Jim Pomeroy – Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog Posted on October 5, 2009 by Suzanne
Thirty years ago this fall the artist Jim Pomeroy and SFMOMA curator Suzanne Foley were corresponding about his proposal to include his text “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” in her survey of 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance practices, Space/Time/Sound. In light of recent discussions on Open Space about the New Langton Arts crisis and the role of nonprofit arts organizations, Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, here revisits Pomeroy’s analysis of modern art museums vs. artists’ spaces. Wonderfully, we are also able to present for the first time a downloadable PDF of his original text and images of their letters.
Jim Pomeroy performance announcement card Exchange DFW/SFO , January 23-March 7, 1976, SFMOMA. Photo: Jimmy Jalapeeno
“To what extent does a larger organization, in absorbing new artistic practices, need to support or point to the smaller institutions that pioneered them?”
In the midst of the debate in August surrounding the pending closure of the San Francisco-based nonprofit New Langton Arts (NLA) writer and curator Patricia Maloney posed this question as part of a larger comment on the perhaps inevitable comparison between NLA and SFMOMA as our blog brought increased visibility to the latter’s predicament. Open Space became a forum for the community to evaluate the struggling institution and speculate on its tactical errors, opening up space for criticism of both organizations.
This end-of-an-era reflection on the blog made me think back to the perceived paradoxes and inherent tensions surrounding SFMOMA’s own attempts, through a two-phase exhibition initiative held thirty years ago, to ‘support or point to the smaller institutions’ that had fostered the breadth of activity associated with Bay Area Conceptual art. In reading Julian Myers’s series of discussion threads on the NLA crisis and the political ethos that generated the emergence of the alternative visual arts space movement in the 1970s, I’ve kept returning to that moment. Specifically, to a text-based piece by the artist Jim Pomeroy (1945–1992) featured in the major SFMOMA survey Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (December 21, 1979–February 13, 1980). The work was in itself predicated on dialogues about the fundamental differences between collecting institutions and the parallel system of artist-run spaces. Entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, the piece consisted of enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, the late Suzanne Foley (at SFMOMA 1968–81) and Pomeroy’s paper, of the same title, written for The New Arts Space conference in Santa Monica organized by LAICA in 1978. It is worth noting here that Pomeroy lived upstairs from 80 Langton Street (what later became NLA) and as co-founder, had been instrumental in formulating its mission and goals. Back in 1978 Langton described itself as a “forum for art work, which requires a more flexible, responsive context and more direct critical/supportive feedback than traditional institutions can provide.”
The bible of Bay Area Conceptual Art, published in 1981 by SFMOMA.
Space/Time/Sound represented twenty-one of the more prominent artists/artist groups of the time, highlighting the work that came out of sculptural concerns—performance actions, installations, video art, slide projections—rather than the sculpture (objects), drawings, photography, etc. that we also associate with a number of the same artists and the broader scope of the movement. Pomeroy had performed as part of Foley’s Exchange DFW/SFO (1975-1976) at Fort Worth Museum of Art and at SFMOMA. Several of the artists on the Space/Time/Sound checklist had either been in that or other SFMOMA group presentations, and in certain cases had been given solo shows at the museum. Taken together, Space/Time/Sound was trying to tell a story of how often temporal or site-specific work produced in the Bay Area had inhabited a full range of other arts organizations and non-art spaces—university museums, temporary storefronts, alternative spaces, galleries, studios, streets.
Foley’s colleague Rolando Castellón (SFMOMA curator 1972–81, co-founder of Galería de la Raza) had the overall vision for a Bay Area-centric exhibition series that would include Foley’s presentation and would begin in 1978 with a more direct acknowledgement of the achievements of alternative spaces. He invited the artist-directors of three prominent San Francisco-based alternative spaces—The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Museum of Conceptual Art (Tom Marioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler)—to program at the museum, highlighting their roles as producer, promoter, and publisher. Each exhibition touched on a signature aspect of their respective projects including live events, while activating the transformed gallery space(s)—from a zine library of correspondence art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.
