OPEN SPACE

…………………………………………………..“That’s not perversity, people, that’s poetry.” Michael Fox……………………………………………

When I visit SFMOMA I am both an outsider without status and an artist in my own right, with a peculiar variety of privilege. Being a writer, I’m not central to the Bay Area art scene, but I bisect with it in overlapping circles. If you know any curators, the first thing that you’ll realize is that in private they love to act out, to throw off the formal constraints of writing copy for catalogues and signage, or whatever they call those informative blocks of text that hang on the gallery walls, from which the first person in forbidden. In private they take enormous pleasure in disclosing, in writing the forbidden, getting all personal and critical and gossipy, throwing around the first person with abandon. Get them alone and they’re eager to extricate themselves from the official discourse of the museum, to show the human side of the process, all the insecurities and resentments and near catastrophes. They expose their feelings about their jobs, and how at times when rushing around the museum they’re stopped in their tracks by the wonder of a piece of art.

Even with my privilege, there’s something about art museums that makes me feel diminished, like I need to be on my best behavior: all those rules for participation, you can’t bring in any water, if you want to carry your backpack you have to carry it in front of you, don’t stand too close, don’t touch, and everywhere the noticing guards. The whole set up makes one long to act out, to do something naughty. In the late 90s I brought the students from the composition class I was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute to the museum to write about Kara Walker’s room-sized installation No Mere Words Can Adequately Reflect the Remorse This Negress Feels… (1999).

Their writing instructions were to subvert the objectivity of the essay form, and to narrate their unique experience of viewing Walker’s work, including the mood in the room, the behavior of other viewers, and how they were feeling that day. So my students took in Walker’s silhouettes depicting the violence of slavery and the sexual horror of the plantation, and used it as an opportunity to use the word “fuck” in their writing. They used it over and over again, like they were wallowing in their liberty. They were being silly and libidinal, yet they were making a point, for the word “fuck” does crumble the stuffy rigmarole of undergrad comp class culture.

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Man I am so jacked up on the biggest Shirley Temple in a dirty glass from Vesuvio, extra formaldehyde from the maraschino cherry, please. I went there for a mocktail after hearing Kevin Killian read from his latest book, Impossible Princess, at City Lights. Kevin Killian is so freaking funny, and his work is so brazenly vulnerable in that it’s vulnerable to be so weird and risky and also risque, and he just plunges into the hilarious muck of it with pretty much the best vibes I’ve ever felt off a writer giving a reading. Some literary organization has to create a Best Vibe award and give it to Kevin Killian. Having City Lights call him and ask him to do a book with them felt like some sort of award to Kevin, and to have the editor specifically solicit his weirdest works must have felt like he won some experimental writer lotto. I mean, everyone I know is always afraid their work is too weird for a publisher, you know? Or is that just me?

Kevin read the story Rochester, a collabortion with the zinester Tony Leuzzi featuring a sort of alternative universe Kevin Killian — hideous, lecherous, sewing aprons from rags and mashing apples to grisly pulp while a chimpanzee bangs out stories he edits and passes off as his own. The chimp is also sort of psychic. Tony is a shallow Castro queen who hardly even cares about Kevin Killian, who is set up in the piece as a literary legend but sort of lumbers and lurches about, poking the boy’s behind with a screwdriver. Kevin read his dialogue in this labored monster voice, with amazing timing, very theatrical. Kevin Killian is a consistent delight to hear read, he is just so smart and witty and strange, the best combo, right? And you probably all already know about him cause he used to blog right here but if you don’t, go back and read his old posts.

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Left: Kevin Killian, Adrienne Skye Roberts, Eric Heiman.  Right: Anu Vikram. MIA: Julian Myers

You can see they weren’t a thousand percent keen on having me take their picture when we all got together the first time to meet that pretty afternoon last April, but hopefully I will be forgiven for posting these now.  I want to say a million times THANK YOU,  & offer  STANDING OVATION to our fantastic first group of columnist-bloggers, whose official term now comes to a close: KEVIN KILLIAN! JULIAN MYERS! ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS! ERIC HEIMAN!  ANURADHA VIKRAM!

We couldn’t have been sure—I mean we, my colleagues and I  @ SFMOMA—what would happen if we brought in outside writers, asked them to write about  the Bay Area, and then more or less handed over the keys to the machinery. Museums just aren’t normally in the business of such figure-it-out-on-the-fly, and while I had a good idea of a brief for the columnists when we started, none of us—not the writers, not the museum—knew exactly what would fly & what might sink. The result—various, vigorous, intelligent, and dynamic conversation, including the many contributions of an ever-growing readership (thank you)—has been better than I could have imagined or hoped. I am very grateful to all the writers not only for their  fierce,  often funny, and always smart & deeply engaged writing, but also their grace & good humor while we hammered out some kinks technological and philosophical. I’d also like to thank my colleagues at the museum for like grace under pressure and for supporting the project so thoroughly.  (Probably more bumps in the road ahead. Just so you know.)

And I hope this isn’t the last we hear from these writers, either, and expect that it isn’t: the guest-columnists program is by rotation, and we’ll bring in a new group every few months, but alumni are encouraged to continue  writing if and as or when they wish, on into the future, as they see fit.

At any rate, onward! I’ll introduce you to the new columnists next week.

xxoo

SS