OPEN SPACE

………………………………………………..”Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” - André Gide……………

Greetings readers, this is Gina Basso, Public Programs Associate and semi-regular OPEN SPACE contributor. I’m about to delve right in to my first ever post….here I go…

You may have read Megan Brian’s post last week about the print traffic woes getting films from the China Film Archive for the films scheduled in the Rediscovering the 4th Generation series currently underway. And the saga continues: one of the films arrived sans subtitles (Mandarin, anyone?). Despite the myriad ways to handle such a predicament, we decided the print would have to be replaced with a subtitled DVD (thanks Facets Multimedia!) for two of the screenings. But don’t worry! the print didn’t come all this way for nothing and we’re showing it anyway, on October 30, in Mandarin, NO subtitles! Once you know the story, just relish in the opportunity to see a visually stunning work that captures the vivid colors of the costumes and the make-up, and the performative elements of Chinese opera.

Woman Demon Human is the only film in this series to be directed by a woman, Huang Shuqin. It’s an imaginative bio-pic of famed Beijing Opera actor, Pei Yanling, who was best known for her portrayal of male roles and who stars in the film, playing a fictional version of herself, Qiu Yun. (Didn’t Richard Pryor do that in Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?) With the opera as its backdrop, the film follows the rise of the young opera star as she experiences love, loss, tragedy, and the trappings of gender conventions. In fact, the real drama lies backstage where tears flow, tempers flair, and performers share gossip with hushes, whispers, and knowing looks. The backstage scenes convey the frenetic energy of the opera’s inner-workings, from the laborious process of applying make-up and getting into costume to the “limbering up” (stretching and contorting)— painful reminders of the physical lengths the performers must endure for their art.

Qiu/Pei’s defiance of traditional roles in the face of public ridicule is at the heart of the story, and  the catalyst that allows her to sink more deeply into her art. Cutting her hair short - “she looks more boy than boy” remarks a character - she raises suspicions from those who gasp at her will to no longer play female roles and to be “nobody’s bride.” Cross-dressing in Chinese opera is age-old (Yuan Dynasty), but it’s more common for men to adopt female roles (dan). This female-to-male reversal illuminates Pei Yanling’s real-life controversy as an opera performer. In the film, her onstage performances as the mythical Zhang Kui, the underworld god and vanquisher of ghosts and demons, act as a meta-text for her life off-stage, mirroring her desire to chase the ghosts haunting her life and challenging traditional customs in modern opera. Director Shuqin also uses the literal mirror, not only as a way to suggest the character’s identity formation, its fragmentation and merging of multiple selves into one, but also as a device to move the story along. Woman Demon Human spans Pei Yanling’s career from the late 1950s to the 1980s and each chapter in her life is signaled by her pondering her reflection in the mirror and seeing two selves - in costume as Zhang Kui and without. As she gazes into the mirror you’re whizzed off into the next dramatic epoch.

Posted by gina under Film | Tags: cross-dressing Chinese-opera stars, Huang Shuqin, Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling, Musée Mechanique, Pei Yanling, Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, Woman Demon Human, Yuan Dynasty, Zhang Kui

[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.

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[ 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.]

Posted by The Archivists under Miscellany | Tags: Archives, Bertha Buffalo, Dada, Musée Mechanique

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.

Posted by Suzanne under About Last Night, Miscellany | Tags: Docents, Musée Mechanique

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…”

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany, News, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: Dance Dance Rev, Musée Mechanique

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—

Posted by Suzanne under Miscellany, Profiles + Interviews, Videos | Tags: Interventions, Musée Mechanique, Security