OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling.]

Do only fans truly understand pop culture? Anyone who has been a fan of one of our global pop stars knows it is the fans that make the star. Candice Breitz has explored—in four different parts of the world—how fans “become” their beloved idol, be it Bob Marley in Kingston; Madonna in Milan; Michael Jackson in Berlin; or, finally, John Lennon in Newcastle, England. I saw Candice Breitz’s Lennon-portrait-as-working class hero three years ago, when it was first shown in Vienna. Today, installed in the Media Art galleries on SFMOMA’s 4th floor, I’m still struck by the way twenty-five ardent Lennon fans have taken on the challenge to sing every single song of his first solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The record was released in 1970, the same year the Beatles split up; Lennon was deeply involved in global politics at the time, and working through the traumatic loss of his mother. Breitz’s impassioned “chorus” sings for 39 minutes and 55 seconds (the exact length of the album). Displayed on twenty-five individual screens, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006), synchronizes the fans’ performances in off-kilter harmony; the album’s first song “Mother” linking this piece of collaborative acapella performance to Breitz’s second work on view, entitled precisely Mother (2005). For this second exploration of pop culture iconography Breitz edited film performances by Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Meryl Streep, creating a revealing composite of the Hollywood cliché of the difficult mother.

While our series of One-on-One talks is typically hosted by a curator “only”, I’m happy to be able to invite you to join me and the artist Candice Breitz in a conversation dedicated to her show “On View: Candice Breitz” before we embark on a more extended panel discussion. The One on One talk starts in the Haas Atrium at 6:30 p.m. At7 p.m. please join us for “More on Pictures, or Appropriation Now” in the Wattis Theater.

Jochen Gerz was here on Sunday handing out portraits to participants of THE GIFT, and now the portraits are making their way all over town and, one can hope, beyond. We’ve set up a Flickr group for all participants to upload pictures of where and how they’ve installed their “gifts”—do note that participants who sat to have their portrait taken were given not their own picture, but a picture of stranger to take home with them.

Here’s Heidi De Vries, out at the Headlands Sunday afternoon with hers:

Photo: Aleksandr Vladimirskiy

And the recipient of Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling’s portrait made a cell-phone photo essay of Rudolf’s journey “home”:


The rest of this story is here.  More pictures from the closing day giveaway/reception here. A bit more about Jochen Gerz and The Gift here.

**and note: the portrait traveling with Rudolf’s on the cable car (and throughout this journey) is Patrick Hillman, an art student who volunteered as a photographer for the project.***

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

Part two of my conversation with Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, on The Art of Participation. Yesterday we covered some specific projects in the exhibition and what an ‘art of participation’ might be; today we’re talking about the build-it-yourself cardboard furniture in the Koret Visitor Education Center, and the particular challenges and delights of putting on an exhibition like this one in a museum setting.

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.

So if we want to sit down to read a book or have a conversation or listen to a lecture in the center, we have to first build our own furniture, but we can also put it together however we like or in a way that will suit our particular desire or need.

Right, and these objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain functions, but they might also be reconfigured and used in ways that we can not foresee. I was always saying, why should we reinvent the table when the table is such a clear and successful structure? Precisely because we might embrace the idea of dysfunctionality-the fact that it becomes more difficult to do something maybe is what makes it more interesting-and provide an open situation.

We’ve been talking here about the blurring of boundaries in the physical spaces of the museum and the change in the way a visitor will experience art in this exhibition. Something that’s interested me over the last 18 months or so while The Art of Participation has been in development is that this work also impacts how the museum itself operates, and not just for the duration of the show, but perhaps over the long term as well. Can you speak to that?

Sure—we are a museum that has departments with clearly assigned roles. The moment you try something new, we have to figure out how to deal with that. The curatorial team and the exhibition department are collaborating with the education department in transforming our educational center, but the responsibilities and distribution of labor is all of a sudden totally unclear. I think we have to reinvent ourselves and analyze what happens, and hopefully come to a different structuring of our processes. Perhaps a more open way of doing things. What happens in a museum—timing and controlling of processes—is so much based on the idea that you select things, you ship things, you unpack things, and you exhibit them and return them.

It’s about objects.

Right. So how can we turn the museum into a site of production and into a site of live events and into a site for different social functions, maybe temporarily. It is still a museum of course and not a clubhouse, but we know that artists have for some time now been turning the gallery into a discotheque or a lounge or restaurant or school, confusing barriers and functionalities, inviting confusion and instability. Indeterminacy becomes an inherent part of the artistic experience.

But which is perhaps antithetical to an institutional one.

There will always be a clash between the needs of a sustainable structure (like planning a budget) and the kind of improvisation that artists would like to do in a museum. To not do it, to not embrace this kind of practice, I think, would be the wrong answer. But there are challenges. 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.

Which are in part to collect and conserve.

On a broader level I would say collecting has become much more difficult. Collecting ephemera, or collecting works that evolve over a long time is inherently difficult for an institution. We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties of exhibiting the kinds of work that require participation, just in terms of sustainability. A lot more players are involved, in terms of making something happen. It’s not just the artist and curator and the exhibition crew, the works are more fluid and they change, and that is something that’s hard to plan for. We have to be ready to embrace things that are not planned to the minute detail, and perhaps think of an artwork as a quality rather than thinking of it as something that is unfinished or that needs to be finished. Other implications for a museum of modern art might be in part about the expectations our public could have—do they expect to come and see great artworks on the wall, or will they complain if they don’t see that? We do want to offer the public different experiences of what modern or contemporary art is.

In the exhibition catalogue, you ask whether or not we’ve come to understand the radical implications of participatory work; my question is, can we view this work as radical now? Or is it absorbed into the fabric of what we are now comfortable calling artistic practice and therefore part of the status quo? Can open or participatory practice today still carry the implications of radicality that it once did?

There are two issues that we need to address: one is the institution’s ability to deal with open and process-based works, and that has been and will also be in the future a structural conflict. The institutional solution has often been to either close the openness of the work, even fetishize it as an object, or to not show the work. And I don’t think that is an option because this kind of work has become such an important aspect of contemporary practice. The second issue is that, within the discourse of art, media art and contemporary art are often on two distinct and separate trajectories. They do not talk to each other. I would like to bridge this gap. You’d be surprised to hear how many art world practitioners still take issue with technology, or vice versa, how many media art practitioners take issue with the institutionalization of art. Both sides need to take into account that 60s and 70s notions of radicality are already challenged when networking and communication are mainstream practices in our everyday life. “Radicality” is perhaps not the key idea here, but instead, various degrees of participation in the public realm.

Something else striking about the exhibition of course is that a lot of the works are FUN, and funny. It will be a pleasure to engage with them. I’m really looking forward to the show.

I think a lot of people will agree that. One of the things I think we should have in our life is fun. Life should be more fun and not just work. How can you make that happen in a place that is maybe not geared for “fun”? Would we contribute to the “entertainment” industry in a museum? I think we should be able to provide something that only a museum can provide. Perhaps a more dubious, ambivalent, but culturally fascinating experience. When I perform a sculpture by Erwin Wurm, I’m sure I’m going to look ridiculous in the perception of others, maybe in my own perception as well. But having allowed that one moment of looking ridiculous, but actually performing an artwork, I think that’s a unique opportunity.

On a more subtle level, take George Brecht, who was a key player in the Fluxus movement. We’ll be exhibiting some of his instruction cards, and you will be able to read them-one piece is called Exit, and the card just says “exit.” So the moment you exit the show you might think of it as you performing this piece. Your life becomes, temporarily, an artwork. Blurring the distinction between art and life has been a dream for many artists, especially in the 60s. It is clear that life will always be different from art; but perhaps infiltrating life with artistic moments and experiences is something the museum can provide.

———————

The Art of Participation opens Saturday, and the public preview, open to all, is TONIGHT! Thursday.

Matthias Gommel, Delayed, 2002; closed-circuit sound installation; photo: courtesy the artist; © 2008 Matthias Gommel

A few weeks back I had the chance to talk with Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling about The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, rolling in this Saturday. The exhibition looks at ways artists have been engaging audiences as collaborators in the art-making process over the last sixty years; of its many distinctive features, “AoP” (as we’ve been short-handing it back of house) will change form and content as people contribute to it. I wanted to ask Rudolf some specifics about the exhibition, and also get his take on what happens when you try to set a big, mutable, participatory exhibition down in an institutional setting a tiny bit more used to the object-on-wall approach than double headsets & DIY cardboard furniture. It was fun, & we talked a lot: I’ll post this in two parts, today & tomorrow.

—-

Rudolf, let’s start by my asking a very basic question: what is an “art of participation”?

That is my question as well, and really the question we are exploring with this exhibition. We know what it means to participate in politics or school, and sometimes know what it means to participate in a work of art if we get clear instructions. However there are some projects where it is unclear what exactly is asked of you, or you can only find out by actually doing something. The work requires your input and your act of contribution.

But the term can also mean an open situation. The idea of “the open work of art” goes back to a 1962 book by Umberto Eco, in which he reflects on developments within contemporary art and music where the results of the artwork were not predefined, but rather could change over time, or change by interpretation. He said, in the whole history of art, the act of looking is a kind of interpretation; it’s always different and each one of us sees art in a different way. In this exhibition, we’re interested in ways people can contribute to a work not only by looking—but also by interacting, participating in a group dynamic, or contributing to an artwork. We go, in other words, beyond the viewer.

What does it mean in this context to contribute or participate? Is it a physical action or something else?

Let me give you two examples that are quite physical. The artist Lygia Clark is a pioneer of what we would call today relational aesthetics. I believe she invented the term “relational objects” –objects that relate to people, to each other, or to a group of people. One example is a net made of rubber bands. There are no specific instructions for use, but together with other people you can test the possibilities of the net. You can stretch or play with it, in a joined, cooperative initiative. By doing this with others, you are dependent on the dynamics of the group; this could lead to something very deeply felt and intense, or it might not even work; for example, if you can not communicate with anybody.

Another example is Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. Wurm offers a series of tools and objects which you use by following instructions—and these tools are exhibited as if they were sculptures. However, the artwork is not the set of objects on the white platform, but the moment a visitor performs the sculpture according to the instruction. You have basic material and the instructions are clear, but it is not so easy to do. Balancing a series of objects against a wall with your body is physically challenging. And performing the sculpture will look different with every single visitor, so there’s always a new sculpture being performed. What I like specifically about this work is that the sculpture is only temporarily enacted. We think of sculpture as something very solid, an object, and then we think of performance—of theater—as acted on a stage. Here these two concepts are mixed.

Lygia Clark’s work seems obviously relational, it requires multiple people, but these One Minute Sculptures require only one?

It’s too limiting to think that participation is about only two people interacting, or one person performing. Participation also means that you watch others and others watch you, but as you do so you become aware of the potential that you might also do it, or not do it.

Ok. So why should we participate?

It’s a very fair question: why should I participate in the first place? There are a number of works where this is open–instructions as concepts for example–but there are also works where there is nothing to see unless you become part of it. There is a work, called Delayed, by a German artist, Matthias Gommel. You just see two headphones with microphones attached to them, suspended from the ceiling and facing each other; this is a situation for two people to talk to each other. Obviously, just watching it, you can’t hear, and what you do not hear is that the mode of communication is delayed to an extent that the participants continuously interrupt each other and start talking at the same time. This is a very simple situation, but when you actually do it it’s a different experience. Likewise, you can watch someone perform a sculpture and that is fine, but doing it yourself will give you a different understanding of the piece.

Even when you’re faced with instructions that perhaps you cannot perform, you can try and realize the limits you are facing. It’s something I find very interesting about the art of participation: it can provide a very deep sensation, almost a sensual experience, but can also provide a sense of failure.

I always think of participatory art practice as somehow messy or uncontained; spilled out all over the place and you don’t know what’s going to happen. How can a museum be messy, or uncontained? It seems beyond institutional comfort zones.

Well, the fact that a museum of modern art has a mission to document and show a range of contemporary art practices means that we need to address all aspects of contemporary art-we need to address the participatory nature of the work—the openness of these works or even what you call messiness—and we need to think about how to do it in a sustained way. Some of the works challenge the way a museum operates, an example would be 1st Public White Cube, by Blank & Jeron, with Gerrit Gohlke, where you will be able to bid on Ebay for the right to make an intervention into an artwork. For us working at SFMOMA, it’s certainly posing a lot of questions in terms of the value of the work, if you can actually pay to get your work into the museum! But this is one of the important reasons a museum of modern art should do such a show—testing itself—while also fulfilling its job of recognizing and acknowledging the history of contemporary art. Another question is, how much does this kind of practice suffer from being transported or displaced into an institution? How many works are out there that can function successfully in a museum over a length of time, and what does that mean for our procedures?

And of course there’s a question about works that perhaps can’t be absorbed into or presented in an institutional context at all.

Well certainly we were looking for works that would work out over a length of time; however we are also including work that is performative by nature. We have a New York artist duo called MTAA who are proposing a performance that is voted on by the public in every single detail. The voting public decides collectively on the title of the performance, on the location, on the props, on the length of time, on the content, on every single item of the performance … and at the end of the show MTAA will then do an actual performance interpreting a script that has been written, in a way, by the public.

How do people participate in the MTAA project? Do they vote in the gallery?

They can vote in the gallery; they can also vote online. We will have a special display in the D-Space on the second floor where you will be able to see the state of affairs. E.g., people have already voted on the title, we know the performance will happen in the gallery, or in the atrium, or in the elevator, and then on the basis of that you can decide how to cast your vote for the next detail. Voting perhaps is not a very creative way of participating, but the way that the choices are set up is quite interesting, and the way the artists will then have to interpret the result requires a lot of creativity on their part. For instance, what if they’re asked to perform for 24 hours, but the museum is only open for 8 hours?

What will the museum do?

I don’t know at this point. This is also posing questions for us working in the institution. We’re now required to adapt or participate in a different way as well, and this is being done with the help of artists.

More from Rudolf tomorrow, on build-it-yourself cardboard furniture, and what happens to standard operating procedures in a museum when it takes on a playful, participatory, mutating exhibition like this one. Do come back! [part two is here]