Surely if you’ve been in the building anytime in recent months, you’ve taken a look at our latest Haas Atrium commission, Kerry James Marshall’s monumental pair of murals called Visible Means of Support. Last February a team of painters from Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, a community mural organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District, spent two full weeks of long, long days in the Atrium painting the works onto the huge, formerly-known-as-the-LeWitt-walls.
The murals depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of American presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Half-hidden in the paintings are also depictions of the slaves who supported plantation life. Appropriately, the SFMOMA Tammy-and-Megan team chronicled the muralists’ labors as the project unfolded. Thanks muralists! Thanks team! Thanks Kerry!
Here are the guys from Ant Farm, at last night’s Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule) sealing ceremony, recording the video message to the future about the contents of the time capsule. A recap: Since November 5th when The Art of Participation opened, the Media Van’s HUQQUH (that green device with the steering wheel around it, and pronounced “Hookah”) has been capturing digital files chosen at random from museum visitors’ electronic devices (cameras, cell phones, iPods). Those captures are what’s being sealed up in the van (whole van sealed up) — to be accessed again only in 2030.
The men, left to right: Bruce Tomb, Curtis Schreier, Chip Lord [ANT FARM], plus Paul Rauschelbach, who did technical genius on the HUQQUH. (If I’ve got that correct.)
Part of the evening’s festivities also included THIS:
A signed one-page print-out, kind of broadside-style, showing a sequence of some of the four thousand one hundred and eighty-seven randomly captured files. All of the print-outs were different: my copy shows files 2335 through 2370, and each thumbnail includes the date and time of upload, and, in the case of music files, artist and song title. I feel like such a kid: THIS IS SO COOL! Bigger shot here; you can see the thumbnails better.
Unsubstantiated office watercooler rumor has it that an especially exuberant visitor tried to fulfill Wurm’s “Keep a cool head” instructions to the letter of the law in ways that are, shall we say, incompatible with current museum policy. More One Minute Sculpture videos here.
And, tonight: The formal closing ceremony for Ant Farm’s Media Van v. 08 (Time Capsule), with Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier & Bruce Tomb in person, starting at 7, right after the Marioni salon. Again with the rumor having it, supposedly a “very famous” person is tonight’s beer-salon guest reader. I have no idea who, as believe me I’d leak it. Which is probably why I have no idea who. See you tonight!
We’ll have more of these in days to come. In the meanwhile, as it turns out, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are Wurm fans too. Here’s their take on his deal:
This is Tammy. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. You might think I’ve been laying low — just kicking back on autopilot on some tropical island with the man or woman that I love. But no way! I’ve been sitting right here in this cubicle, in this chair, in the exact same position, for weeks now. So when Suzanne asked me if I would go on assignment in the galleries to cover the public’s interpretation of the many participatory pieces in the enigmatically titled exhibition, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, well, I was thrilled. Lucky for me, Megan Brian offered to help. (She’s the kind of person people instantly open up to.)
Our mission was simple: “How does this thing work?” The first object under our studious lens was Ant Farm’s Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), a gutted van with hookah-styled plug-in station for uploading digital files from your own phone, camera or iPod:
The electronic time capsule will be soon be sealed, to be opened again (’accessed’) only in the year 2030: CLOSING CEREMONY FOR THE ANT FARM MEDIA VAN V.08 (TIME CAPSULE): January 29, 2009 7:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.: Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, and Bruce Tomb in person. FREE! (with museum admission…)
The last of my week of Derek Jarman music videos. Jarman made this video for Throbbing Gristle’s “TG Psychic Rally in Heaven” in 1981. Fair warning, it’s quite violent and explicit in language & content.
I think Jarman’s broken flashes of images complement TG’s challenging, avant-garde music. Peter Christopherson, who played what we could call the percussion for the band, later went on to form the band Coil, which Jarman employed for soundtracks to many of his films.
More Jarman videos! This is one of several he made for The Smiths, Ask, from 1986.
Derek Jarman’s films and The Smiths’ songs share similar motifs; this video is a prime example.Both reflect on a fractured world.While Morrissey croons, “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” Jarman’s video depicts romantic encounters in front of an abandoned warehouse.The skeleton dance partner makes the entire scene into a dance macabre: the youth celebrate but the world falls to pieces.
A week of Jarman vids, continued! Jarman made three videos for the Pet Shop Boys: Rent, It’s a Sin and a set of projections for the band’s live shows. Today I have posted the video for Rent but I encourage you to seek out the others, as they are phenomenal as well. I love the lyrics of this song, they are so to the point.
Hi, it’s Megan. We’ve got aDerek Jarman film series on right now, continuing through November and much of December. Some of you will know that, especially early in his career, Jarman made a lot of music videos. All this week, I will be posting some of my favorites.
To complement Jarman’s rebellious attitude, I thought I’d start off the week with the rebel Marianne Faithfull. Jarman created this video for her song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (1979). It’s a beautiful and haunting video. As an added plus, she’s a babe.
This is Tammy. It’s hard to imagine that the Sol LeWitts are gone. We got up REALLY EARLY last week to witness the big event and I think I gasped when the first roll of paint hit it. And not because I’m one of those people who believe in the sacredness of art and its artifacts, but because I suddenly realized that these giant stripes of color have been a subliminal message for me in my five years of working here at the museum, and I gasped because I had finally figured it out…yes, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings #935 and #936 look like my mother’s dresses from the seventies—sacred (my mother and the seventies, I don’t really care about dresses).
Even still, there was something very satisfying about watching the erasure of this bold display. Someone made a joke about wearing white after Labor Day, and then staff photographer Don Ross got stuck up in the cherry picker.
[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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As the Wall Drawings Vanish……………………………………………………….
As SFMOMA prepares to remove Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #935 and #936 from its Atrium, I’ve been working at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, helping to install LeWitt’s last project and the largest retrospective of his work ever, consisting of over 100 of his wall drawings. MASS MoCA is working with Yale University and Williams College to create what’s got to be one of the most dynamic installations in the country. MASS MoCA has given an entire three-story factory building to the project and as of this writing it is has taken a small army of drawing installers, interns, and apprentices close to five months to complete. When all is said and done, the exhibition is scheduled to remain in place for twenty-five years.
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)
Wim Starkenburg, one of my fellow drawing installers here and at the SFMOMA retrospective, was in charge of executing #935 and #936 at SFMOMA back in 2000. He is now 61 and worked for Sol since the 1980s. When I broke the news to him about the deinstallation (after all, #935 and #936 have been there for eight years), Wim was surprised they were being removed because he thought they worked so well with the architecture. I speculated that maybe they went a little too well with the building and that rather than being a permanent motif it might be nice for them to vanish one day into memory. Longing, it seems to me, is one of the deeply moving aspects of LeWitt’s art. On one level it has a powerful physical presence but on another level the work is temporal and fragile. Still, the wall drawings exist only as a set of instructions. Because the drawings are a map of an idea, his concept is like that of an architect–an architect designs a building and then has people build the building. Sol LeWitt’s work is similar in that he comes up with the idea of how a drawing should look and how it should be made, and then he has others execute the plan for him. We drawing installers feel connected to them because we put our time and energy into making them, but in the end, they aren’t the art – the instructions are the art. Wim understood this.
Sol LeWitt, Working Drawing for Wall Drawing #936: Color arcs in four directions, 1999, Gift of the Artist
I remember that in 2000 I had just graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and that a teacher there, Léonie Guyer, asked me if I would be interested in working on the Sol LeWitt retrospective. I can’t remember how many wall drawings there were, but definitely more than thirty. Work teams changed up from time to time so I got to work a little bit on almost all of the drawings. But the first job I had was sharpening pencil leads. I remember estimating that in a week I had sharpened about five thousand pencil leads. Each wall drawing had a team of people working in either crayon, ink wash, acrylic paint, or in graphite. And if the drawing was in graphite, sharp lines were essential. As a pencil lead is dragged across the bumpy surface of a wall the line gradually becomes grainy. Depending on the wall, the leads might only last long enough to make two or three lines before the line quality is too rough, hence the need for someone like me to just sit and sharpen pencils. Working on LeWitt drawings can be like Zen Archery, where the student holds the bow for weeks before being given an arrow, but then holds the arrow in place with the bow again for weeks before being allowed to shoot. Only after holding the bow and then holding the arrow for a length of time is the target allowed to be shot at. In this way the student learns to be as close to his/her tools as possible so they can become second nature. Maybe this sounds a little bit hippie but if you sharpen five thousand pencils you really become familiar with them. You also develop a profound reluctance to waste materials or to take them for granted. I have found, in general, this is not taught in art schools much these days.
Chris & Wim, North Adams, MA
I think that back in 2000 #935 and #936 were almost the last works to be completed. One of the best memories I have from then was standing on the scaffolding in front of the partly finished drawings with Wim, who came all the way from Holland to do the project. We were looking down at the empty lobby. We both knew that all the work we had done was going to be painted out one day because the eventual absence of the work was built in to its presence.
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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 the first in an occasional series focusing on people in and around the Bay Area who help make it such a lively place for art & culture. Dear local person and personality, Mr Andrew McKinley, is owner of Adobe Books and a long-time dedicated patron of the arts. Adobe Books in San Francisco's Mission district has been the heart & soul of that neighborhood's artist community for nearly twenty years, and has always been a welcome meeting place for artists, writers, musicians, and people of every walk of life. Thanks, Andrew. And many thanks toTammy Fortin for fine labors on this project.]
“A love letter both to French New Wave cinema and to late 1960s French youth culture, Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers stars the director’s son (Louis Garrel, of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) as a Parisian student revolutionary. At a lolling pace, the film explores art, bohemia, revolution, and sex in May 1968 and after. While both director and audience know the historical outcome of these youthful acts, Regular Lovers points to their poignant appeal.”
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:
This was made by Tim Svenonius, SFMOMA Producer of Interactive Technologies, who says, “On April 30th, a construction crew raised two thirty-two ton girders into position between the museum and the rooftop of the adjacent garage, where a skybridge will lead to the future sculpture garden. I was out on Minna street with nearly two hundred other museum staff people, who were evacuated from our offices, in case a gust of wind sent one of the beams careening into our building to pulverize us all. The vid was shot using a Sony Cybershot, 8.1 Megapixel, and edited (hastily) in iMovie.”
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.
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.
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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.
