Jim Pomeroy performance announcement card Exchange DFW/SFO , January 23-March 7, 1976, SFMOMA. Photo: Jimmy Jalapeeno

“To what extent does a larger organization, in absorbing new artistic practices, need to support or point to the smaller institutions that pioneered them?”

In the midst of the debate in August surrounding the pending closure of the San Francisco-based nonprofit New Langton Arts (NLA) writer and curator Patricia Maloney posed this question as part of a larger comment on the perhaps inevitable comparison between NLA and SFMOMA as our blog brought increased visibility to the latter’s predicament. Open Space became a forum for the community to evaluate the struggling institution and speculate on its tactical errors, opening up space for criticism of both organizations.

This end-of-an-era reflection on the blog made me think back to the perceived paradoxes and inherent tensions surrounding SFMOMA’s own attempts, through a two-phase exhibition initiative held thirty years ago, to ‘support or point to the smaller institutions’ that had fostered the breadth of activity associated with Bay Area Conceptual art. In reading Julian Myers’s series of discussion threads on the NLA crisis and the political ethos that generated the emergence of the alternative visual arts space movement in the 1970s, I’ve kept returning to that moment. Specifically, to a text-based piece by the artist Jim Pomeroy (1945–1992) featured in the major SFMOMA survey Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (December 21, 1979–February 13, 1980). The work was in itself predicated on dialogues about the fundamental differences between collecting institutions and the parallel system of artist-run spaces. Entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, the piece consisted of enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, the late Suzanne Foley (at SFMOMA 1968–81) and Pomeroy’s paper, of the same title, written for The New Arts Space conference in Santa Monica organized by LAICA in 1978. It is worth noting here that Pomeroy lived upstairs from 80 Langton Street (what later became NLA) and as co-founder, had been instrumental in formulating its mission and goals. Back in 1978 Langton described itself as a “forum for art work, which requires a more flexible, responsive context and more direct critical/supportive feedback than traditional institutions can provide.”

The bible of Bay Area Conceptual Art, published in 1981 by SFMOMA.

Space/Time/Sound represented twenty-one of the more prominent artists/artist groups of the time, highlighting the work that came out of sculptural concerns—performance actions, installations, video art, slide projections—rather than the sculpture (objects), drawings, photography, etc. that we also associate with a number of the same artists and the broader scope of the movement. Pomeroy had performed as part of Foley’s Exchange DFW/SFO (1975-1976) at Fort Worth Museum of Art and at SFMOMA. Several of the artists on the Space/Time/Sound checklist had either been in that or other SFMOMA group presentations, and in certain cases had been given solo shows at the museum. Taken together, Space/Time/Sound was trying to tell a story of how often temporal or site-specific work produced in the Bay Area had inhabited a full range of other arts organizations and non-art spaces—university museums, temporary storefronts, alternative spaces, galleries, studios, streets.

Foley’s colleague Rolando Castellón (SFMOMA curator 1972–81, co-founder of Galería de la Raza) had the overall vision for a Bay Area-centric exhibition series that would include Foley’s presentation and would begin in 1978 with a more direct acknowledgement of the achievements of alternative spaces.  He invited the artist-directors of three prominent San Francisco-based alternative spaces—The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Museum of Conceptual Art (Tom Marioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler)—to program at the museum, highlighting their roles as producer, promoter, and publisher. Each exhibition touched on a signature aspect of their respective projects including live events, while activating the transformed gallery space(s)—from a zine library of correspondence art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.

Foley’s invitation letter to Pomeroy expresses interest in showing the panel from his sound-based performance Composition in D, 1974, a work she refers to as ‘pivotal’ and which “was important for me, as was the series [South of the Slot]. It would be good to have it represented though this piece.” A group of artists had generated the two-month South of the Slot series at 63 Bluxome in San Francisco, and its word-of-mouth success was partly what informed the desire for a continued alternative space, and the decision by the San Francisco Art Dealers Association to assist with the formation of 80 Langton Street.

Jim Pomeroy, Composition in D, a cantata for string trio and twelve music boxes. Participants: Howard Fried, Jim Pomeroy, Paul Kos, November 4, 1974, in “South of the Slot”, 63 Bluxome Street, San Francisco. Photo: Richard Alpert

I found the Foley/Pomeroy correspondence, and a copy of the conference paper, fortuitously, misfiled in our unprocessed exhibition archives, and after I stopped looking for it. Before this, I’d only ever seen citations of the project, and the full text was absent in related publications. I’m therefore happy to be able to present both documents in full here on the blog, at the end of this post. Whether or not Pomeroy’s piece achieved its potential for acting as “a kinetic situation, inviting dialogue and thought processes on the issue raised” as he hoped, given the text-and-photo-panel-heavy exhibition design, there are signs that his point—that it could not be ignored that one of the major and definitive changes in contemporary art of the 1970s was the self-determination and expanded role of artists in the founding of new arts spaces—was taken. A concern he had expressed in the paper was that “all too frequently, a museum or gallery will represent with massive publicity and documentation exhibitions or performances presented at artists’ spaces and fail to acknowledge the previous source of exposure.” Foley explicitly supported Pomeroy’s pro-artist premise, dedicating a full section of the comprehensive Space/Time/Sound catalogue to the ‘new alternative visual arts spaces’ and to the phenomenon Pomeroy refers to in his paper as the new ‘artist consciousness’, as well as including profiles in the exhibition on all of the Bay Area-based spaces including 80 Langton Street represented in the conference.

If Composition in D involved firing slingshots to silence alarms then Pomeroy’s Viewing the Museum took aim at various art world practices and its individual players. His biting anti-SFMOMA remarks—complete with quoting then-Director Henry Hopkins—go unmentioned in exhibition texts. Exemplifying Pomeroy’s wit and penchant for title punning, the piece was instead contextualized in didactics with the rest of his artistic practice as “approaching the subject much as he examines phenomena and objects, taking them apart, examining them and putting them back together in juxtapositions that make wry parodic comments on themselves.”

While sorting through this material, I came to realize that the way museum staff and colleagues often talk about Space/Time/Sound suggests a positive read of the exhibition, despite being allegedly unpopular within the museum, with the public, and in the press. We tell a tale of an exhibition that was ‘pivotal’ in generating primary research and documentation of how our brand of Conceptual art had manifested in the region. Foley and Castellón’s exhibitions have come to signify for the museum a productive collaboration with Bay Area artists, a bold curatorial risk in comparison to regular museum programming of the time, and an attempt at confronting the challenge of translating peer-oriented work to a museum’s more general audience. Artists speak fondly of the curators who championed them at a key turning point in their careers. Having digested the press clippings right before reading the Foley/Pomeroy exchange, I initially felt a bit protective of Foley, but with each rereading appreciated Pomeroy’s letter and his position more broadly. His assertion that most of the significant activity of the decade occurred outside of the museum was both a point that needed to be made as well as a point of contention for those who objected to—on principle or in practice—the museum historicizing the scene. In fact, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s scathing exhibition review dismisses the survey’s “slight tip of the hat to alternative spaces [that] suggests none of the richness of the network of personal relationships, underground institutions and events that shaped the development of Bay Area Conceptualism.”

Then SFMMA Assistant Director of Art George Neubert summarized in his wrap-up report for the NEA: “The critical response to the series of exhibitions and events was quite mixed and in some cases negative and derogatory. Because it was controversial to be treating “alternative” art in an “establishment” museum situation it was not easy to obtain private or corporate funding support.” Of course some of the complaints were just thinly disguised attacks on idea-based art and the non-commercial object rhetoric of the period, while other criticisms reflected a resentment of the way museum recognition is interpreted as ‘progress’ or ‘maturation.’ The latter anxieties are evident in Pomeroy’s paper: as he put it, the museum’s “posture of benevolent patriarchy” towards artists. In general, a recurrent sentiment of the time was that static documentation of past events was a poor substitute for first-hand experience, and thus despite the best of curatorial intentions, the museum had indeed become the mausoleum for the local avant-garde.

Even back then Pomeroy refers to his original paper as “a real period piece.” In reading it, we can identify obvious shifts in the art world since then, including the art market’s later embrace of once non-marketable artistic forms. There is a general climate of increased opportunities for emerging artists, productive moments of collaboration between museums and other nonprofits, and the rise of other models like artist-run galleries, not accounted for in his schematization, that would also absorb the experimental curatorial methodologies promoted by alternative spaces. Blogs are but one sign of the constant reevaluation of arts organizations in their relationship to artists and their audience. In contrast to this potential to alter one’s institutional image, the case of Space/Time/Sound speaks to the limits of what we might want an institution to represent.

13 September 1979

Suzanne Foley, Curator San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Dear Suzanne,

Thank you for your letter and invitation to SFMMA’s exhibition, “Space/Time/Sound-1970’s”. I will be happy to participate. I will, no doubt, be communicating with you shortly regarding the show, but wanted to initiate my proposal in writing, for reasons explained below.

Since this exhibition is described as an “end of the decade” reflection, I feel it is, indeed, appropriate “to take a look at that important aspect of Bay Area creative activity that extended the traditional definitions of art.” Your choice of concentrating “on artists whose expressions come out of sculptural concerns” is well founded, and I agree “a thoughtful look at a few artists can make a succinct statement which then sets the tone for all the other activity in the decade.” The fact that most of the significant activity of the decade occurred outside of the museum context is a point which must be made. To wit, I would like to include a work which I feel is indeed “pivotal” and in the sense that it remain pivotal, I would like to activate the museum and the spectator as co-respondents.

Proposal: Exhibit in the form of enlarged reproductions, my article “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog”  commissioned by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art for the conference The New Arts Space held in Santa Monica in April 1978, accompanied by copies of your letter of invitation to this exhibition, this letter, and your letter in response (as well as any other significant documents relevant to the work). All documents to be enlarged to the same size and exhibited as a suite of prints. The reproduction will be expedient and graphic (Photostat) and something like 11/2 to 2x original size.

Many of the reasons I feel this work to be pivotal or significant are stated in the article itself. For me, at least, it acknowledges a relatively new stature, posture, attitude, or identity for the artist—a position which seizes a responsibility for autonomy, often clumsily but assertive nonetheless, and determination which previously resided in more remote and dominating roles. Principally, these roles were administrator, critic, curator, director, publisher, agent, and significant audience. Most of these were not occupiable by artists, and seem to be closed to many others (like community representatives) as well. The major aspect of change in the arts in this decade is the explosion of considerable alternatives to traditional norms. Not style, as in ‘movement’ but movement, as in ‘away’. The reason that most museum directors and senior critics complain about doldrums in the seventies (and that most museum exhibitions justify that complaint) is that they can’t see the changes, because they’re not stylistic changes, but linguistic changes. If this exhibition is to be accurate in order to “set the tone for all the other activity in the decade”, it must confront that issue.

In the year and a half since I wrote the article I have learned many things to change its utopian tone. One rude awakening has been the realization that not all these new arts spaces are as democratic, altruistic or ethical as I would like. Many are clumsily administered, leaving much of the burden on either the artist or the audience. Yet, despite these trespasses, I still feel that this is my arena and the arena of responsible growth—and I mean growth in the sense of maturity, not in the sense of ‘progress’ as is so often used in our mercantilist hierarchies. Since I wrote the article, it has become clear that profit plays an increasingly important role in museum directions. Programs are filled in around shallow, pretentious, and over-publicized blockbusters like “Tut” and manipulative PR shows with monster budgets and miniscule scholarship and content. All too frequently, selection of important critical functions is made on the basis of this kind of “support”. Meanwhile, there are the built-in responsibilities to trustees and collection, leaving little room, time, or budget to ‘reflection’. Invisible as it may appear to our ‘elders’, this is one of the major crises of our decade.

Reading back over the article, I feel awkward in terms of scattered organization, points which could have been clearer or better made, analysis which settled for “art-world” gripes (and avoided deeper social questions of ‘what exactly is the place of an art-world in our culture?), or the previously mentioned disappointments with more promising milieu. However, these faults, like drips and slips on a painting, are indicative of a time and a process; and comprise an important part of the whole. They are transparent enough to allow at least the intended essence to be read. It’s a real period piece and must (and will) stand on its own. So I swallow my awkwardness. I don’t think anyone else will choke on it either.

I don’t expect the museum to agree with my views or to assume liability for them. I grant the museum its position and take responsibility for my own work. I do expect the SFMMA to reciprocate by hanging this work. After all, if I am wrong or out of place, I risk playing the fool (and the museum certainly commands significant evidence to the contrary). If there is found to be some agreement with my views, then perhaps a productive dialogue will result. I address these remarks to ‘the museum’ because your response in this matter will constitute ‘museum policy’. I do not intend to compromise your position or our friendship; but this is an official and professional relation.

Obviously I have questions about Institutions, Spaces, Alternatives, Criticism, Assessments, Decades, Art, Artists, Audiences, Support, Et Cetera, Et Cetera. I would like these questions to be the sound that is heard in the time of my space.

This is the only work I wish to place in the exhibition.

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

Jim Pomeroy

Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog [downloadable PDF]

November 14, 1979

Jim Pomeroy
74 Langton Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Dear Jim:

Needless to say, I was surprised to receive your response to my letter, indicating your wish to be represented in the exhibition “Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area” by your paper published in the summary of The New Arts Space conference sponsored by The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1978. As I read it, the essence of your thesis is that the artist in the seventies has taken active responsibility for defining his/her place in the art world by assuming the roles previously held by the administrator, critic, curator, director, agent and significant audience. From my research on the exhibition, I can agree with you that this an exceptionally important point in understanding what has happened in the arts in this decade. It is much more appropriate to have your personal conviction elucidate this point than to have it rationalized in Museum reportage.

I suppose the institution, could it but speak with a single voice, might say in response to the thesis of your paper “you are flattering to suggest that the Museum’s sole purpose is to serve the art community; would it were that simple!” As an institution, a Museum is an admixture of an established commitment and the dynamics of all the individuals who make it happen, the staff, the supporters, the visitors and—the artists; it is a sociological phenomenon. As you have pointed out, the artist in this decade has realized, matured to the extent, that he/she, too is a sociological phenomenon. So the place that we—institution and artist—find the most dynamic is where our “worlds” overlap. The Museum is not the be-all and the end-all and it is idealistic to expect that to be true. That’s what the seventies have told us about our idealisms of the sixties.

Here’s to the eighties!

Warmly,

Suzanne Foley
Curator

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Jim Pomeroy, Apollo Jest: An American Mythology (In Depth), 1978, 1983 (still)

Continuing to be a key spokesman for the artist community, Pomeroy later turned a critical eye to the rigid genre division in art schools, the institutionalization of alternative spaces, and the dependent relationship on the NEA. Before he left San Francisco in 1987 to teach in his home state of Texas, Pomeroy participated in several exhibitions and events at Langton including the seminal performance Byte at the Opera (1977) with Paul DeMarinis, who would later co-organize with then- Executive Director Susan Miller the 1999 posthumous Jim Pomeroy: A Retrospective on the occasion of NLA’s 25th anniversary. The show celebrated from all accounts a much-loved and missed figure known for his work across media—sculpture, performance, new music, sound art, video, and stereography and anamorphic photography—as well as his incisive critical writing on technology in culture. As a testament to a longstanding relationship with an artist, it was the type of exhibition and publication that an old arts space like NLA could do.

–Tanya Zimbardo, SFMOMA assistant curator of media arts

This afternoon, SFMOMA is hosting a special memorial service honoring Bay Area sculptor and conceptual artist David Ireland, who passed away last spring. Ireland was a central figure in conceptual art in the Bay Area and beyond. From the 1970s until his death, he produced a highly idiosyncratic body of work concerned with the creation and function of art within everyday life. In place of the blog’s usual mid-month “Collection Rotation”, today we also pay tribute, with a collection of contributions from younger artists, organized by SF artist and musician Scott Hewicker.

David Ireland, Untitled Untitled (Small painted can with Dumbball). N.D. Tin, cement, paint. 7” x 4” x 4”

My home, my work, my artistic and musical practices—essentially my whole life—co-exist on a steady fault line between David Ireland’s two Capp Street houses in San Francisco’s Mission District. 65 Capp Street was the site of the first Capp Street Project, and 500 Capp St, Ireland’s former home and studio, is now also, to my mind, his greatest lasting artwork. The two houses seem at times like two footprints of a standing giant, and he was a giant to me and to many. Fearlessly beginning his career late in life, David’s essential concern was the Zen-like observance of, and dedication to, the ever-lasting present. Using common, readily available materials such as concrete, found wood, and other debris, with the lightest of touch. David could make dirt sing, rewarding our acceptance of his work, but never asking for it. “You can’t make art by making art”, he often said, and you can see in some of the contributions below how many artists have taken that simple but profound idea to heart. I didn’t know him well, but his work and the ideas inherent in their making have always deeply resonated with me, as with others. David’s refusal of personal attachment to the works he made gave me the courage when I left art school to discard all my old work and start over again from scratch.

His passing last May, though expected for a long time, nevertheless struck slow and deep. I was surprised by what seemed to me a muted media response, or in the case of the art world outside the Bay Area, what felt like too little response at all. I never considered David Ireland “just” a San Francisco or West Coast artist. We were lucky to have him here and lucky he wanted to be here, and his ideas and creative spirit seem embedded in the foundation of a working artists’ community here. From spontaneous street sculpture to DIY art spaces, David helped you appreciate the beauty inherent in everyday things, and in happenings outside the sphere of marketable art. News of his death I thought should have rung out through the streets like the death of Victor Hugo in Paris. He touched so many people, so many artists.

I see echoes of David Ireland’s work in many artists, and wondered what it would look like to ask a cross-section of people here, or who used to be here, to select a work of David’s and a work of their own to engage in a kind of visual interplay that reflects how they’ve felt David’s impact on their own work or lives. Some have also contributed memories and personal insights. A tribute like this one couldn’t begin to be representative of everyone Ireland touched. I hope we can take this tiny part to indicate a much greater whole.

—Scott Hewicker

Rebecca Goldfarb, D.I. Dumbball toss to R.G. 2009

Dear reader,

This is Tammy. Has this ever happened to you?

I was passing a casual afternoon in the SFMOMA sculpture garden the other day, sipping a glass of fresh tap water and soaking up some much needed vitamin D in my San Francisco summer attire , when I realized that my helmet with its tundra down lining resembled the Thought Screen Helmets made famous by our friends at Stop Alien Abductions.  Thought screen helmets prevent aliens from reading your thoughts, and ultimately, from abducting the wearer. Just for fun, I toyed with “anyone” who might be listening by creating a half-thought. And then, as if in answer,  an eerie pattern to the sculptures seemed to appear—an unwritten narrative that became more and more obvious the more I gazed at the objects on display and took into account the simple fact that rooftop gardens, like tennis courts, can easily be transformed into helipads.

Was the curatorial vision describing an actual visitation? Experts have denied any such conspiracy, but I’ll let you be the judge. I give you here, the key:

Alexander Calder, Big Crinkly = The spaceship

Louise Bourgeois, The Nest = Mother alien who eats her young; equipped with sharp-toothed lower lip folded under the head

Juan Munoz, Conversation Piece, NY (1, 2 & 3) = Alien hatchlings, or larval stage (pre-nymph)

Ranjani Shettar, Me, no, not me, buy me, eat me, wear me, have me, me, no, not me = Nymph-stage shedded skin of the now teenaged hatchlings (represented under the mother’s legs)

Mario Merz, The Lens of Rotterdam = The dwelling.  Igloo in appearance, so as to ‘blend in’ (the first alien landing coordinated at points due east of the Bering Strait)

Ellsworth Kelly, Stele I = The golden calf or object of worship

Kiki Smith, Virgin Mary = Sarcophagus for captured humans

Robert Arneson, No Pain =Severed head of the decapitated human leader

Joel Shapiro, Untitled = Communications antennae; able to withstand arctic winds

Henry Moore, Large Torso Arch = Fourth dimension portal for ‘birthing’ spaceship (saves light years and is fuel efficient)

Barnett Newman, Zim Zum I = Thermal radiation jet shower and particle neutralizer

I hope this knowledge does not compromise our safety or  future privacy. As you know, They can read our thoughts, and They have ways of making us forget.

Artcast tour of the Sculpture Garden that explores all 11 works and artists thematically (more of a “sculpture as such” approach): here.

Sculpture-by-sculpture audio guide in downloadable zip and cell-phone-able tour (maybe more fun when you’re here on site): is here.

In contrast to building projects previously discussed, I’d like to briefly mention The Heidelberg Project started by Tyree Guyton in Detroit, Michigan. Back in 1986, East Detroit struggled to recover from the aftermath of the Detroit riots and faced a depleted economy and racially segregated neighborhoods. Guyton, a resident of Heidelberg Street since the age of 12, began cleaning up his increasingly abandoned and blighted neighborhood with an enclave of children who lived nearby. With the materials they gathered from the vacated residences and lots, Guyton and the neighborhood kids collaborated to create art environments and installations in the vacant lots, on street posts, and the facades of homes. The city of Detroit resisted, of course, demolishing a portion of the project in 1991 and then again in 1999.  However, The Heidelberg Project persisted and now operates as a non-profit arts organization, hosting a series of year round workshops and educational programs for schools and youth in the area.

The Heidelberg Project, installation of discarded vaccuum cleaners in a vacant lot on Heidelberg Street, Detroit, Michigan

Clearly, the context of The Heidelberg Project and the public plaza of the San Francisco Federal Building or MIR differ greatly and the comparison is a stretch, at best. However, I mention The Heidelberg Project as a way to push the possibilities of our collective spaces and as an example of a community-driven public art project that not only functions in the context of an urban neighborhood facing poverty and disenfranchisement, but employs the creative reuse of material and space—a thread that runs through many of my recent blog postings.

On that note, I look forward to hearing from Open Space readers about green building projects and public spaces in the Bay Area.

The Heidelberg Project, decorated home on Heidelberg Street, Detroit, Michigan

[Throughout the run of the Art of Participation, we've been treated to daily performances of John Cage's seminal work 4'33", a composition of silence lasting -- well, yes -- four minutes and thirty-three seconds. A score of 'silence' highlights ambient sounds surrounding the performance. Cage was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, and together these two works form the opening or entrance to the exhibition. Below, SFMOMA visitor services attendant Michael Zelenko, on what it's been like to experience 4'33" day in and day out, for the last three months. There's also a nice YouTube clip with Cage discussing silence, here.]

4′33″

Over the weeks, my attention has shifted inevitably from the performance to the audience. On the wide spectrum between befuddlement and admiration, most visitors’ reactions fall somewhere in the middle. However, after a few weeks I realized that those listeners at either end have a common reaction–total and absolute silence. Admittedly, the completely attentive individuals are rare, but they have contributed more than their fair share to my experience. I remember in early December when an elderly Swedish music professor stood riveted next to the piano, intensely focused during those four and half minutes. Afterwards, he shared with me his theory regarding the length of the composition in a hushed tone: the 273 seconds that make up the piece are possibly a reference to -273 Celsius, or absolute zero, when all molecular motion stops, or at least reaches its minimal state, a sort of molecular silence. These audience members –the fans — are my favorite because they stick it out, smile, and applaud warmly when the performer stands up from the bench.

On the other hand, I’ve repeatedly heard the story of a visitor who brazenly tapped a performing staff member on the shoulder, asking for directions. When someone from the audience whispered that they were interrupting, the visitor stepped back in disbelief, as if suddenly awakened. For the most part though, visitors patiently watch the pianist for a couple of minutes before they look at each other and, smiling sideways and shrugging their shoulders,they move on. Others don’t stop at all, but simply throw an awkward glance in passing.

After almost three months, I’d yet to do the honors myself! So it was with excitement that I finally sat down behind that ominous looking piano last week. I have to admit I was a bit nervous. As the seconds ticked by, I began hearing the kinds of things I’d overlooked during all those other thirty-six performances: the droning tones of laughter from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole-In-Space or the abrasive sawing of Hans Haacke’s News printer, both installed nearby; and finally, a woman singing, right next to me, in front of Nam Jun Paik’s Participation TV, blissfully unaware she was engaged in two pieces at once, Paik’s and Cage’s. At some point during the third movement, as if orchestrated, all these previously unacknowledged sounds seemed to come together. It felt to me as if the museum itself was performing for us. When it was all over I turned to the audience and heard the pitter-patter of applause, not quite sure who it was for.

The term D.I.Y., or “Do It Yourself,” has become something of a buzzword lately, an ethos. The acronym was spawned from early 1950s home repair manuals, grew to refer to alternative punk and hardcore music, and now encompasses everything from the burgeoning indie craft scene to the Slow Food movement. Doing It Yourself, it seems, is pretty darn cool because it means you can really “have it your way” and the term wears itself like the ultimate democratic and even populist statement. We are all creators! We are all designers!

However, left to their own devices, humans can be an unruly lot, especially when it comes to following a given set of instructions. Take it from someone who once worked as a designer at a hands-on science museum: a large part of my day was spent trying to design instructions and images to coax museum visitors into doings things a “certain way” (push this button) to get a “certain result” (make it go). The trick was to frame the instruction in a friendly and “rewarding” way that would make the visitor feel they had gained something (”I learned about quantum physics! Neat-o”), or had done something correctly (”I followed the instructions and the whirly thing spun around”). These were the basic goals, with conveying complex concepts falling at one end of the success spectrum, and delivering simple physical results falling on the other.

Mind you, these were the best outcomes one could hope for. What usually happened, comically enough, was a lot of museum visitors randomly banging around on high-tech machinery, buttons being pushed willy-nilly out of sequence, and the lovingly designed graphics ignored and thrown to the winds of instructional irrelevance. What I learned, essentially, is that humans are a messy, anarchic lot that, on the whole — and despite your best-designed intentions — will revert to a herd of cats with incredibly short attention spans.

Initial Freecell design proposal photographs

How do designers and viewer/participants gauge “success” when it comes to open-ended or participatory experiences? Especially when the viewer/participant is called upon to follow a given set of rules but also to bring in their own creativity (or even lethargy) and possibly do something unforeseen or deemed “unruly” by the designer? In other words, are all outcomes — especially the ugly — ones… good? Does inviting someone to respond to a work only to have them merely scribble graffiti on it a valid invitation-response exchange in itself? Should designers nod approvingly when their works get turned upside down? To take a well-known and ongoing online example, I wonder how much of the “crappy” or “wrong” responses end up online at the “Learning to Love You More” website by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July and how do they get weeded out as so? I assume that not every response is deemed a “right” response.What an artist/designer hopes for is a response to their solicitations for participation. But I suspect they also expect something in particular. How does a sliding scale of success become formulated?

OK, back to the unruly public:

I can appreciate when the best of intentions goes a bit haywire. Structured (or even semi-structured) situations like Freecell’s project have the potential to elicit the most interesting and off-the-wall end products simply because the public responses defy expectation.

Left: original image of Coach handbag. Right: counterfeit crochet version, never finished, by Carrie Suchman from Ohio.

Suzanne Stein, SFMOMA community producer, pointed me in the direction of this video snippet showing SFMOMA visitors using Lygia Clark’s interactive work Rede de elástico (Elastic Net) as a jump rope in the galleries. This work requires visitors to collectively knot together individual rubber bands to create a “net” of sorts; life as a jump rope was unexpected and had to be quickly discouraged as it may have interfered with or bumped into other works in the gallery. To be fair, in an earlier Open Space blog interview, Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling acknowledges that there are always institutional restraints that keep artworks from getting too unruly and that may even hinder a fully “active” participatory experience. Clark intended her work to be actively played with. It’s just that SFMOMA can’t accommodate all the ways in which that can happen.

“There is a famous historic example of an exhibition by Robert Morris in 1971, at the Tate in London, that had to be closed after a few days because people were destroying some of the objects. There is an urge and an eagerness to do something and to participate that can be counterproductive to the usual aims of a museum.” – Rudolf Frieling

Freecell’s initial plan was devised for a minimal room with no other furniture in it, in which visitors could construct the modular units. But “D-space” is also the Koret Visitor Education center, and purity just wasn’t possible: Stack-to-Fold bumps up against a video projection area, and coloring/drawing area (The 1000 Journals Project), creating a bit of confusion as to what one is supposed to focus on or pay attention to. As the exhibition progressed, it was also apparent to the museum staff that folks weren’t utilizing the space “correctly” by making their own seating area and tables out of the Freecell units, so they added actual chairs and a formal sitting area with tables. This may have discouraged folks even more from thinking of their constructions as functioning as utility items. From my visit, it looked as if the Freecell units had become surfaces upon which to graffiti on or stack like Legos. It certainly looked like a far cry from the clean, platonic, designed experience originally depicted in their mock-ups.

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Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist based in San Francisco. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. You can view her work at http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com.

Never have there been two films so ripe for reassessment as George Sidney’s Viva Las Vegas, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Made thirty years apart, they both reside in that basket reserved for the culturally unsanctioned. Maybe it’s due to the stain of Vegas — that fata Morgana that has traditionally made the highfalutin see red. Now, in the true era of anything goes, in which the Vegas aesthetic has established itself as the norm, it’s just possible their time has come…

I believe somewhere in the pages of Cahiers du cinema in the 1950’s, a proto-French New Wave director mused on the revolutionary concepts he hoped to enact in celluloid: gone would be artificial notions of plot and character not derived from action. Film was about the eternal now. Each moment would create its own reality, its own urgency. Life would be experienced by the glance, the gesture, the drama of expressions across the face, from second to second, shot to shot. If a character desired to sing, he’d sing. If she wanted to dance, she’d dance. If angry, they’d shoot to kill. If lusty, they’d go to town… Desire, thought, and action would again be one — and paradise regained. Each scene would exist for itself, build to a new shuddering climax, then be dismissed, in an endless quest for the new now now now…

This article must have been amongst the earliest of its kind to be translated from the French, and transported to Hollywood, for George Sidney, prince of the MGM musical-comedy, apparently read it and instantly put its principles into action. As an example of this New Wave genre, it has never been surpassed. Sidney was just the man for the job, having built an extensive body of work poised somewhere between primitive surrealist and naive absurdism, which had a long history of sending the literati into uncontrollable spasms of collective horror and outrage, and of gracing the faces of the average Jane or Joe with smiles of pleasure. There is something seriously strange about Sidney’s work, an unhinged yet vital deliriousness, a quality emitting from some now deep-buried, disclaimed and abandoned fold of the American Grain, which, I must admit, I find intoxicating.

Jonathan Rosenbaum once proposed Gentleman Prefer Blondes as the capitalist Potemkin, but for me this title goes to Viva Las Vegas. Though Blondes is arguably brilliantly embedded with capitalist ideology, Viva cuts to the chase by offering an unsurpassable platter of delights for our ecstatic delectation. This is the field of argument to which capitalism is best suited. Examples of what’s on offer: Elvis performing “What I Say” in a sequence that gives both Ray Charles and Bruce Conner runs for their money, the most mind-blowing first date in cinema history (not counting Last Tango in Paris), and, at the film’s climax, the most viscerally exciting auto race I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But this film is far more than capitalist apologia, for its convulsive beauty contains a religious dimension — an ecstatic vision, a mystical union of opposites, Viva Las Vegas presents such a profoundly affirmative view of the American psyche, that it suggests it’s capable of (witness the “fate” of Cesare Danova) transcending death itself.

If Viva is Vegas as utopia, the Vegas of Showgirls is a dystopia worthy of Blade Runner, or Brecht’s Mahagonny. Ambition, manipulation, corruption, the quest for power — these are the issues on this film’s agenda. Though its Vegas is as beautiful as that of Viva (in a 1995 kinda way), this work is a large and bitter pill — ultimately to your benefit, but scary for those in search of a quick and easy tease.

Showgirls follows the exploits of Nomi Malone, a dancer who seeks to protect her integrity while crawling to the top of the Vegas food-chain. Young, vital, infinitely ambitious, yet willfully naive, charming but profoundly undereducated in all but a modicum of the street-smarts she desperately wants to shed, Nomi is a mass of contradictions, a woman in severe need of Reichian analysis, in which every element of being is treated as neurotic symptom. All of her talents and symptoms will come into play as she battles her way from strip-club nymph to full-fledged Goddess of show business on the Vegas strip. Arrayed against her is a virtual network of the devious and duplicitous, all of whom want either to prevent her from attaining her rightful pedestal in the Pantheon, or gain access past her g-string. As she powers her way through power-mad would-be seducers (club and show managers, a choreographer manqué, the reigning Vegas Goddess, a sexually violent Michael Bolton doppelganger), she comes ever-so-close to a confrontation with her own heart of darkness, but like America, to which her character is an analog, Nomi will stop at nothing to protect her remaining shreds of innocence. Over the course of the film, the trail of self-deception and chaos in her wake reveals a latter-day incarnation of Inanna, Sumerian Goddess of passion, war, and destruction.

Paul Verhoeven’s audacity is seen in the way he vacuum-packs contrary elements into seemingly irresolvable structures. Dealing in a largely heterosexual eros, but in a self-consciously high-camp manner, relishing ambiguity and reveling in primal force, proffering both satirical social critique and an appreciation for the permutations of undying archetypes, and working in a style marked for its mixture of raw garishness and cold European aestheticism, it’s no wonder the works are so often misunderstood. Their aim tends both above the head and below the belt.

The difficulty of these films is compounded by Verhoeven’s open embrace of that despised form, melodrama. This isn’t a problem for his macho melodramas — Robocop and Starship Troopers — but the mode has become somehow threatening when applied to a female world view. Showgirls refers back to the genre of “women’s pictures”, now for the most part sadly defunct, which dealt with troublesome emotions — hysteria, say, or unrequited love — and were often centered around sympathetic portrayals of outsider women. They served as societal safety valves, providing catharsis, allowing for an imaginative exploration of a realm of extravagant emotionality, touching parts of the psyche now repressed. This instinctive, working-class genre has lost its currency, due, in part, to the intertwining rise of PC strictures and upwardly mobile aspirations, and their concomitant code of rigid decorum. Guy Maddin, in a recent, spirited defense, said “melodrama isn’t true life exaggerated — that would be bogus. It’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.” And uninhibited emotion in the classically “feminine” mode just ain’t in fashion.

In dream-like style, Showgirls (like Viva) romps through other genres (musical, soft-core porno, over-the-top exploitation film, martial-arts action) as well, in the best meta-Hollywood manner, making for a narrative and dramatic short-hand in which complex ideas and feelings are suggested with ruthlessly efficient, effortless speed. Genre play in a film overloaded with painful realities is, in fact, the most transgressive element of this radical work — and the cause of the emotional gag-reflex it has so often inspired. Ultimately, Showgirls is a “women’s picture” made for men, and therefore disturbing to just about everybody.

So fond of techno am I that I have always refused to listen to—I’m sure I’ve even said “hated”—opera without knowing much about it. Then, recently, a dear friend set out to convert me. We spent a wonderful evening listening and comparing. As I write now, my new heroine Régine Crespin is belting out Verdi. Alas, me…a convert?

Unfortunately, diving back into Derek Jarman after many years had the opposite effect. Where I was once an Act Up boy overwhelmed by the poetry of The Garden and in tears at the New York premier of Blue (which, I hope, will still reduce me to rubble), I left Caravaggio mildly interested, The Last of England bored, and The Garden all but obtunded. People change. And the films and music that give us identity age. I embraced Jarman in the 1980’s because the lush sensibility mixed with righteous indignation and a certain academic veneration of beauty had operatic strength. Why now, I wonder, does Jarman’s vision seem dated dull? Postmodern without punch? Operatic in its hysteria but without a unifying beat?

There are so many magnificent images. Yet, in the way they knit together, something seems lacking, unmetabolized. It was, of course, a very different time. People were dying of AIDS everywhere with no end in sight and WMD’s were circling around the American southwest on train tracks, set to launch at any moment. It was a jittery time: melancholic even in advance of death. Jarman captured thanatos well—if not with a kind of aesthetic hyperbole that could be hypnotic or off-putting relative to your anger at the unassimilated thud of yet another death.

At some point, though, the fat lady sings and there is resolution. I’m afraid that for Jarman, at least in the films we have seen so far, the tragedy is still pending. I’m going to try to go back to that time of waiting for the inevitable. But it is rubbing me the wrong way now that my heroes are the ones armed with hope rather than despair.

Brecht Andersch:

While I must confess my previous encounters with Jarman’s work didn’t make me a fan, and this extensive retrospective has not been a conversion experience, I’ve nevertheless found some elements in the work to admire and enjoy, such as:

1) This is an artist of confidence and audacity – Jarman is a man full of feeling and passion, and whatever fears he faces regarding the difficulties of expressing a complex and thorny vision are met face-on and dispatched.

2) His work is deeply personal – each film seems to tell a version of his own story, or provide an update as to how events have affected the development of his vision. Many of my favorite filmmakers, writers, and artists work in this mode.

3) The filmmakers he emulates and to whom he pays repeated homage are artists I admire immensely: Michael Powell, Cocteau, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos. At one point in The Last of England, a rapid-fire montage of black and white imagery alternating with shots dominated by red or blue (in a manner clearly influenced by Anger and Markopoulos) is immediately followed by a homage to the ending of Pasolini’s Salo: two soldier/terrorists dance near a fire burning in the middle of the street, machine-guns slung over their shoulders as they waltz…

4) Jarman has a bold and unusual sense of color and film form in general, and the results are often beautiful. One technique he employs repeatedly is to blow up super-8 Kodachrome to 35mm. As a lover of this now almost defunct “home movie” stock, I find it very exciting to encounter its deep, saturated reds and blues on the big screen, though, as I’m also something of a film purist, the pixels acquired from the video intermediate of The Last of England are a bit disconcerting. More to my taste is that super-8 Kodachrome moment in Jubilee—blown up directly to 35mm—in which a ballerina performs, out-of-doors and nearby a fire. Through deft in-camera editing and graceful camera movement and zooms (Jarman no doubt operating the camera himself) Jarman becomes his dancer’s partner, and the film and the world come alive…

5) Jarman is unyieldingly honest, his work over-stuffed with contradictory impulses and ideas. Just when I’m ready to write him off as an unredeemable chiliast, for example, he makes a whole film—Wittgenstein—dedicated to the story of a man who must learn to live with all of life’s roughness and confusion. As alluded to above, each of Jarman’s films is a chapter in a too-early concluded spiritual autobiography, and this kind of rigorously honest self-appraisal—in a quest for a deeper encounter with Self—is extremely attractive to me.

[At 6am this Wednesday morning, the iconic and colorful Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings #935 and #936 will be "deinstalled" (read: painted over), in part to make room for some VERY BIG sculptures that will be part of the upcoming Martin Puryear exhibition in November. Any SFMOMA search on Flickr will immediately turn up dozens of images of these works. The drawings, having lived in the Atrium for eight years, seem practically synonymous with that space, or even with the museum itself. Local artist Chris Cobb was part of the team of artists who worked on the Sol LeWitt exhibition at SFMOMA in 2000, creating many drawings from LeWitt's instructions. He reflects on the strange 'passing' of the drawings:]

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Snapshot of a snapshot: LeWitt installation in progress @ SFMOMA, 2000. This was an ink wash wall drawing that was made by building up layers one at a time, letting them dry and then adding the next layer.  (Chris Cobb)

Sol LeWitt, Working Drawing for Wall Drawing #936: Color arcs in four directions, 1999, Gift of the Artist

Chris & Wim,  North Adams, MA

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Chris Cobb is a San Francisco-based artist represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery. An account of his work on the Sol LeWitt retrospective at MASS MoCA will appear in the Nov/Dec issue of The Believer magazine and a number of his photographs will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters Magazine. He is best known for an installation he did at the Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco in 2004.

This is Tammy. Hey look! Summer’s gone up in smoke and it’s back-to-school time. And although my academic pursuits were stopped short many years ago by an ergonomic accident, September still brings with it a pain in my gut. Summer vacation drifts into a landslide of work and anxiety. Will my coworkers laugh at my back-to-school Toughskins and non-name-brand sneakers AGAIN this year? I ignore their petty, school-kid crap and plunge head first into my work. Thankfully, Stein and my boss, curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling, are keeping me busy with a lot of assignments. Stein even proposed I make my little postings here a regular column. (Name options: True Random Thoughts, Non Sequitur, Obvious Observations.) I’ve also been gearing up for the Art of Participation show, opening in November, editing interviews with Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer, and some more mundane projects, like hiding the filing I didn’t do this year and reorganizing the office to confuse Rudolf now that he’s back from vacation. I am seriously busy, but I do have priorities. So, with that in mind, I’ve been checking out the summer shows, and I noticed something peculiar….

Lee Miller is cruisey. Or maybe it’s just the third-floor photography gallery in general. But I’ve been in the exhibition three times now, and each time I happen upon some kind of girl-on-girl sexual tension. Let it be known that my gaydar is technically flawed, but still, if I can identify this ancient ritual, it must be painfully obvious to everyone else. I have some questions about this: Is Lee Miller a gay icon? Or do girls just think she’s hot? Does an artist have to be beautiful or interesting biographically in order to be successful? If so, does this apply more so for women? What would Frida say? Would the cross-dressing, bisexual Frida notice these things too? Would Frida cruise Lee? Would Lee cruise Frida? Could they see past their obvious attraction for each other and just be friends?