Jim Goldberg, The Orchard, 2006. Chromogenic print. Purchase through a gift of an anonymous donor and the Accessions Committee Fund

It’s almost impossible to get a full sense of Jim Goldberg’s photographic style from just one picture. A complex storyteller, he weaves his own artistic narrative by collaborating with people on the margins of society through photographs, film, text and ephemera. Working across media and in diverse formats including 35mm, Polaroid land camera and 4×5, his multilayered installations test and blur the boundaries of traditional documentary photography. From his earliest pictures documenting the rich and poor residents of San Francisco, Goldberg has sought to give voice to his subject by asking them to write on his pictures. In Raised by Wolves, his photographs were accompanied by his own innovative personal account of kids living on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. His most recent series, Open See, began with a 2003 commission from the Greek Olympiad to photograph immigrant and refugee communities in Greece. He spent the next six years tracing the migration of these displaced people to places as diverse as Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bangladesh. The resulting work is a complex analysis of the hopes and dreams that led so many people to seek a better life in Europe and the cruel realities they faced on their journeys. For Open See Goldberg further develops and enriches his style with the inclusion of photographs such as The Orchard that are far removed from his hallmark snapshot aesthetic.

Upon first glance, The Orchard tells a somewhat familiar story of two young people enjoying the sunshine in a pastoral field. For me it calls to mind a tradition of artists depicting the everyday that begins with Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) of 1863 and extends to Jeff Wall’s Tattoos and Shadows from 2000 (also currently on view at SFMOMA). In his painting of a group of men and a nude woman picnicking in the grass, Manet answered Charles Baudelaire’s call in The Painter of Modern Life to paint contemporary scenes that captured “the passing moment and all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” The alienation of the figures from each other and the abstract and unfinished nature with which the paint was rendered led to its ultimate rejection from the Salon. Jeff Wall reinterprets the iconic scene in Tattoos and Shadows, a picture of three emotionally isolated figures reclining in a backyard. Rather than evoking a narrative, the posed image highlights the rich visual qualities such as the play of light and shadow on their inked skin. As part of a larger documentary series, The Orchard was not made in direct response to this work, but it certainly engages with this tradition.The remote orchard in the far eastern reaches of the Ukraine at first seems romantic—even idyllic—recalling the Garden of Eden in its symbolic construction. Upon closer inspection, however, details such as the debris-strewn dry grass, the ragged clothing of the unemployed drifters and their suspicious and somewhat dejected body language reveal a more complex and far from idealized vision of the modern experience.

Please join me on Thursday evening at 6:30 pm to explore this work further, and stay tuned to the blog for a conversation with Jim that will offer an in-depth look at his thoughts and process.

—Lisa Sutcliffe, assistant curator of photography

Howard Fried, Inside the Harlequin: Approach-Avoidance III and II (composite), 1971; Two unsynchronized Super-8 film loops transferred to video with two audio loops; Actions: Howard Fried, James Pennuto, David Sherk; Camera: Al Wong, Edmund Shea; Collection SFMOMA © Howard Fried

From the start of the 1970s, Howard Fried put forward one of the most compelling bodies of conceptual film and video work. The artist belongs to a generation that radically redefined sculpture and questioned the role and form of art in society. A leading figure on the West Coast in the intertwined fields of performance, video, and installation art as they emerged, he was also one of the key advocates of these mediums in founding the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute in that era. Exploring his own psychology as a point of departure, his abject sculptural and performance-based works investigated more broadly the problems and processes of how we perceive and learn information. The paradox of choice was central to his study of scenarios in which individuals are faced with competing options: from the routine of ordering food in a restaurant to the rhetoric of political television advertising. His meticulously crafted works probe issues of criteria, judgment, control, and predictability in analyzing how people deal with conflict situations and group power dynamics. Fried’s conceptual practice was tethered to everyday activities, interactions, and possessions that held personal meaning in his life. The artist frequently placed himself as the protagonist in his witty, disquieting works. Whether humorously performing the role of a victim of his own ambivalence, or the role of a mindfucker who constructs a frustrating situation that his participants must indirectly learn to negotiate, he implicates others in the decision-making process.

Approach-Avoidance II (detail; James Pennuto, David Sherk), 1971 © Howard Fried

Objectifying the problem of indecision, specifically the basic type of psychological conflict known as approach-avoidance that arises in pursuing a goal or activity that is both attractive and undesirable, is the framework for several early pieces, notably Inside the Harlequin (1971). This installation consists of two silent Super-8 film projections joined at the seam and subtitled from left to right Approach-Avoidance III and Approach-Avoidance II. The unsynchronized film loops of slightly different lengths (approx. 12 minutes) echo the endless cyclical pattern of a conflict without resolution.

Fried often used structural opposition: two characters, two teams, two goals, or two systems pitted against or played off one another. Here, the artist divided his warehouse studio in San Francisco into two parts, the floors of either side painted a different shade of gray. Two men are restricted to opposite sides of the space, while the third (Fried) moves freely—embodying the idea of a consciousness considering more than one position or vantage point. He crosses the line again and again—relating either cooperatively or antagonistically to the other two. An arrangement of the artist’s belongings on the darker side diminishes in successive shots as a man hands off various objects to the one bound to the lighter side. Fried assists with the bigger items, including a two-man chainsaw we see him use cooperatively in the other projection. Echoing the motif of splitting in the piece, the men decimate the functionless architecture of stacked sheet-rocked worktables. Perhaps inevitably, the split evokes psychoanalytic associations, from opening up the repressed to the onset of a psychotic break. While on the one hand, the double ensures against loss, on the other, the split has a destabilizing effect.

Approach-Avoidance II (detail; James Pennuto, Howard Fried), 1971 © Howard Fried

Each of the two films features two pairs of opposing actions—contrasting the active vs. passive camera movements, the established vs. disrupted positions of objects. Inside the Harlequin cycles through actions 1-4 on the left and 5-8 on the right. However, there are two sequences (3 and 7) that appear in both films in which the action crosses over the studio, as well as ‘crosses over’ the dual projection, so that at times we simultaneously see different moments of the same scene. In the second cross-over sequence, we observe the trio rappelling from the long wall of the studio. When Fried crosses the center line to one of the sides, the man assigned to that side also stands on the wall parallel to the floor, while the other one stands on the ground. Playing with closeness and distance, the projections alternate between views of the long and short axis of the studio, and the dyadic and triadic relationships of the figures.

As its title suggests, the dual projection is triangulated by an absent, first film, Approach-Avoidance I (1970). The complex editing pattern of Inside the Harlequin was essentially built on time sequences developed in this earlier animated film, of the typed letters in APPROACHAVOIDANCE. The scenes in III and II are divided into segments analogous in duration to the positions of the letters in that first film, used to symbolically illustrate directional and velocity changes in the conflict pattern. Fried’s characteristic wordplay, in this case, is a subversion that extends down into the underlying details that act as the subconscious of the piece. The sequencing reverses in the projection on the right. Through its use of thematic polarities, physical metaphors, and movements and reversals in space and time, the work addresses the tendency expressed in approach-avoidance conflict of being more repelled (i.e. rappelling) and less attracted by a goal that one is moving toward, and vice versa. The artist places emphasis on the ongoing artistic process of re-evaluation over completion. The purity of his mathematically generated system is cut with cheap drama and laced with personal example. While Fried’s filmmaking is primarily structural, there is something about the distinctive content—physical comedy, raw aggression, or makeshift attire—that seems to evoke multiple associations with popular cinema amongst viewers. The chaotic content and casually executed tasks allow the overall tightly structured piece to breathe.

Howard Fried, Inside the Harlequin: Approach-Avoidance III and II (composite), 1971. Collection SFMOMA © Howard Fried

The piece was filmed over a week at 16 Rose Street (overlooking Market), the site of a number of Fried’s most iconic performance actions and videos, sometimes featuring neighboring artists in the building, like sculptor James Pennuto, who we see here in the white painter’s overalls. David Sherk (helmet and padded gray sweatsuit) and Fried would wrestle again for Indian War Dance, the first part of Fried’s notorious performance for Documenta V (1972)—drinking at the ring of a bell, their sobriety manipulated by a judge until they collapsed. Drawing on his experience with this sport, Fried’s interest was not only in the physical involvement and competition, but the idea of kinesthetic feedback. As he reflected in Avalanche magazine, “There are what seem to be physically sadistic parts of the action, inflicting pressure on the opponent, and masochistic counterparts, receiving similar pressures. One is active and the other passive, but you get feedback either way.” The artist studio here resembles a cross between a gym and a garage workshop. Athletic training as an analogy to artistic production would be made explicit later in well-known studio actions like Tony Labat’s Terminal Gym (1980-81) and Matthew Barney’s DRAWING RESTRAINT 1-6 (1987-89).

Like his peers Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman, Fried is one of the few video art pioneers who had also previously created film installations specifically for the gallery context, exploring the spatial use of multiple projections.

As a prologue to seeing Inside the Harlequin, go check out Fried’s Studio Relocation (1970) featured in The View From Here (otherwise illegible online). Exemplifying a poetics of failure, this anecdotal piece hinges on his best-laid plans going awry. Playing off of the genre of studio-based performance and the notion of the ‘artist at work’, my own exhibition The Studio Sessions explored process-oriented pieces as dialogues about the works themselves. Fried’s discursive transparency about his working method and the exhibition phase within several pieces was critical to my thinking about the condition of publicness.

Inside the Harlequin; Installation view at SFMOMA, 2010; photo: Ian Reeves

—Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator, Media Arts

Robert Overby, Hall painting, first floor, 1971. Latex rubber, plaster, paint and burnt wood.

[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.

Robert Overby, Hall painting, first floor, 1971. Latex rubber, plaster, paint and burnt wood.

[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!

Candice Breitz, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), 2006; twenty-five-channel video installation with sound, 39:55 min.; installation view at Bawag Foundation, Vienna; Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube; © Candice Breitz; photo: Alexander Fahl

[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.

Robert Rauschenberg, Port of Entry , 1998. Print | vegetable dye transfer on polylaminate © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York

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).

The work is made using Rauschenberg’s transfer process, a process that was vital to his career. In Port of Entry, the figures face something in front of all of us, something beyond the “view from here”-and yet pedestrian signage and physical barriers abound. Some forms emphatically repeat and others are almost unrecognizable. This past May, a blogger highlighted Port of Entry as a favorite because it tells stories (“Check out the tiger, the peace wheel and the ice cream cones”). Rauschenberg called upon the everyday, working famously in the gap between art and life. For Rauschenberg, there was no reason not to consider the world his palette. His claim to this idea of art made for a liberating, open-ended proposition that flowed through every aspect of his work, from subject to materials to methods. Indeed, it’s what inspired that urge I felt back in the 60s to know not only how he made that Life spread but to give that method of picture-making a try. Such is Rauschenberg’s boundless proposition on art: anything is possible.

Throughout his career, Rauschenberg incorporated photographs into his work, using pictures from mass media. With the onset of digital technologies, the artist began enlarging and manipulating his own photographs, then printing them on a digital Iris printer. The transfer process in Port of Entry starts with Iris prints. With the aid of moisture, the printing ink becomes soluble, thereby giving him immediacy and directness in the transfer of his own photographs. This entirely eco-friendly transfer drawing method is far from his first method conceived in the 1950s. Back then, he used turpentine or lighter fluid to transfer magazine printing ink from the likes of Newsweek, Time and Sports Illustrated. That’s how we—all of the kids in the neighborhood—did it; we spread out on our driveway with paper, magazines, turpentine and brushes in hand to give it a try. When Rauschenberg died last year, Richard Lacayo wrote, “every time you see anyone doing anything that isn’t supposed to be art—and calling it art—Rauschenberg is there.”

—Jill Sterrett, director of conservation and collections

This is Sarah writing now—Jill asked me to sub for her One-on-One talk on Rauschenberg because I’m heading up a research project on the museum’s Rauschenberg collection. This particular work is one I have not spent much time researching yet, so I’m using this talk as an opportunity to dig a little deeper and just spend time looking and thinking about it. I have an odd relationship with Port of Entry—every time I go see it, I’m surprised by how small it is. Not that is it petite, mind you, but somehow it looms even larger in my mind than it actually is. Something about the expansiveness of its content and the arrangement of forms  across the plane, I suppose. Perhaps that will be a good place to start the conversation. Hope to see you on Thurs. Aug. 20 at 6:30pm. And cheers to Jill on vacation . . .

—Sarah Roberts, associate curator of collections and research

Andrea Zittel, A to Z 1995 Travel Trailer Unit. Customized by Andrea Zittel and Charlie White, 1995; © Andrea Zittel

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.

The photographs of Trevor Paglen—one of our 2008 SECA Art Award recipients—complicates my desert obsession. Paglen takes pictures of covert military operations in the remote depths of the Nevada desert. If my interest in the desert was teetering dangerously on a romantic cliff, then Paglen’s work brought me back down to its hot, dirty reality. His photos identify the potentially horrifying nature of the desert: the atomic explosions conducted there, its occupation by the US military, the severe isolation one endures. Aldous Huxley, the intellectual whose writing inspired the founding of the utopian commune Esalen, also reminds me of the desert’s formidable qualities. In The Desert: Boundlessness and Emptiness, he writes of the desert’s all-consuming nature and the technological incursions of the American military into its vast, invisible spaces—the very subject of Paglen’s work. Huxley’s description is so good, I quote it at length here:

“But the light forgives, the distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can coexist with things of a far higher order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or vicarious sport. Jet planes, for example-the stillness is so massive that it can absorb even jet planes. The screaming crash mounts to its intolerable climax and fades again, mounts as another of the monsters rips through the air, and once more diminishes and is gone. But even at the height of the outrage the mind can still remain aware of that which surrounds it, that which preceded and will outlast it.”

Andrea Zittel, A to Z 1995 Travel Trailer Unit. Customized by Andrea Zittel and Charlie White, 1995; © Andrea Zittel

But before Perret and Paglen (and after De Maria), there is Andrea Zittel. I admire Zittel’s independence-her clear, fertile vision. Since 1999, a decade into her practice, Zittel has been mostly living in the California desert, near Joshua Tree National Park, building a highly efficient and well-designed universe for herself and her friends to inhabit-a place where she can experiment. She has named this all-encompassing space A-Z West. With her work my obsession pivots on the practical, sleek, and resolute. Obsessive is perhaps an apt word to describe Zittel’s practice, which seeks to refine human living by developing architectural structures that assume myriad flexible and mobile forms: living units, travel trailer units, wagon stations,  cellular compartment units, and even breeding units. But her project is not limited to architectural objects; it extends to anything functional and useful—anything that could benefit from systemic overhaul and an innovative organizer: uniforms, billboards, office spaces, carpet, furniture, food, and all kinds of different containers. Her solution-oriented experiments propose new models for the varied circumstances one encounters in life. And rather than insisting upon a homogenous style, she often invites her friends to modify their units to suit their own needs and aesthetic preferences.

Again, Zittel makes me think of Huxley when he observes, “The desert can drive men mad, but it can also help them to become supremely sane. The enormous drafts of emptiness and silence prescribed by the eremites are safe medicine only for a few exceptional souls.” I think Huxley would consider Zittel an exceptional soul, and although he did not live long enough to witness her work (she was born two years after he died), I am pretty certain he would have loved it.

Andrea Zittel, A to Z 1995 Travel Trailer Unit. Customized by Andrea Zittel and Charlie White, 1995; © Andrea Zittel

Zittel’s engrossing objects should be experienced in the desert, but for those of you not quite ready to relinquish your urban roots, or not able to travel the distance, you can come glimpse a small sampling of her world at SFMOMA with Travel Trailer Unit (1995), currently on view in our fifth floor galleries, and originally commissioned for her 1995 solo exhibition at SFMOMA, New Work: Andrea Zittel. You can hear me speak this Thursday at 6:30 pm about Zittel and this work, and you can find out more about her at andrea zittel’s a-z.

I will continue to nurture my art-mediated obsession next month when I go back to the desert. This time to Utah, to visit Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Next stop,  Zittel’s High Desert Test Site. To be continued…

– Apsara DiQuinzio, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1958. On extended loan from Jean Christophe Castelli.

―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.

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.

Kiki Smith, Lilith, 1994. Bronze and glass.

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.

Kiki Smith, Lilith (detail),1994. Bronze and glass.

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.

Sherrie Levine, La Fortune (After Man Ray), 1990. Felt, mahogany, and billiard balls

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