OPEN SPACE

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

In the mid-90s, on the block of South Van Ness bordered by 16th and 15th streets used to be a little art gallery called Bewegung. It was the brainchild of Heather Haynes, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Heather lived in the back and the gallery was in the front. Heather was my best friend for a bunch of that decade, when I was young and just moved to San Francisco. I would come over to the gallery and Heather would be giving the whole space a spiritual cleanse, mopping it with a solution of like cow’s milk and blue crumbly balls of something from a Botanica in the Haight plus flower petals and when she was done she’d go in the shower and give herself a spirtual cleanse as well, dumping this great-smelling potion over her shaved head. The whole space used to be a Chinese restaurant – Heather would find animal carcasses in the backyard while gardening – but now Heather had performance and art in the windowed storefront while she and a roommate lived in stilted wooden boxes in the back, like treehouses. I was always locking myself out of my own house and sleeping at Heather’s house, in her cloud bed made of piles of down comforters and tossed with throw pillows stuffed with vetiver. If it sounds magical it’s ’cause it was. I once even saw a ghost hanging out over Heather while she slept, but that is another story.

The best show I remember from Bewegung was Charles Herman-Wurmfled, the jack-of-all-trades who went on to make a bunch of movies, first Fancy’s Persuasion, a classic in which he cast Justin Bond as the mom a la’ John Waters’ choice of Divine as the matriarch in Hairspray. After that he did Kissing Jessica Stein and next, amazingingly, Legally Blonde 2, but I remember when he hung a bunch of art involving blue maribou on the walls of Bewegung and in front of it I go-go danced, topless and painted blue, wearing shitty cut-off jeans and combat boots, to the sound of Hole blasting through my Walkman, while balanced on a cinderblock. A few other ruffians were similarly Smurfed-up and stuck on a block to dance to the beat of their own Walkman, while off to the side a cellist played elegant music. It was kind of amazing.

Now Heather lives in Toronto, where she runs Toronto Free Gallery www.torontofreegalery.org  an art spaced dedicated to showing work that deals with social justice, cultural, urban and environmental issues. TFG is sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a Caribbean patti take-out joint, and the owners of the take-away place did a Caribbean  patti workshop as a part of the current exhibition curated by Maiko Tanaka, Tejpa Ajji and Chris Reed. It’s that sort of true community space. The current exhibition, Toronto Free Broadcasting currently has  an open call out for instructional videos and a bunch already received are up on their site, assisting with hands-on problems like How to Break Into a Hotel Room, as well as more conceptual issues like How to Become a Hot Chick or How to Ruin a Relationship. http://torontofreebroadcasting

Heather Haynes is also publishing the art, media + politics magazine Fuse, which has an awesome cover story on the art and career of Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of of Culture and the creator of all of the movement’s amazing graphics, an excellent mix of pre-punk folk art depicting yelling ladies and kids bearing protest signs, beaten pigs and of course Huey P. Newton with a gun. Some looks like zine art and some like  propaganda and all are so full of beautiful energy and dynamic gusto. They look like they could have been created yesterday and, in the words of the artist, “You’re talking about unemployment, decent housing, dealing with the prison industrial complex, and the disproportionate number of people of color dying in the military. All those things still exist today.”

When Sister Spit was just in Cleveland some local queers gave us the hard sell on their town and claimed it to be akin to San Francisco in the 60s or the East Village in the 80s. I don’t think this is true, but the rumors are coming in that this might be the case for Winnipeg. Writer Eileen Myles was just up there reading from her brilliant new book The Importance of Being Iceland (so brilliant it made me cry in the tour van three different times with three different emotions) and she said it’s like the coolest place ever, and an article in Fuse that talks about the scene also makes it sound like one of those beaten down cities that eventually produces some cracked-out cultural diamond. But my favorite part of the article is the bit about how someone vandalized a new and heinous luxury condo development with the tag BAYAREA! Ouch. The truth hurts. http://www.fusemagazine.org/

Did you have your picture taken tonight at our Halloween party / Fall Members Opening? The full Flickr set is here!

Drinking the most anemic, milked-down coffee at a breakfast joint in Providence, Rhode Island, I so wish I was back in Cristy Road’s lightless, ornamented punk rock palace. The walls are covered, like totally covered, with Cristy’s illustrations, inky and graphic and punk and female, girls breaking down or falling in love or both at the same time while crowd surfing with octopus at a punk show. Cristy is often asked to create art for the bands and businesses who, at a glance, know they share the same political aesthetic as Cristy. She did the T-Shirts for the feminist book store Women and Children First in Chicago, she did the cover of the 3-wave feminist anthology We Don’t Need Another Wave, she made Sister Spit’s 2009 graphics and she created an awesome burning cop car for a show about queer street protest I curated this summer. The cop car was blown up and submitted to the art director of the Green Day musical happening in Berkeley, who was soliciting art to plaster across the stage’s backdrop. This is super perfect for Cristy because her name was lifted from the lyrics of a Green Day song and she is so obsessed with the band her first artistic offering was Greenzine, a true fan-zine, and her current work in progress is an illustrated novel about her love for the band. After the publication of her last illustrated punk rock roman a clef, Bad Habits, Green Day’s Billy Joe sent Cristy a hand-written fan letter, calling her a miracle. The real Christie Road is a street in the East Bay, with a sign that is regularly stolen by mad Green Day fans. Cristy has one hung above her work station. She told me they’re really hard to steal now cause the workers hang it way high, out of the reach of thieving Green day fanatics.

The rest of the room half-plastered in Cristy’s artwork is wallpapered with various posters of glamorous women, mostly Madonna, as Cristy’s roommates are a gaggle of punked-out fags not too punk to love Madonna. They are, after all, drag queens as well as punks and on my visit one, a fashion designer, was holding white denim vest tricked-out crusty-style in patches and studs, under the kitchen sink, dying it sepia with tea. The other were sprawled in the cavernous living room, stoned and eating coffee cake and giving themselves clay masks and watching The Golden Girls amidst the decor – a live iguana, clown dolls, a crazy mannequin named Pompeii, a gun vase stuffed with glittery fake flowers. Diana Ross posters hang on walls, Hole, too. Perpetually exhausted as the endless tour rolls into its seventh week, I had tugged my luggage through the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood Cristy lives in, and she rewarded me by making me a giant cup of Cuban style coffee like her grandmother makes, in a metal espresso pot thick with sugar and cream. Even though this tour has given me a caffeine tolerance that has rendered Red Bull useless, I sip the Cuban coffee respectfully, knowing that it has the power to Fuck Me Up.

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Photo: Scott Owens

Not sure how this worked, but Scott Owens claims this it is a  self-portrait, taken while on a field trip with The San Francisco Foundation to visit the new Rooftop Garden.  Looks like he’s having a good time inside Barnett Newman’s Zim Zum I (1969).

Loves it!

San Francisco – May 2009.  Photo: Irene Pomianowski aka bellearielparis

Irene Pomianowski took this shot of Anish Kapoor’s Hole (1988) while at SFMOMA with a group from the Newark Museum.  She says, “In the 5 days we were in SF we went on tours at 6 museums (in addition to SFMOMA), City Hall, Napa Valley for winetasting & lunch, a performance at ACT, and of course, ‘Beach Blanket Babylon.’ Somehow I found time to take about 1000 photos.” Thanks Irene!

Photos: Global X

A mysterious person named Global X made this mini-series involving a red A17 coat-check tag.  Thank you X!

On the fifth floor:

On the second floor:

I was walking down Market Street on Saturday just taking in the day with my sometime colleague Bradford Nordeen. He and I have co-authored a groundbreaking article on “The Cinema of Whitney Houston” that is supposed to appear in the October issue of L.A. based art and culture magazine Animal Shelter. So there we were fresh from shopping when we saw this classic car parked on Market Street. (Wait, I forgot to say that if you are interested in bargains, get yourself down to “Agnes B.” on the first block of Grant, they are going out of business and everything, everything is 70 per cent off!) It’s a shame they are going out of business but now their prices are sort of in the Ross Dress for Less category. Well back to the car.

Tourists from dozens of nations saw a photo op and brought out state of the art Leicas, Panasonics, Nikons to do it justice. (more…)

Photo: Rands

From this angle,  Donald Judd’s Untitled (1973) looks an awful lot like the staircase in the Atrium.  Photo by Rands.

Lovely piece this week in Artforum, by Vincent Fecteau, whose Not New Work exhibition opened here July 25.

Are you a regular (ish) reader of Open Space? First of all, thanks; and next, would you be willing to answer some questions about the blog? I have an outside team of evaluators conducting interviews with SFMOMA staff, contributors, and readers, to gather a variety of perspectives and opinions about Open Space. Whether you follow the blog religiously or casually drop in from time to time, your feedback is needed and desired, and will help inform what happens next here. The information is being gathered as part of general reporting back to our funders, and to help me understand what you think is working and what we could be doing better.

If you’re interested in participating in a 30 minute telephone interview, please contact Bethany Keener, of Randi Korn and Associates, at sfsurvey [at] randikorn.com. A random selection of interviewees will be chosen from the pool of interested parties. As a small thank you, interviewees will receive two tickets to SFMOMA, a $5 coffee card and the everlasting gratitude of Suzanne—although I’ll never know who said what about the blog (or me), since the interviews are anonymous.

Thanks!

This pretty snapshot, taken by SFMOMA visitor Jeanee Chung (and scooped  up from Flickr), shows  a portion of Damien Hirst’s painting Pray (2003)  and, in the reflection of the glass, one corner of a gallery in our current fifth-floor contemporary exhibition, Between Art and Life, organized by Gary Garrels.  On the left side of Jeanee’s picture you can see Ernesto Neto’s My Little Castle (2005) and on the right is Jim Hodges’s series of photographs Even Here 1-12 (2008). (Which pictures, sweetly enough, are themselves of light reflections from windows on a gallery floor.) Nice. Thanks Jeanee.

Tomorrow I leave for the 100-degree (plus humidity!) heat of Hale County, Alabama to advise the young creatives at Project M who are busy trying to come up with a design project that will have a positive impact on the world. They’ll be toiling alongside the inspiring Rural Studio architecture students who are designing and building amazing structures for the rural poor in the area. I’ll be posting to this blog while I’m there so check back over the next few days to see how we’re faring in the blazing Southeast heat.

But before I go, here are a few things I’ve seen over the last month that are of note. I encourage you to add your own thoughts about them (or related topics) in the comments section of this post.

-I was lucky enough to catch Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found magazine, at the Intersection for the Arts this past Monday. His merry “Denim and Diamonds Tour” crew includes his brother, Peter, and the twin sister music duo, the Watson Twins, who are both performing original songs in between Davy’s hilarious readings of finds published in the magazine. The tour is still in the Bay Area, stopping tonight in Oakland at the Ghost Town Gallery, and tomorrow night in Santa Cruz at Cayuga Vault.

-There is an interesting show at the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery called Trace Elements that asks, “What are the trace elements of a City? Does the urban environment hold secrets or codes that would provide a greater comprehension of its systems, or of its human inhabitants? What remains when individuals and the places we build cease to exist? How does this evidence, these trace elements, assist us in piecing together history?” Featured artists include Kelly Tunstall, Clare Rojas, Dan Nakamura, and the Hamburger Eyes Collective. The show closes on July 3rd.

-The Venice Biennale gets invaded by the Brooklyn artist, Swoon, and her band of anarchists via boats built from New York City garbage. Read all about it here. In related activist art news, I was lucky enough to be at a creative retreat in Utah a few weeks ago with the amazing Lisa Anne Auerbach, who I hope to write about in a future post. Readers, do you have any thoughts about contemporary politically-charged art?

-Lastly, I screened the Olivier Assayas film,  Summer Hours, at the recent San Francisco Film Festival and it’s still playing all around the Bay Area. Even if you balk at the thought of a subtitled film about the French bourgeoisie, Assayas poses some compelling questions about how we value art and the objects with which we surround ourselves. The final scene makes it all worthwhile. Trust me.

The latest in the regularly rotating Minna Alley sign series. I know I could be less lazy and do some actual footsoldiering reconnaissance, given that this is only downstairs—but who’s responsible for these? Is this person affiliated with Catharine Clark? [Appearance of the signs predates Baer/Ridgway]….

[Update: Anthony Discenza is the artist. Thanks Joseph del Pesco]

I’ve never met the painter Harry Jacobus but his position in San Francisco art history is unassailable, and his romantic vision has this sort of, oh I don’t know, sublime excess that speaks to me even today.  Maybe you have to be in the right mood to get him, and perhaps that’s why his reputation is highest among poets, musicians, and other artists.   That’s just a guess on my part.  The work is decorative, pleasing, and stops just this side of florid, but all these things are true of Cezanne, right, and yet Harry Jacobus is a name unknown except for, hmmm, I am tempted to use the term cognoscenti even though that seems dead wrong!  But I do love him.

Some find his work unbearably twee, even trite.  If you find the early, romantic pictures of Jess too sincere, you are definitely not man enough to stare down the limpid realities of Jacobus at his most characteristic. (With Jess and the poet Robert Duncan, Harry Jacobus founded the legendary King Ubu Gallery on Fillmore Street back in 1953.) Thus it was with great interest that I opened my mailbox to find an invitation to a show of Jacobus’s crayon drawings—some paintings—that was going to be held at a private home in Berkeley right behind the Claremont Hotel.

I went with Eric Delehoy, a friend of my wife’s who was visiting from Portland, a man whom I hoped would appreciate the rarity of the occasion. Eric, a writer himself and one of the editors of Gertrude magazine, just gulped and got into the car, and from there we got lost three different times.  So when we tiptoed in, the event had begun and our hostess was playing some French music on the piano and it was like a Raul Ruiz film come to life. Either she had taken all her other art work down, and just hung every wall with Jacobus work of all periods, or she actually has this on her walls every day. (more…)

At the corner of Valencia Street and 18th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District is a construction site as seemingly banal as any other construction site: a chain-link fence designates a hard hat zone, wooden frames and scaffolding are visible, and hammering can be heard. As a resident of the Mission District and someone who prefers walking to public transportation, I pass this site several times a week. The construction is happening faster than I imagined and soon enough 700 Valencia Street will transform into a brand new condominium building.  Despite San Francisco’s plan to keep housing in the Mission affordable, all of the eight units will be available at market or above market prices.

The Mission District is historically a Latino/a neighborhood with a reputation of cultural diversity.  Despite recent and visible gentrification trends, it continues to be relatively less expensive than other neighborhoods in San Francisco. Additionally, the Mission is home to many cultural and art spaces including the Mission Cultural Center, Artist’s Television Access, Precita Eyes, Galeria de la Raza, and Southern Exposure. The Mission is known for its countless murals found on the sides of buildings in streets and alleys including Clarion Alley, Balmy Alley, and the Women’s Building. The Women’s Building, tucked just behind the construction site at 700 Valencia Street, is a non-profit that provides vital community services and resources, as well as hosts events and programs geared towards gender equity.  The building itself has a bold presence on 18th Street.  Its facade is bursting with the MaestraPeace Mural which illustrates the contributions of well-known female activists, authors, and artists.  This colorful and detailed mural stands in stark contrast to the sterile construction less than half a block away.

As a native to the San Francisco Bay Area, I have become increasingly aware of sites like 700 Valencia Street and the transformation of many of the city’s neighborhoods, both subtle and not so subtle.  It is nearly impossible to ignore the current nationwide housing crisis; headlines of foreclosures, threats to rent control and tenants rights, and the decline of SROs.  The relationship between artists and urban space has always been complex.  I am reminded again and again of the paradoxical nature of artists in urban neighborhoods: artists of a certain wherewithal often move to industrial and “less desirable” neighborhoods in search of space and cheap rents and in doing so, pave the way for developers and investors.  As the trends of gentrification goes, artists are then often adversely effected by shifts in urban landscapes that they, in many ways, helped to create.  It is a double edge sword.  So, what is the role is of artists in shifting urban landscapes?  And how does public art function in the context of redevelopment?

I recently reread a portion of Rosalyn Deutsche’s book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, in which she discusses the ways in which dominant uses of public space are often exclusionary despite their facade of democracy and unity. In her chapter “Uneven Development:  Public Art in New York City” she focuses this discussion specifically on public art projects in Manhattan during the 1990s, highlighting collaborations between artists and development agencies. This chapter reminded me of the meaning and function of public art in cities and the ways in which it is often folded into new development and the rhetoric of beautification–or a way of concealing the processes of gentrification and displacement.

Last year, local artist Kari Orvik faced this issue head-on.  As a part the show Grounded sponsored by Southern Exposure and Intersection for the Arts, Orvik created a participatory photography project entitled “The View From Here.”  This project spoke directly to the proposed construction site at 700 Valencia Street.  During an afternoon in December, Orvik invited participants to the roof of a neighboring building on Valencia Street and photographed them with the background of the Women’s Building’s MaestraPeace Mural.  The mural on the eastern face of the building depicts a larger than life portrait of Guatemalan indigenous rights activist, Rigoberta Menchu.

“The View From Here” aimed to raise awareness about the five story condominium building that would obstruct the view of the MaestraPeace Mural from Valencia Street prior to the series of hearings before the Commissioners on San Francisco’s Board of Appeals.  In Deutsche’s words, Orvik’s project is public art “as new spatial activity.”  Rather than complicit within redevelopment and the designation of public space for the purpose of capital, Orvik politicizes space and critiques the metamorphosis of San Francisco’s Mission District.  Functioning as social practice, Orvik’s piece lends itself nicely to critique and protest.  While one could walk down 18th Street to view the Rigoberta Menchu mural more closely, I think Orvik intended her piece to be a gesture that speaks to larger issues of what we stand to lose as city dwellers to development and increasing housing prices.  The metaphor is obvious: the Women’s Building, a grass-roots community space and its lively mural created collectively in 1994 becomes obstructed by a brand new, five story, eight unit condominium building affordable to very few who currently call the Mission District home.

Within today’s political and economic climate sites like 700 Valencia Street will continue to be debated in the Mission District. Orvik’s work reminds me of the importance of recording our experiences in our neighborhoods, the histories of places rapidly turning over to developers, as well as the important role of artists as politically engaged citizens who speak against the dominant use of public spaces and attempt to create alternatives.

Today we were treated to a dance performance in the Atrium, as part of National Dance Week’s Dance Anywhere Festival.  It’s a Part II of sorts; a similar happening took place here last year.

Here’s a little clip from this afternoon.  More at Flickr.

Shucks. It’s been a year. First, do we think blogs get counted in something like dog years?  Next, keep your eye on the blog, as we’ve got something fabulous launching here in coming days that’s going to make the next twelve months very interesting indeed. Last, I had the blog’s chart done online (thanks Astro.com) for the happy occasion. Aries! Aries rising! Venus in Aries! OMG! Thanks for a great first year. xo, SS
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Introduction

This report is a short edition of the Youth Horoscope. In the short edition, only a few, but nevertheless important aspects of your natal chart are considered.

The report was generated for OPEN SPACE with the following birth data: female, born on 16 April 2008 at 6:00 am in San Francisco, California.

Your sun sign is Aries. This is the sign in which the Sun is in your birth chart. Your Ascendant, the rising sign, is also in Aries, and your Moon is in Virgo.

Aries Rising

You are a free spirit who likes to do things your own way and to be the first whenever possible. You always try to act energetic, active and self-assertive.

You like to compete with others. Cooperating is sometimes a problem because you are so independent.

Others will like you for the positive energy that you radiate. At the same time your lighthearted attitude about your feelings may make it hard to get sympathy when you really need it.

You tend to be rash and impulsive, acting first and thinking later. Learn to be a little more thoughtful about your actions.

You will fight for what you believe in, so it is important to think carefully about your beliefs, so that your energies will go to a good cause.

Frank Stella’s Khurasan Gate:

And here’s the whole thing(nearly 24 feet long):

This, from recent SFMOMA visitor Dave McLean’s Flickr photostream, expresses an emotion one understands people do occasionally feel in the galleries:

The snapshot is of a work on view now, Kind mit Pudeln (Baby with Poodles), by an artist I like quite a lot, Katharina Fritsch. From this work’s description in our collections pages online, here’s one answer to the WTF?

Finally, the terms are explicit.

In other news,  former SFMOMA director David Ross on the Colbert Report, re:  Shepard Fairey and questions of copyright infringement. (From Tim Buckwalter)

Martin Parr, Untitled [sundae with cherry and straw], from the series British Food 1995

We’ll be home & hearth-side the next few weeks, with stacks and stacks of all-natural, burns-cleaner-than-wood, non-petroleum-wax-chip firelogs and plenty of solstice cheer. So much to delight you going on in the galleries over the winter break, however, & the cold short days are always a sweet time for museum-going, don’t ya know? See you back here on the blog in the new New Year—-xxoo

Click through for the larger view. Sorry my badge is in the pic.

Hey all,

Just a reminder that tonight’s Tom Marioni FREE BEER Salon is featuring that famous local painter Robert Bechtle as guest bartender, and that famous local news & gossip maven Leah Garchik as guest reader.

Also on tonight in the D-Space, starting at 7pm when the salon closes, is a cool-sounding project developed by Stanford students as part of our experiment Group Work, a collaboration between three types of institution: an art school (CCA), a research university (Stanford), and a modern art museum (that’s us). Peggy Phelan at Stanford, and Brian Conley at CCA, have been leading courses on art education and participation, and as part of their coursework, each student group is producing projects related to those themes. Tonight the Stanford group presents, and next Thursday the CCA group will be here.

Details from the Standford students:

We imagine a lively atmosphere with eccentric sounds, people in puppet clothes, photographs (like at an amusement park), and occasional readings of esoteric materials. An art-town fair with three main elements:

Collaborative soundscape Two chalkboards with contact microphones attached placed on opposite sides of the room on easels. Chalk and erasers are provided. The sound will be amplified, and processed with effects like reverberation, distortion, and delay. The effects and prerecorded sounds will be controlled from two laptop computers stations operated by the students. The piece emerges from the collective writings and drawings of participants from the public, and momentary interventions or sound poems written by Stanford students. Other sounds such as erasing or directly touching the chalkboard will add nuance. In addition to the live sounds from the chalkboards, there will be some sporadic instances of prerecorded material, realized by the students &  emerging as performance cues. The audience is confronted with an object that is familiar as a pedagogical tool, but transformed into an instrument that invites creative personal visual and aural experiences while participating in an open sound piece.

Border piece: Built on the fourth wall of the D-Space between the two front columns, approximately 4 feet high, this element constitutes a barrier/border fabricated out of fine, breakable threads, yellow DO NOT ENTER, DANGER, CAUTION tape, tie-line, clothes pins, & “surveillance” cameras. The barrier will have rotating on-duty “staff.” Participants have a few choices for passing through: 1. ­ pass trough this border by making an offer, write a poem, make a small drawing, a dance movement, etc., OR 2. ­ create a new identity by using provided elements for a new kind of identification card. Once realized the ID constitutes a “legal” document and can be used as a pass, OR 3. ­ do none of the above and find a way to “cross” the barrier/border “illegally,” by crawling or jumping over. On the other side of the border lies the FUTURE, a place for play and display of inclusion and exclusion, of exploration of all six senses.

Polaroid piece; Three Polaroid cameras, three disposable cameras, and two photosticker cameras will be placed around the room. Each camera will have instructions or a prompt such as, “with this camera shoot the person you find the most attractive tonight,” or “make a political statement with this camera” or “please take home the picture you took with this camera and send it to a person who does not know what collaborative art is” or perhaps simply “capture participation.”

If all this isn’t enough (or is too much) for you, there’s also a screening of Derek Jarman’s Edward II, starting at 7pm in the Wattis.

Unknown, Untitled [Apples], n.d. Gelatin silver print, Gift of Gordon L. Bennett. Collection SFMOMA.

Martin Parr, Untitled [metal gravy dish], from the series British Food, 1995. Digital print. Collection SFMOMA.

May it be generous and may it be warm.  Go easy on the butter, heavy on the cream. xo, SS

If you’re around this holiday weekend and harbor both a special talent for achieving the impossible and the lecturing skills to teach someone how to achieve that miracle themselves, a group of SFAI graduate students wants to hear from you. In conjunction with The Art of Participation, they are organizing an “Art of How-To: Intuitive, Impossible, and Absurd” mini-lecture hour in our Koret Visitor Education Center (slash “D-Space”) on Saturday afternoon, inviting you to come down and educate the public with your special wisdom. Everyone’s welcome to propose a topic, and selected presenters will be given five minutes to discourse. They’ll be shooting video and it’s possible we’ll post some of the results here on the blog.

Contact info and more details are here.

A bit of a gloomy tale from the Archives for a sunny fall day in San Francisco:

Irving Norman, Armies, n.d., © Irving Norman Trust,Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

Painter Irving Norman’s 1962 pleas to George Culler for a little validation and a one-man show (first ignored, then harshly denied) include a doleful reference to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.  Not coincidentally, for this blog post anyway, today marks the anniversary of Ginsberg’s legendary first reading of the poem, at the Six Gallery on Fillmore street in San Francisco in 1955.  Of some not-really connected interest is that the work of both artist and poet was at once time censored for obscenity: a painting of Norman’s taken down by the de Young in 1950, and the same charge leveled almost immediately against Howl. The letter below makes clear that Norman didn’t think much of Ginsberg’s famous poem at the outset, however Norman’s difficulties in getting his work recognized by the museum and then-director Culler apparently helped him tap into his rage and alienation, and gave him reason to reconsider the poem. Read on, but get the Kleenex out.

Norman grew up in the middle of famine-struck Poland during World War I, emigrated to the United States, then joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently these happy experiences had a lasting effect. He started taking art classes at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1940 and had a one-man show at our museum in 1942, resulting in a favorable review by Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein.

Fast forward twenty years: Norman writes to director Culler asking for a new one-man show and some constructive criticism of his recent work. Ignored twice and thoroughly discouraged by his lack of success, Norman makes a final plea in 1963, relaying a sad story about nibbling mice.

Disregard the unusual use of punctuation, and the underlying story is a perhaps sadly familiar artist’s tale. (Transcription, and the rest of the exchange, below.)

—

May 15 – 62
Dear Mr. Culler
About 3 years ago I asked for a show and was completely ignored, a few weeks ago I tried to see you but was discouraged, had I been sure that my work justifies such an attitude I would not write this note, I simply can’t understand why my efforts are being discouraged. I would like to show 30 or 40 items, all of decent quality some are perhaps of very high quality, consisting of some drawings, some water colors, and paintings some rather large, I would like to get a decent one man show.
A few years ago as you might know – Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem – that is now a classic – titled “Howl” I argued against its over emotionalism and for some disciplined and clearer thinking in art, but judging by the discouraging and timid attitude towards a genuine and very valid expression in art, one almost feels like agreeing with Ginsbergs “Howl”, but why is it allowed to reach a point when howling becomes necessary.
My work is an expression of a true aspect of our contemporary environment and should be shown to prevent Art from becoming smug and rotting.
Timidity has never produced great Art nor great Museums.
I sincerely hope to hear from you soon.
Respectfully
I. Norman

—-

Feb. 6 – 63
Dear Mr. Culler,
23 years ago I left the world of politics in contempt for its trickery brutality and illusions, and by natural inclination drifted into the world of art.
Under the influence of the writings of Thomas Wolf, especially his “You cant [sic] go home again” I thought I found in the world of art the possibility of a broad and deep understanding of human existence which is above all a search and a facing of Truth.
Is it possible then that the world of art is similar to the world of politics, for how else can I understand the neglect of my work. If I could only know for sure the real reasons for it, I can only speculate. The left can never forgive my leaving them, and the right thinks this the best of all possible worlds. If the reasons for the neglect of my efforts are due to brutal political intrigue, then I have good news for those who practice it. I recently found mice nibbling at my pictures in my storage shack where most of 23 years work is stored and perhaps rotting.
I wish I could know the results of your study of my work. You may of course keep the photographs as long as you need, but will you kindly return them when you are ready they are the only ones I have
Respectfully
I. Norman

And then finally, a response from Mr. Culler:

February 12, 1963

Dear Mr. Norman:

I am sorry to have kept your photographs so long. They are being returned to you now.

I have a great deal of sympathy with your situation and with the message you have tried to convey in your work. I can assure you that no political considerations are involved when I say that we are not able to offer you an exhibition.

We are concerned with artistic quality. Our judgment must operate to select the works we believe to be of the greatest artistic significance, a term which does not exclude the nature of the artist’s intent but also takes very much into account the success the artist has had in realizing his goals through visual means. I say this only because I want you to realize than an adverse decision about your work down not mean that you are being excluded for political reasons but only that, while it has value as art, this value in our view is not superior to other work being considered. I am sorry that I cannot be more encouraging.

Yours sincerely,
George D. Culler
Director

——-

We’re with you in Rockland, Irving! Although you’re pretty unpopular in the art press. The story isn’t all sorrow, however: despite the desperate tone of the letters, Norman didn’t give up his mission -  there are two paintings in our own collection and two posthumous retrospective exhibitions (The Measure of All Things at de Young in 1996, and Dark Metropolis at the Crocker Museum in 2007), celebrated his work. Interestingly, during the Crocker retrospective, that museum was also simultaneously exhibiting a group of photos by none other than, oui, Allen Ginsberg.

The Frida Kahlo exhibition closes tonight. I got a text message late last night saying 400,000 people have come through the museum since the show opened; which means in the last three months alone. Three hundred and forty thousand of those people have purchased the special tickets to Frida Kahlo.

The final day of the exhibition will see artist & curator René Yañez’s Pasión por Frida tableaux vivants (living paintings), happening most of the day in the Schwab room, with Frida lookalikes enacting many of Kahlo’s most famous pictures. I’ve also heard there will be Frida-alikes taking tea in the cafe, wandering the galleries, and washing up in the ladies’. The months of the exhibition have seen a lot of people of every age and gender passing through dressed up to look like Frida, and sometimes the gesture has been camp, but mostly it reflects a deep devotion to this artist whose work speaks so profoundly to so many.

The dress Frida affected (she started wearing the traditional clothes in her early 20s) was a highly constructed performance (and in part the long skirts helped hide her physical ailments). It was also a statement, a political one, of pride in indigenous Mexican culture, and as many readers will know, the regional costume Frida adopted was of the matriarchal community of Tehuana in southern Mexico. It’s worth noting too that many of our visitors arriving in the colorful dress we so closely identify with Frida Kahlo were not “in costume” at all.

Christo Oropeza, one of the Information Desk assistants who has been working so hard all summer with so many people streaming in for the exhibition, interviewed this woman about her dress:

Photo: Christo Oropeza

“I’m from Juchitan, Oaxaca and it’s an honor for me to see people from other countries appreciating the works of a Mexican painter: Frida Kahlo. The way I dress is the way my townfellows, my mother and sisters and I dress every day and we appreciate that Frida showed to the world our beautiful and colorful typical dresses.” – Elsa de Gyves (July 20, 2008)

[New contributors! The Archivists ]

It was a tense moment in the comment box last week, but the SFMOMA blog seems to have weathered the storm. Do let us say that the museum is no stranger to criticism. There is, lingering temptingly in the archives, a story too good to keep to ourselves: the infamous mystery of the “missing” artwork donated in 1972 by the Bay Area Dadaists.

In an attempt to upstage a donation by Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson of paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the Bay Area Dadaists gave the Museum an “even more lavish gift,” in the form of “Bertha Buffalo” – a bison head with a Dada treatise in its mouth. When Director Gerald Nordland didn’t properly acknowledge the gift, the Bay Area Dadaists sent him this threatening letter:

Along with the letter, the Bay Area Dadaists also sent:

One: A copy of a recent article about the Anderson donation (which apparently left them “Rauschenbergless”).

Two: A letter sent to members of the press (complete with creative spelling) exposing the atrocious actions of the museum…

1. That Mr. Nordland is lieing and is afraid to show our bison head “Bertha Bufallo” in or to the Museum.

2. One of the guards stole the Bufallo from the Museum. Think of the headline that makes (Guard steals Art from Museum).

3. Or the Museum staff misplaced the Bufallo under an ashtray or something, which would be hard to do considering its’ size, but you never know it just might have happened.

And, three: They also included their original statement, describing the Bertha Buffalo gift:

“Just as the whiteman came and slaughtered the bison, for greed and profit forcing them into near extinction, so have the galleries, schools, museums, and art establishment conspired to try to crush the life and force out of the dada spirit. So to the San Francisco Museum of Art we (the bay area dadaists) present Bertha Buffalo a symbol not of our extinction, but of yours.“

Now there’s a critique.

———————-

[ The Archivists at the SFMOMA Archives work to organize and preserve the records of the museum's history, sorting through press clippings, scrapbooks, and letters to find the ideas behind past exhibitions, activites, and events. We'll occasionally treat you to some of our more illustrious findings.]

Photo: Jessica Whiteside

In the galleries yesterday; but at a mere 8,241 visitors we didn’t quite break last month’s Free Tues record.

The Frida Kahlo was here/SFMOMA MAPP HAPPENING happened Saturday night in the Mission and was AWESOME, Frank Smigiel Public Programs Curator Person taking it to the streets we adore you. I’ll have a mini report-back and some pics up tomorrow; meanwhile some great pictures of Rene Yanez’s Kahlo lookalike audition, Violeta Luna’s performance, & other MAPP pics are cropping up on FLICKR.

In other morning news, it’s FREE TUESDAY today at the museum, notable not just because, er, Free, but because it’s a FREE TUESDAY in AUGUST during the run of the FRIDA KAHLO exhibition. Which means it’s going to be worth a run down to the museum just to see the crowds. (You still have to pay to see Frida. But it’s only $5. Instead of, um, uh…17.50.) Last Free Tuesday we broke attendance records with EIGHT THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE visitors. Today we’re expecting—let me say this as accurately & professionally as possible—WAY more than that. I’ll see if we can get some pictures or videos of the crowds.

On the subject of crowds: I’m agoraphobic in pretty much every other situation, but when it comes to museum galleries stuffed with people, weirdly, I’m exhilarated. I admit this isn’t always about the viewing of individual objects, which, it is true, can feel somewhat compromised when you have to elbow past or through. But ALL THOSE PEOPLE, looking at art. Together. In big air-conditioned rooms. It makes me feel giddy, and happy; freakishly, I love it. You can too. See you there.

This is Kris. He works in the guard booth. He’s learning Japanese. He’s awesome.

A sweet greeting at the SFMOMA guard station:

Artist Unknown, ["Rib Meat"], 2008, provenance: Minna Alley

Jenny Holzer, Untitled, from the Survival Series, 1983-1985, Collection SFMOMA

For everyone looking for the Berlin Alexanderplatz support/discussion group posts, you can catch up with us by following the tag Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema. We’ll post the next support-group installment sometime on Saturday.

Photo: Jessica Whiteside

Jessica’s Flickr report on the second Kahlo opening.

Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico

Terril Neely, Market St from Twin Peaks

But something else entirely: Here are two similar pictures of a familiar view of San Francisco, taken facing east from the top of Twin Peaks. The first is by Gabriele Basilico, the Italian photographer famous for his documentation of urban and industrial landscapes. SFMOMA invited Basilico to the Bay Area last year to photograph our local landscape (”From San Francisco to the Silicon Valley“).

The second photo is by Terril Neely, SFMOMA graphic designer, famous for baked goods and an inordinate love of kombucha, who snapped the picture during a holiday visit with friends. Terril sent me both pictures when she saw the Basilico, which she was about to place into some marketing material, back in February.

Someone in a nearby cubicle, when I said I was going to post these side-by-side on the blog, claimed that of course the Basilico was the “better picture”, because it more closely captures the feeling of actually being at the top of Twin Peaks, the sense of isolation, quality of light, expansiveness of scope of vision, etc. Better-pictureness, to my mind, isn’t so relevant here (although I do like the bit of hair left frame in Terril’s shot): Twin Peaks is a REALLY POPULAR San Francisco taking-in-the-view spot, for tourists and locals alike. For a zillion more such like: Flickr.

Friends, it’s one giant kaleidescopic Döblin/Fassbinder mountain. We’re still cooling our hamstrings before writing onto the blog. If you’re planning to attend the Saturday screening, a word to the wise and therefore comfortable: snacks and coffee. (which you can’t of course bring in to the theater). And, you’re in for a real treat.

On Thursday I’ll bring out the trail mix.

We did have a round of Berlin Alexanderplatz screening and post-screening drinking and talking last night, and it was fun! I’m a little bit hoping we’ll hijack the SFMOMA blog for a JUNE ALEXANDERPLATZ extravaganza all month long, but of course there’s this whole FRIDA KAHLO thing happening you might want to hear something about along the way… Meanwhile: In a few hours we’ll have our roundtable up and started, everyone’s still waking up and thinking up all the smart things they want to think up about it.

I’ll say here just for a moment though a couple of the things I DID NOT EXPECT to see last night, but that I got! I didn’t expect the MELODRAMA; I didn’t quite expect the miniseries to feel just so much like a miniseries, with hourly cliffhangers and what looked to me a lot like televisual staging; I wasn’t expecting all that SEX (why not I have no idea); and I was expecting so MUCH MORE VIOLENCE. Which is not to say those last two weren’t present in almost equal parts and usually indistinguishable. Also, honestly, I never expected it would be this much FUN. It’s an addictive drama, good-looking, curious, weird, engaging, funny. And of course only just starting. As a friend said at the end of the night, like many good novels, the first hundred pages are just the set-up, and even kind of lousy. After four hours, I’d say we’re about 100 pages in. Which is to also say, it’s probably just now getting good.

More detail in just a bit—-

Education Assistant Jessica Whiteside’s made the Flickr report on the last-ever SFMOMA Sessions party here. I’ve always wondered about the provenance of the party title “Sessions”…

And, Fritz Haeg’s call for SFBay Animal Stories has been extended til June 2. You can post story submissions in the comment box, or you can email them to Education (at) SFMOMA (dot) org, subject line: “Fritz Haeg Animal Story.”

I wondered the other day if there would be any crossover between the two big institutional locally focused exhibitions this year: NONE WHATSOEVER.

However, many congratulations days overdue to SFMOMA’s own Joshua Churchill!! who works here in Exhibitions, and is one of the artists included in this summer’s Bay Area Now 5. Right on.

En route to tomorrow: interview w. Alison Gass & Apsara DiQuinzio re: SECA Award process, as promised.

Ugh, hot. And they say it’s not going to stop just yet. And there was a mosquito in my room last night. Which puts me in mind of:

R&Sie Mosquito Bottleneck Project, Trinidad

R&Sie, Mosquito Bottleneck Project, Trinidad, 2003 Collection SFMOMA

This fourteen-hundred-square-foot home was designed for a media-art collector living on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean, where the heat of West Nile virus is ongoing. The homeowner wanted his residence to insulate him both from the mosquitos that carry the disease and from the standard litany of other environmental and psychological agents that can disturb the sanctuary of a home.

This design proposes a strategy for confronting and embracing one’s fear of mosquitoes—a manipulation of space that aids what the architects call “angst management.” The structure is designed in the form of a horizontal Klein bottle—a kind of three-dimensional Möbius strip—in which exterior surfaces invert to become interior walls and interior volumes intertwine but do not intersect. Thus, mosquitoes can enter the home and live in close proximity to the owner without actually sharing his space, all the while buzzing in a soothing, therapeutic manner.

Local blogger Heidi J De Vries has a nice and very personal bit up about Robert Rauschenberg today at Engineer’s Daughter.

Mary Biggs, SFMOMA school docent, and Ellen Arenson, SFMOMA Docent Council President

This Monday past was the Docent Spring Thing—every year the Education department holds a party in the museum to celebrate and thank the two hundred-plus docents who work so hard year round. The party is a chance for the staff to come out and say hello to and thank the touring footsoldiers of the museum.

The docents are a highly committed, all-volunteer team, and their training program is extensive and ongoing. The newly graduated docent class spent over 200 hours completing their course of study, and even seasoned twenty-year veterans are required to attend regular courses, trainings, and museum events to keep on top of their skills.

The amount of work the docents do is fairly staggering and not always visible in its entire scope to either staff or public: They provide at least four free daily tours every day of the year that the museum is open, plus special-exhibition tours and artist-specific highlight tours on top of that: the public tours alone served nearly twenty THOUSAND visitors in 2007. They also do extensive work with school children from around the Bay Area: more than eight thousand students from grades three to eight, and many hundreds of high school and college students, come to the museum each year as part of docent-led touring programs. For other students who aren’t able to come to the museum, the docents also do outreach programs, talking to and doing in-school projects with another thousand-plus children each year.

My first job at SFMOMA was scheduling the docents, and I know just how hard they work, how much they love and care about art, about SFMOMA, and about what they do. This is just a small word of thanks to the SFMOMA docents. More party pictures are here.

We’ll begin the week with a soothing silent video of the quickly moving (and noisy) Minna Street construction of the soon-to-be rooftop sculpture garden:

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Eliasson fans, I’ve just had word that Olafur’s One-way colour tunnel, pictured at top, and installed here on the fifth floor bridge since Take your time: Olafur Eliasson opened last September, is coming down May 27. Come and see it while you can.

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Thanks to Tammy Fortin on camera, and to Tim Svenonius for helping me get the footage off the camera and inaugurating me to the joys of iMovie. Thanks again to Kara Davis and Nol Simonse! Kara talks a little bit about the dance itself below.

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

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

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

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

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

Gentle reader, this is Tammy.

I was excited to learn that SFMOMA was building a sculpture garden on its garage roof. I imagined it—an elaborate place where whiskey rivers would meet the charm and class of chocolate fountains, black light paintings, giant sculptures of tiny Hummel figurines, maybe a maze made out of hedges and a Minotaur!?

But, (sigh)—mass destruction is the prelude to constructing such a place. Elaborate scaffolding was established, walls knocked out, construction crews poured cement into kiddie pools, and life-sized Tonka Toy cranes set to the task of heaving port-o-potties to and from the garage roof. Then: enter the Jackhammer.

The Jackhammer greets me every day as I enter the workplace. At night I imagine its terrible drill, just above my head. I try tuning it out. But it is impossible.

So, why not have a little fun with it? Exhibitions Technical Manager Steve Dye and I went out and made some field recordings of The Jackhammer. And then I added a dash of metal.

Take a listen.

Jackhammer as musical instrument. Blasted Jack-Hammer.

Hi Friends,

We’ve been a tiny bit dark momentarily, but do not fear. Later today! (as long as this poet can get the technical apparatus to work back here), we’ll meet another regular contributor in her maiden post. Tammy Fortin! You’ll like her style. And, a few days hence, local writer Eleni Stecopoulos responds to An-My Lê ’s Small Wars.

In the meanwhile, there’s this:

Photo: Stephanie Pau

Which curious object appeared posted under a traffic directional in the Minna Alley (and right in front of Catharine Clark) a couple of weeks ago. It’s signed (unintelligible) and numbered as one of two. Anyone care to claim?

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Thanks, Lou, for answering our questions—