OPEN SPACE

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

I’m obsessed with the how and where people are installing their Gerz gift portraits, and the relationships they’re having with the portraits.

The outdoor installs are great (from funderbolt):

Some are naming theirs (”She looks like an Ashley to me”):

anna leah says:  I’ve had a blast with this experience. I especially loved seeing the participants walk through the street with portraits in arms. As for mine, I’ve named it “Consuelo”. I’ve had a challenging time and this face says to me, “There’s still hope for you chiquitita.” Now that’s a gift!

Plus (”installed” on Missed Connections?):

“OK, so we never met but both of our photographs were part of that exhibit at the Moma called the Gift. I went back yesterday and thought I was going to get a picture of myself (and was thinking what was I going to do with a large photo of myself) Instead they all gave us a random photo and I got yours..

If this is your photo and you want it let me know…”

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.***

Exhibit A: MTAA is going to do their you-voted-it-through performance AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE (We Solemnly Promise That No One Will Get Naked) tomorrow at high noon. Gather yourselves circa 11:45 a.m. in front of the freight elevator on the third floor, where the performance will take place. If you’re not familiar with MTAA, check out Karaoke DeathMatch 100 “This alcohol-fueled blood feud features 50 rounds of sing-along fury (taped live over an 8-hour period with hardly any pee breaks.)”

Exhibit B: At 2pm, following AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE, there will be a panel discussion, led by Ted Purves (chair of the Graduate Program in Fine Arts at CCA & author of book fabulously titled What We Want is Free) on “Social Practice West“.

Exhibit Last: ON SUNDAY: from noon until 5pm, come down for the special closing event for Jochen Gerz’s THE GIFT. During Art of Participation more than a thousand SFMOMA visitors had their portraits taken; a number of those have been on view in the museum during the show. For this special reception, Gerz invites all project participants to return to SFMOMA to receive a framed portrait from the exhibition as a gift to display at home:

The last step is to exhibit your piece of the collection, and document how you display it; I’ve set up a special Flickr group for participants of The Gift to share photos (or videos) of how and where they exhibit the portraits they receive.

This is a portrait studio if I say so.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?

It will. This pair of empty desks and chairs tucked into a corner of the third-floor landing will shortly become the portrait studio for Jochen Gerz’s project THE GIFT, part of the upcoming exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which—I’ve been writing this paragraph for three hours trying to convey my true exhilaration at the nearing prospect of! In super brief: the exhibition examines ways artists have been engaging audiences as essential collaborators over the last sixty years, covers a whole wide range of genre and media, is so much of what this correspondent loves in contemporary art, and promises to be a lot of FUN.

The image I have in my mind of what happens when AoP opens the morning of Nov 8 is something like hundreds of squealing eight-year-olds flooding the Atrium, the stairwells, the galleries, and immediately transforming those spaces with their infinitely renewable bright excitable energy. A somewhat undignified way of introducing this important, layered survey of participatory art practice, but nevertheless a gesture toward some of the very human, relational, and tangible experiences I think the exhibition hopes to provide. The infinitely renewable, excitable eight-year-old of my heart wants to tell you EVERYTHING about the exhibition, ALL AT ONCE, RIGHT NOW! and in coming days and months you’ll hear a lot about it on the blog, starting with a (more) dignified interview with The Art of Participation curator Rudolf Frieling next week. But for today, just a quick sneak peek at Jochen Gerz’s The Gift:

Jochen Gerz, The Gift, iteration SFMOMA 2008. The gallery wall awaiting your image; ‘photo studio’; and picture-storage wall-o-cubbies. Those cubbies are big enough for whole teenagers to stuff themselves inside of, according to exhibitions manager Kent Roberts, who caught half a high-school class doing same.

The idea is that at the beginning of the exhibition there is literally nothing on the wall. With your collaboration, and with a lot of help from students and volunteers from around the Bay Area, The Gift will be produced over time. We’ll use the photo studio to take portrait pictures of museum-goers which will then be printed, framed, exhibited, and stored all on the same floor, all on view. Gerz’s work is called The Gift because you give your picture to the show, & because you also get something in return: on closing day, we’ll have a big communal event (a.k.a “a party!”), and the artist will hand out a picture to everyone who contributed theirs to the project.  In other words, if you have given your portrait, you will then also own a part of the collection. You don’t get your own photo, however; you get a picture of a stranger, and the condition of receiving a portrait is that it then gets exhibited elsewhere (BART station/your living room/your tropical vacation?). Portrait sittings will be on a first-come, first-serve basis, when the studio is open (tentatively 12-4 M-Tu-Th-F). Also look for big spreads of visitor portraits in local newspapers over the run of the exhibition, also orchestrated by Gerz & part of the project, and another way of extending the artwork into the daily life of the city in ways that aren’t specific to the museum walls. Or even, exactly, SFMOMA’s jurisdiction. More on this in future.

Jochen Gerz, The Gift, 2000; digital photography studio, production lab, digital pigment prints, and newspaper advertisements, each photograph: 23 5/8 × 19 11/16 in., overall dimensions variable; installation view at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Tourcoing, France, 2000; photo: courtesy the artist; © 2008 Jochen Gerz and Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany

In the meanwhile: More on The Art of Participation here. Members’ preview opening is FRIDAY NOV 7, adjunct to Martin Puryear, with everything open to the public November 8. Become a member! Come to the party! It is going to be a lot of fun. And for months to come.

xxoo!

SS