Interview: Rudolf Frieling on The Art of Participation. Part II Posted on November 6, 2008 by Suzanne
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| Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art, 1970 – 2008, 1979 installation view at SFMOMA; © 2008 Tom Marioni; photo: Paul Hoffman |
Let’s start with the transformation of our Koret Visitor Education Center and the Freecell commission. For the run of the exhibition, the ed center is being turned into something called “D-Space.” Can you talk about that?
One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.
So, if I understand you correctly, you’re talking about a way we might mirror artistic practice, by attempting to blur the boundaries between the education spaces, the lecture halls, and the galleries of our own institution.
Right. My initial concept was to create a core zone, an open educational and performative space, right at the center of the whole show in the fourth-floor galleries, but for logistical reasons we had to relocate to the second floor, to our current educational center. So we thought, well how can we take the spirit of the show into that space and transform the space? We can ask artists to interpret that situation and to provide a different solution. We wanted to have a space that could be transformed by visitors, also by staff members, and be transformed for different uses, different functions, with the idea being that it could always be set up differently and so always provide a different experience.
Based on who was using it and for what purpose.
And you would never know quite what to expect before you get inside. So we asked an architectural and design group in New York, Freecell, to design pieces of furniture or some kind of reconfigurable structure based on a do-it-yourself model. They came up with a series of cardboard panels with perforations and instructions, to be folded into furniture. In the beginning they will be just rectangular shapes leaning against the wall, in an empty room, almost like pictures in a gallery, but that are to be taken off the wall and used, turned into something else-that is a truly participatory act.
