by a curator “only”, I’m happy to be able to invite you to join me and the artist Candice Breitz in a conversation dedicated to her show “On View: Candice Breitz” before we embark on a more extended panel discussion. The One on One talk starts in the Haas Atrium at 6:30 p.m. At7 p.m. please join us for “More on Pictures, or Appropriation Now” in the Wattis Theater.

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is actually a little bit two-on-one: Jill Sterrett, SFMOMA director of conservation and collections, & Sarah Roberts, associate curator of collections and research, who will be pinch-hitting for Jill's Thursday evening tour. ]

I have a memory from the 1960s. It’s an astronaut in a picture-pastiche in Life magazine that caught my eye. I came to learn later that this fold-out spread by Robert Rauschenberg was commissioned by Life to commemorate Dante’s 700th birthday. Back then, I didn’t know Rauschenberg, I hadn’t yet learned who Dante was, and I certainly missed the full impact of Rauschenberg’s references to a modern-day inferno. Still, the fresh forces of youthful curiosity and discovery in that unknowing moment seem to me quintessential Rauschenberg, and they are all present in Port of Entry (1998). (more…)

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from assistant curator of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio.]

I have a growing obsession for the desert; perhaps it is not even so much about the desert as it is about how art can activate it, both as a place and as a concept. This interest was set in motion while I was doing research on Mai-Thu Perret last summer. The genesis of her project involves a story she wrote called The Crystal Frontier, about a group of young women who abandon their rote, urban lives to form a utopian community in the desert of New Mexico they call New Ponderosa Year Zero. They do this to escape the constraints of capitalism in a phallocentric West. Shortly thereafter, I went to visit Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field from 1977 (an earthwork that informs Mai-Thu’s ideas) located very close to Ponderosa, New Mexico. There I witnessed how De Maria’s work yields to the sublime, shifting light of the desert and I listened to its engulfing silence. And dare I say it, I also carelessly swung around the stainless steel poles De Maria planted into the dry, crackling New Mexico earth to solicit lightening storms. During my brief stay I was hoping to catch a glimpse of a New Mexican Whiptail—an all-female species of lizard, indigenous to New Mexico and Arizona, that procreates parthenogenetically, laying complete female eggs. But, alas, I saw none. (more…)

My Aunt Gladys once, when she read a thing in a magazine, wrote me a letter, saying she was so proud of me, because she had worked so hard to instill some respect for the American flag in her students, and she was glad the mark had been left on me.

―Jasper Johns to Emile de Antonio.

I’m next up with one of our weekly One-on-One curator talks, Thursday 2 July at 6.30pm. Someone had the idea that the British curator should do 4th of July weekend. I’m going to be talking about Jasper Johns’ Flag (1958), one of his series of pictures, if they are pictures, of the flag of the United States. SFMOMA has another of these (not now on view), from 1960-69, made from lead. The first in the series, Flag (1954-55), is in the collection of MoMA in New York.

I know this series fairly well. I used to teach about it at Open University residential schools in the late 1990s, relying on Fred Orton’s book Figuring Jasper Johns, and the related curriculum materials he made for the OU. The quotations in this post, (three from Emile de Antonio’s 1973 film Painters Painting), my facts, and many of my ideas about Flag come from that book. I’d say that Orton—who was associated with the Conceptual Art group Art & Language—sees Johns from a Conceptual Art perspective. About the Flag in the MoMA collection Orton asks a Conceptualist’s question: is it a flag or a painting? In other words, has Johns made a painting of a flag, or made a flag with paint?

When I stopped teaching his work, I didn’t think about Johns again for a long while, until, recently, I saw a poster of a Johns Flag, quite large, hanging in the Visa Section of the U.S. Embassy in London. I’ve seen it there a few times in the last couple of years, at various interviews. There are a couple of other posters of paintings and, of course, there are some other American flags (though not as many as you would expect). The flag-like object in SFMOMA (or MoMA) is probably not a flag, nor is the poster of Flag in the Museum Store; the poster in the Embassy, I’m not so sure. And if someone stuck a poster of Flag in the window of his big rig, or burned one in a street somewhere, it’s a flag. Meaning is use.

Some people thought he was anti-American… that he was a man who protested against the symbols of America, the flag. At the time there really was no special reason for it: there was no Vietnam War… There was McCarthy. No, McCarthy had disappeared a long time before that.

―Leo Castelli to Emile de Antonio.

The original Flag, of 1954-55, was in Johns’ first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in New York, in January and February 1958. Alfred H. Barr Jr., former Director of MoMA but at that time the Director of Collections, wanted to acquire it for the Museum. The acquisition was blocked by the Committee on the Museum Collection (someone wondered if buying Flag ‘might not leave the Museum open to attack from groups like the American Legion’), and the matter was referred to the Board of Trustees. The Board also decided against buying Flag, ‘fearing that it would offend patriotic sensibilities’. The work eventually entered the MoMA collection in 1973, as the gift of Philip Johnson (who had been an anti-Johns member of the Committee on the Museum Collection in 1958), in honor of Barr on the occasion of his retirement.

By 1958, McCarthy had disappeared, but in 1954 he hadn’t yet. The Army-McCarthy Hearings (widely televised at the time, and, by the way, the subject of de Antonio’s amazing 1964 film Point of Order!) took place in the summer of that year, not long before Johns conceived of Flag. Patriotism and the flag were hot issues in 1954. On Flag Day, 14 June, Eisenhower approved controversial legislation that added the words ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. On 10 November, the dedication of the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery took place. Johns, himself, had been discharged from the army only two years before. Is Johns’ Flag for or against the American flag? Impossible to say.

The Flag on view now at SFMOMA was painted in 1958, shortly after the Castelli show. Like the ’54-55 Flag, it shows the 26th flag of the United States, with 48 stars (the 27th flag was instituted 4 July, 1959, and the twenty-eighth and current flag, on 4 July, 1960, following the granting of statehood to Alaska and Hawaii; later Flags by Johns show the 50 star version). SFMOMA’s Flag is, in fact, not in this museum’s collection. It is on extended loan from Leo Castelli’s son Jean Christophe. We’re very lucky to have it. It was previously shown in the Centre Pompidou’s 2001 exhibition Les Années Pop (The Pop Years), and before that—I love this fact—it was on loan to the US Embassy in Paris for the tenure of Ambassador Felix G. Rohatyn. Imagine it hanging in the Ambassador’s office. It originally entered France as diplomatic cargo, and when the painting came to San Francisco, transport was again facilitated by the US State Department.

Emile de Antonio: What about Dada?

Jasper Johns: ‘What about Dada?’ What kind of question is that? ‘What about Dada?’

My remarks here have been about what kind of flag Flag is. On Thursday, I’ll say some things about what kind of painting it is, about the lesson of Marcel Duchamp, lessons for Andy Warhol, and the glorious indifference Flag seems to have toward something that you would think it impossible to be indifferent about. I hope you can be there.

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from assistant curator of painting and sculpture Ali Gass. Thanks Ali!]

Kiki Smith’s Lilith crouches and hangs in a precarious position of emotional and physical tension. The sculpture is a life-like figure of a woman. (Indeed, Smith’s mode of making the work heightens this naturalism, as she cast an actual human model in her studio in clay and then constructed the final form from bronze). This woman’s form moves into the realm of inhuman creature-hood, however: clamped onto the wall in an upside-down crouch reminiscent of a cat ready to spring, or an insect or a bat adhered in a gravity-defying pose. The surface of the work echoes the formal modeling of earlier western figurative sculpture. The “S” twist of the body pulses rhythmically, creating a curvilinear flow from neck to hip, reminiscent of an Italian renaissance sculpture’s perfectly continued fluidity. However, the surface of the bronze is more like a 19th century casting. It is imperfect in texture, evidence of the clay and finger marks of the sculptor appearing in the metal form.

The way the work is positioned might feel physically precarious to the viewer, as the artist hides any evidence of the way the sculpture is attached to the wall. One can intuit the heaviness of the bronze, yet the work appears to balance easily against the flat surface of the wall. This sensation of being unsettled that is triggered by the impossible lightness is heightened by closer inspection of the details of the work. Smith has inserted extremely natural-looking glass eyes into the head of this form. Their icy blue irises stare penetratingly back at the viewer as one gains intimate access to the form’s face. The lightness of the eyes contrast dramatically with the darkness of the bronze, and the seeming life behind their surface is in stark contrast to the obvious artifice of the metal skin and body contours. The eyes feel too like that of a creature about to attack, seemingly trapped in an emotional split between feeling threatened and being threatening.

The title of the work brings additional meaning to these formal artistic choices. Lilith is a biblical figure who has long been adopted by feminists. In Jewish lore, she is the first wife of Adam, exiled from the Garden of Eden for her unwillingness to bend to Adam’s will, and is ultimately replaced by Eve. In this mythical story, she is cast out and becomes a demon bringing death and disease to those she encounters throughout history. Feminist literature invokes her image as a woman literally demonized because of her unwillingness to be subservient. Lilith is thus both a sympathetic and a terrifying figure.

Please join me on Thursday June 24th as I lead a One-on-One tour discussing this powerful and complex sculpture. I plan to discuss the ways Kiki Smith’s work is marked by her ability to find the nuances of both femininity and humanity, and to bring those details to the forefront in ways that point to the beauty and grotesquery potentially inherent in each. Much of the artist’s greatest work folds human and animal forms into one another. Here, she has indeed created a body that challenges both the traditional notions of figurative sculpture as well as the traditional depictions of the female body and idealized femininity.

–Alison Gass, assistant curator, painting and sculpture.

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop.]

On the 2nd floor right now we have a gallery devoted to the work of Sherrie Levine. The centerpiece is a sculpture titled La Fortune (After Man Ray), which three-dimensionalizes a billiard table that appears in a 1938 painting by the photographer Man Ray, called La Fortune. Levine’s piece was first shown in 1991 at SFMOMA as one of six identical tables, presented serially and in precise alignment à la Donald Judd. As with much of her work, there is an element of the uncanny. The balls are secured in place and the cue sticks are absent; there is no mechanism built into the sculpture for the game to be actually played. La Fortune (After Man Ray) is, ultimately, no more a billiard table than its painted source, both made in the spirit of René Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe), from 1929. The Magritte painting pictures a pipe accompanied by the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe—a seemingly contradictory but literally truthful statement that it is not a pipe we are seeing.

Using a wide range of media, Levine explicitly appropriates works from the male-dominated Western artistic canon, resulting in a practice that is part commentary on a wildly unbalanced history and part homage to artists who, gender aside, have inspired her. Levine’s visual thievery began in the early 1980s when she started taking black-and-white photographs of reproductions of photographs. Among these were her After Walker Evans pieces (1981), also on view, which are next to impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Levine’s rigorously conceptual and coolly aesthetic practice calls into question issues of authenticity, originality, and fair use. While her photographs most audaciously beg the question of how closely a work of art can approach another and still be a work of art, all of her creations extend the aura of their referents as they generate their own. Levine thus claims history as part of her history, insisting that the male artists she admires share the stage. Join me on June 4 to look closely at this concentration of works by the artist and discuss the issues they raise.

Janet Bishop, Curator of Painting and Sculpture

[As a complement to our Thursday evening curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretation.]

Seen from afar, down the long enfilade of galleries on the 2nd floor, Ranjani Shettar’s Sing along floats above the other more floor- and earth-bound artworks on view. The poodles of Katharina Fritsch are stolid and rooted in their rippling pool of black, while Kiki Smith’s Lilith seems crouched on the wall in feral descent. Even Nicola Tyson’s Red Self Portrait, arms outstretched like fins, bespeaks a downward gaze as much as upward lift. Only Sing along, seen from near or far, seems empty, light, a calligraphic curve in flight. The piece is a set of open, hovering articulations, as much absence as presence—at once abstract and evocative of natural forms. Sing along seems to redefine the gallery it inhabits and the visitors who share its space: it floats in our company and extends from the wall in ways that suggest flora, fauna, the human and seraphic… yet resists being tied down to any one definition. Its process of making combines steel sculpture with an artisanal tradition of fabric dyeing. The work’s origin in a small village in India might seem to set it apart from modernism’s smooth, chromed forms—however the artist has said she takes inspiration from the works of Eva Hesse and Martin Puryear. There’s a warmth and wonder I feel in the presence of this work that is rare and keeps me wanting to linger with it. It keeps me engaged and discovering. Join me as we explore the work’s antipodes and affinities this Thursday evening at 6:30.

Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation

[Alongside our curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from Julie Charles, associate curator of education.]

A couple of weeks ago I was in Philadelphia for a conference and went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the Cezanne and Beyond exhibition. This exhibition displayed paintings, watercolors, and drawings by Cezanne alongside works by several artists for whom Cezanne has been an inspiration and whose work reflects Cezanne’s legacy. One gallery paired a classic Cezanne still life with Jasper Johns’s painting, Drawer, an all-grey canvas with, literally, a drawer embedded in the surface. I spent quite some time thinking about that work by Jasper Johns. When looking at his work, I always seem to end up with more questions than answers. Perhaps that’s what keeps me coming back to his work again and again.

In the 1950’s  Robert Rauschenberg, who was a friend of Johns at the time, said “. . . a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” Rauschenberg and Johns both took as their subjects, and materials, the stuff of real life—things that were lying around their studios or that they could find on the streets of New York City. Johns himself said that he chose to depict maps, targets, and numbers (more stuff of everyday life) because they were “things the mind already knows” and therefore, his works could operate on other levels.

This Thursday (May 14), I invite you to join me in a discussion about Johns’s painting, Land’s End. Together, I hope we can explore the questions of how artists get their ideas for their art as well as how the stuff of everyday life comes together in this work to let the mind operate on other levels.

Julie Charles, Associate Curator, Education

[Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing regular ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design.]

A preeminent figure in graphic design history, Otl Aicher’s identity for the 1972 Munich Olympics remains a seminal project on which much of contemporary identity and branding design has been based. On view in SFMOMA’s Architecture and Design gallery is a selection of the studio’s Olympic graphic work: a sampling of Aicher’s playful color palettes and distilled sports imagery set within carefully calculated grid layouts and strict structural hierarchy. Aicher understood the need for a universally comprehensible set of graphics for the games, and this dictated many design decisions, leading to the creation of a new visual language. Perhaps the most recognizable component of Aicher’s design—the pictogram system developed for the sporting events—was later expanded upon to become an international system of symbols and icons.

With the Olympics, the studio employed a concept that held graphic design as a platform for communication and social interaction, beyond aesthetics and into experience. From the architectural signage, to the uniforms of the official Olympic staff, from the sporting event tickets to the public advertisement posters, each piece was carefully crafted to be part of the bigger picture. Aicher’s philosophy of a unified aesthetic that could be implemented for virtually every component of the games was based in ideas of interpretation and resonance. The design was as much about the entire visual experience—the cohesiveness of the Olympic identity—as it was about the individual artifact.

Some of my interests in the progression of graphic design are explored here. Aicher capitalizes on the essence of graphics — of visual language — as communication. He freely moves beyond the typically 2D world of posters and print, and begins to assimilate his playful and colorful designs into part of the architecture of the Olympic Village. He sees the poster not just as a single unit, but explores how it works in multiple, and what it means in, say, an assembly which follows the line of the sidewalk. Here, graphic design is more than graphics. Aicher even specifies which flowers should be planted where, so that the colors compliment the signage of certain arenas, and what typeface the scoreboards should use so as to coordinate and fit into the larger scheme. The notion of branding—of each piece working together to resonate with the viewer—is prevalent.

Please join me in the Atrium on May 7th at 6:30 pm to hear more about Otl Aicher and the Munich Olympics.

Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design, SFMOMA

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing regular ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from John Zarobell, Assistant Curator of Collections, Exhibitions, and Commissions.]

Sargent Johnson is not an artist you might find in a standard history of modern art, but his contribution to sculpture in the 20th century is unique and Johnson was one of the most prominent mid-century sculptors in the Bay Area. With the murals by Kerry James Marshall, which investigate the invisibility of African Americans in US history, now on view in the atrium it seems like a timely moment to consider the artistic contributions of Sargent Johnson.

Johnson migrated to California from Massachusetts in the 1920s and pursued his art education at the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). During the WPA, Johnson worked in the studio of Benjamin Bufano, one of the pre-eminent sculptors of San Francisco, until he managed to receive some commissions himself, for George Washington High School in San Francisco and the Aquatic Park in Berkeley. The museum owns a number of works by Johnson but only one — Forever Free — is currently on view. Standing in the middle of a gallery of modernist art from the Americas, Forever Free stands out like a sore thumb, demonstrating a commitment to figurative art that I think has been overlooked in the attempt to make American art into a progression towards abstraction. I am particularly interested in the burden of representation that falls upon artists of color and I will be discussing this more in my one-on-one talk about this sculpture on April 30th.

Emerging at roughly the same time as many artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson wrestled with many of the same issues but without the benefit of an established black artistic community. Instead, he thrived in the multicultural atmosphere of the Bay Area. He was concerned with the representation of African-American subjects and he once said: “I am producing a strictly Negro Art.”  His work harkens back to ancient polychrome sculpture of Egypt and Greece and color was one of his central artistic concerns. In an era in which most American artists turned at first to social issues and then to abstraction, Johnson consistently produced a figurative art that drew upon traditions but was decidedly modern in form. His use of low relief combined with stylized figures was but a single strategy of an artistic career that drew upon many sources but spoke repeatedly about the vitality of Black culture in America. As Johnson himself said, “The Negroes are a colorful race, they call for an art as colorful as they can be made.” I’ll consider what this quote might mean and discuss Johnson’s representation of an African-American mother on April 30th.

John Zarobell, Assistant Curator, Collections, Exhibitions, and Commissions

[John's gallery talk is Thursday at 6:30. Meet in the Atrium. And: Kerry James Marshall will be speaking here a bit later that eve, giving the Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture. More info here.]

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing regular ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Elizabeth Gand, Assistant Curator of Photography.

When crisis or calamity strikes, what can photographs do? All four photographers in the exhibition The Face of Our Time ask that question, but each takes a different path towards an answer. For Leo Rubinfien, the question has deep personal roots. In early September of 2001, Rubinfien and his family moved into a new apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center. On September 11th of that year, he found himself face to face with “the massacre across the street,” as he calls it.

The chaos, destruction, and agony of that massacre prompted Rubinfien to embark on a five-year photographic quest. He visited cities across the world that have suffered acts of cruel violence meant to terrorize the populace. In each city, he photographed the faces of people passing by in the street. Bombay, Benares, Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Colombo, Hebron, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karahi, London, Madrid, Manila, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Tokyo are all represented in Rubinfien’s photographic essay. Each city is personified by individual, anonymous citizens who gaze out from the picture with searing intensity.

more after the jump (more…)

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Lisa Sutcliffe, Assistant Curator of Photography:

Please join me tomorrow evening at 6:30pm for a discussion of the work of Guy Tillim, a South-African photographer included in the current exhibition, Face of Our Time. Born in Johannesburg in 1962, Tillim has spent the last twenty years documenting the political, social and economic conditions of African nations as a photojournalist and freelance photographer.

In his recent series Congo Democratic, Tillim describes the political climate leading up to the historic 2006 elections in the capital city of Kinshasa. With a long history of political strife, including two successive civil wars that claimed an estimated 3.5 million lives and left the country in ruin, the Democratic Republic of Congo finally held multiparty elections in 2006. Tillim’s depiction of this momentous event diverges from the tradition of classic photojournalism: instead of capturing heroic images of leaders or dramatic instances of violence, he presents subtle details that serve as metaphors for the chaotic and charged political atmosphere. While shooting at a political rally that drew thousands of people into the streets,  for example, Tillim records the rapture of the crowd, and a quiet sense of anticipation. This picture of Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of two leading presidential candidates out of a group of thirty-three, emphasizes the hulking form of Bemba’s back as he enters the stadium and a menacing glance from one of the bodyguards who flank him. Tomorrow I hope to further discuss the development of Tillim’s personal documentary style, and its relation to the tradition of photojournalism.

Lisa Sutcliffe, Assistant Curator, Photography, SFMOMA

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’re doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, and public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Henry Urbach, SFMOMA curator of architecture and design:

Guestbook by Jürgen Mayer H., principal of the Berlin architectural studio J. MAYER H., is a limited edition book composed solely of sheets printed with data protection pattern. A touchstone of the studio’s work and focus of the exhibition Patterns of Speculation: J. MAYER H., data protection patterns are ubiquitous, jibberish-like image types that serve to conceal other information, including bank statements, shipping labels and paycheck stubs.

Mayer H. began collecting data protection patterns many years ago and has gathered hundreds; he has worked with them across multiple media and scales, even generating architectural form from their dense scramble. In Guestbook, he printed the pattern in thermosensitive ink, so that when people touch the page to ‘sign in,’ the pattern temporarily vanishes, capturing a trace of the viewer’s hand which, in turn, vanishes as the pattern slowly returns. Much of Mayer H.’s work addresses the uneasy relation between embodied, sensory experience and digital, dematerialized realities; with Guestbook he articulates this contemporary condition with exceptional elegance.

Guestbook was made in 1996; one of Mayer H.’s earliest works, it set the stage for the extraordinary body of work that has followed. Please join me Thursday, April 2 for a discussion of the exhibition Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H., and how it aims to reveal the interrelationship of concept and form across the firm’s many compelling projects.

Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA

Alongside our new curator “One on One” talks, we’ll be doing occasional ‘one on one’ blog posts, from curators, staff, public, on a particular work or exhibition they’re interested in. Today’s post is from Stephanie Pau, our Manager of Interpretation:

I feel fortunate that at SFMOMA, educators (like myself) are often treated as collaborators in the making of exhibitions. And sometimes, we even organize our own exhibitions in the drop-in Koret Visitor Education Center. This is the story of The 1000 Journals Project, which I recently co-curated with “Someguy”, and which is on view through April 5. Around this time last year, I’d been looking for exhibition and project ideas to complement Rudolf Frieling’s then-upcoming The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now. That exhibit, which was deinstalled last month, looked at six decades of artworks in which artists engaged the public as co-creators, and in the process suggesting the radical notion that musuems could be places of production as well as display.

Inspired by the simple elegance of participatory exhibitions and activities crafted by the education teams at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I hoped to craft an exhibition experience in the Center that not only mirrored the more inclusive atmosphere of Participation, but that counted the contributions of many people as essential to its existence.

Eventually, my shortlist of exhibition ideas included a project I’d grown enamored with several years ago, called The 1000 Journals Project — a simple but brilliant art/social experiment launched by “Someguy.” Someguy, who is active in the Bay Area graphic design community, chose, at least for this particular endeavor, to remain anonymous. In a culture as glory-hungry as ours, I admire that Someguy was not only mad enough to launch the project with his own money, but sought to claim none of the fame that might come with it (granted, his identity is among the worst-kept secrets I’m privy to, but still…).

The 1000 Journals Project began in August 2000, when — like Johnny Appleseed — Someguy began “planting” a thousand blank journals around San Francisco — dropping them in bus shelters, park benches, even bar bathrooms. Each book was stamped with only minimal instructions for adding to, sharing, and (eventually) returning the books, and left Someguy’s hands with his faint hope that one day he might see what became of them. In the years since the project started, the books have circulated from stranger to stranger, traveling to Palestine, Tokyo, the top of a mountain in Croatia — places many of us may never see in our lifetimes.

The project seemed ripe for some form of exhibition. Within days, we (meaning me and Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Interpretation) cold-called Someguy at his graphic design office with our idea and, lucky for us, he was more than game: he had already been searching for a venue to host an exhibition for the thirty-plus books that finally made their way back “home”.

Our primary challenge, and goal, with this exhibition was to find ways to overcome the tacitly understood codes of “behavior” that visitors, myself included, bring with them to the museum. Rule #1 in nearly all but the most progressive arts and culture museums?:  Do not touch.

Working closely with Someguy, in-house graphic designer James Williams, and Senior Museum Preparator John Holland, we developed a concept and design for the exhibition that was, in retrospect, a true anomaly for museums: it emphasized the “anti-precious” nature of the work on display. Vitrines, frames, and pedestals — the common modes of display (and protection) — were not an option. After all, the “art” wouldn’t exist if the books were placed behind glass: it was imperative they could be drawn in, written on, touched, added to, or even destroyed, depending on the whims of the participants.

We hoped to break down the rules of engagement from the beginning, with an unusual approach to signage. We installed a grid of blank journals that displayed the sparest outlines of the words in the exhibition title. Our somewhat fanciful conceit was that the rest of the title might be filled in by the doodles and unfiltered entries of visitors, using writing implements we provided on a chalkboard rail beneath.

When designing mounts for the journals themselves, we found inspiration in the old-timey editor’s desk, whose inclined surface allowed for easy reading and also an ergonomic surface for those who chose to add their own entries. John’s design included a drawer at each station, which held pens, glue, stamps, and other ephemera that we hoped might inspire visitors to keep adding to the books. A thin ledge allowed us to place pens on the surface — another signal that these books were as-yet unfinished works-in-progress, and invited participation. Finally, John recycled the wood from platforms we’d created for The Art of Richard Tuttle and built a lovely communal table that we placed in the middle of the KVEC Lounge area. We wired down four of the journals from the original one thousand and put out buckets of drawing materials, old magazines, and glue.

In the months since the opening, its become clear to me that The 1000 Journals Project exhibition is really about encouraging art-making. The point, for me, was to create an environment in which everybody, not just children, might feel compelled or invited to try their hand at being an artist. It’s not unlike the challenges that Erwin Wurm, Tom Marioni, and other artists posed to visitors of Participation — step on a platform; crack open a beer; perform alongside us. In October of last year, I recorded an interview with Someguy, and I think he sums it up nicely: “You don’t have to sign your name to it. You could put anything you want in the journal. I just hope that people who participate in the project, or even don’t participate, can start letting go of that fear of creativity and fear of being judged.”

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Stephanie Pau is Manager of Interpretation at SFMOMA. She studied archaelolgy, not art history, and used to write extensive reports about things she excavated in one-by-one meter pits in tiny towns across California. She has a gift for creating and consuming vast amounts of soup, and can sometimes be found hunting for mushrooms in the Bay Area’s lovely oak woodlands.

We’ve just started a great new onsite series here: curator “One on One” talks. Each Thursday evening at 6:30pm, one of our curators shares their perspective on a single work on view. Talks last about twenty minutes and take place in the galleries: a really great opportunity for conversation with some of the marvelous people on staff here. From Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Design:

I hope you will join me this Thursday night, March 12, in a discussion about an exciting new accession into the Architecture and Design collection, Silent Architecture (2003-2004), by the German architect Simon Ungers. This complex project is a study of four types of civic structure — Library, Theater, Museum and Cathedral — buildings that often employ grandiose architectural gestures in order to become recognizable symbols of the city in which they reside. Comprised of four untreated steel models that recall Minimalist sculpture, austere plans and monumental renderings, Silent Architecture is ideal for opening up several issues within design. I’d like to take this One on One opportunity to address a few ideas, perhaps iconographic architecture, typological analysis, the influence of artistic genres within architecture, or how to display architecture in a museum. Depending on time and interest level, we could unpack one of these topics in depth, or touch upon all them.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher
Assistant Curator, Architecture and Design, SFMOMA