The Art Fry

First week of school!

2007-01-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

The first class of the spring semester was, appropriately, long and exciting. We began with Curatorial Models II (a continuation of a course we began in the fall), for which our main project will be curating, as a class, the first solo exhibition of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More at MU in Eindhoven, Holland. Miranda and Angelique, MU's curator, came to class, and we began talking about how the show might take shape. I liked Miranda right away; she said she wondered whether we'd all picked out special outfits for the First Day of School, which was hilarious to me because I always do that. When I was little, my mom and I used to pick out a special outfit for every first day of school, complete with a matching backpack and lunch box.
The only difference now is that I try to make it look like I'm not trying so hard, but I've always been a sucker for the first day of school.... Anyway, I'm really anxious to see how the exhibition will take shape. Harrell will be meeting with us next week, so we'll be pitching ideas and thoughts to him then. We definitely have our work cut out for us. In addition to LTLYM, we'll also have a number of guest faculty for Curatorial Models, as in the fall, including Jessica Morgan (curator at the Tate Modern), Sean Snyder, Mary Jane Jacob, and Hans Ulrich-Obrist.

Our second class was Exhibition Practice II, another part 2, which will basically be split into three parts. For something like five weeks, we'll meet with Dominic Willsdon, Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMoMA, who we met on Tuesday. Dominic seems like an incredibly smart, thoughtful person; we spoke really eloquently about ideas around the "public" and how they interplay with his own goals and ideas for SFMoMA. I have to say, I don't usually like the rhetoric around museum education (often a lot of stuff about wringing exhibition content dry to extract the bare bones essentials and take the intrigue out of everything), but I was really impressed with the way he conceived of his job within the institution. For Dominic, we'll be individually working on public programming proposals around an upcoming New Media exhibition. The other parts of the course will be split between Leigh Markopoulos, who we also had last semester, who's giving us the nitty-gritty in all aspects of exhibition planning and execution; and then we'll also do a huge project for Sandra Percival, director of New Langton Arts, for which we'll individually conceive of and propose a year's worth of programming for Langton.

So that's Tuesday... Then Wednesday, we'll have Professional Development II with Jens Hoffman, the new director of the Wattis Institute, who wants to work with us on the Bulletin Board project (something that Matthew Higgs set up during his reign here). Jens canceled our first class, but we met with him once last semester, and he seems like a really interesting person. Then we have Art History and Theory with Julian Myers, who taught the Detroit research course last semester. This course, "Discontents", will map the avant-garde from the early twentieth century through the late sixties and going a bit into the present moment, specifically looking at Dada, Russian Constructivism, Tropicalia, Algeria, and Islamic Vanguardism. It sounds rad, and it has a really great reading list. I also have a class on Mondays, Field Guide to Social Practice with Ted Purves, which will start next week....

SO, this semester is already shaping up to be really exciting and much more project-based than last semester; almost every project we work on this semester will culminate at the end, which will mean that we'll go more in-depth than with most things in the fall. And of course, it's great to be working on some real curatorial projects alongside the theoretical. Also, we're working as a class (outside of class) on a zine and exhibition called Faction, which is a series of collaborations with artists and curators around the idea of the blurring and clashing of fact and fiction in art and life. The zine will likely debut in April, hopefully alongside the mounting of the show at PLAySPACE (the graduate gallery at CCA). More later about my specific collaboration for that project...

TART Journal

2007-01-15T15:45:00.000-08:00

And for something new: I want to plug TART Journal, another blogger site that I'm managing, as intern at TART, an interesting gallery/project space in SF (47 Lusk St, in the heart of SoMA) run by artist Anne Colvin, who also lives and works in the space with her partner Neil. TART Journal was created as a companion to TART's current project, "My place between 12 and 2pm with Moyra Davey and Marcia Tanner", for which Anne is opening her doors to one and all, inviting us to sit, drink tea, and experience a slice of what Moyra and Marcia have shared with Anne, a series of surprises for 28 straight days. This forum is meant to spark conversation, and we hope TART Journal will help facilitate that. If you're in SF, please come to Anne's between 12 and 2 till February 7.

Detroit: the long-awaited post

2007-01-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

OK, long hiatus there. I got a bit too comfortable with the luxury of having a break, catching up on sleep, and being mindlessly entertained. But I'm back. So, I've decided to post my interview with Jef Bourgeau, a conceptual/social artist whose Museum of New Art was the focus of my research in Detroit. Rather than editorialize right off the bat, I thought I'd let you experience the story of MoNA, as Jef tells it, for yourself first. Enjoy.

Transcript: Telephone Interview between Jessica D. Brier & Jef Bourgeau, November 1, 2006

JDB: Did you grow up in Detroit?

JB: Yeah, I was born in Detroit.

JDB: Can you talk about what it was like to grow up there?

JB: Probably like any other city in the 60s, urban flight happening, late 50s, early 60s. After WWII, they started building subdivisions outside the city. [My parents] wanted their own home. It was always interesting, we lived 40 minutes outside of Detroit and my Dad would drive in for work. The expressways just accelerated that whole process of moving out of the city. Then the first shopping mall was built in the suburbs. Detroit was perfect, plus the whole car thing. The car companies got together and organized a company to buy up all the streetcars and shut that business down. People would have to use cars to move around. There were streetcars that went from Detroit to all the smaller cities around and all the way down into Toledo.

JDB: You grew up in the suburbs?

JB: Yeah, we moved out there when I was about four years old. Those have changed; we had woods around us and now it’s all built up.

JDB: Which suburb did you live in?

JB: West Bloomfield, but we went to Pontiac schools.

JDB: Was that your original connection to Pontiac [where MoNA is located now]?

JB: Yeah, but that’s now why I’m there. Anyway, with the riots and everything there was bussing. Pontiac was probably even less white than Detroit. They had riots in Pontiac as well. There was a large black population.

JDB: Those also took place in the late 1960s?

JB: Yeah, it’s also a very poor town that had built itself on cars and fallen on hard times. Up until then, we used to drive down to Detroit.

JDB: Do you remember the Michael Heizer piece that was on the lawn of the DIA around the same time?

JB: Yeah, do you?

JDB: No. (Laughter)
JB: I know that everybody got upset because they were ripping up the front lawn. In fact, I think that piece ended up in MoCAD, in the building they’re moving into.

JDB: It’s there now?

JB: No, I think it was before they moved in. A friend who has an art blog had some sort of event over a year ago. They hadn’t done anything to the building. It had been an old car dealership. There was an old piece of machinery in the back that looked like some art. Another friend said it was the Heizer piece. So [the building] was just being used as a storage facility. I don’t know who owns it, probably Manoogian, who’s one of the big art collectors in the area. He’s the one who gave that building to MoCAD.

JDB: The Heizer piece reminded me of what happened at the DIA with your show, Van Gogh’s Ear, in terms of the DIA’s history with censorship.

JB: Well, you have to go back to the Diego Rivera murals. There was a big stink about that, and they shut that down. And then, about six months before they shut my show down, in 1999, they had hung a Kara Walker show and pulled it before it opened.

JDB: What was the reason for that?

JB: It was interesting that it was the Friends of Modern Art who protested it, I don’t know what their official title is, African American or black… One of the women who was on that committee– I spoke to her about it– talked about how it was so strange, and she agreed with me. But then I found out that she was one of the people who protested.

JDB: Did she say why?

JB: No, she never admitted to it. They also had a panel on the topic of black art in Detroit, the history of it. The Kara Walker thing came up and one of the artists on the panel gave the explanation that the people who protested had built careers as artists and had some money now and were middle or upper-middle class and didn’t want to be reminded of this sordid past. Strange rationale. They wanted to be accepted and this [show] disrupted that.

JDB: Can you talk about MoNA’s history and how your show that was shut down at the DIA and at the Oakland University Gallery affected MoNA?

JB: That was actually in Pontiac [not Oakland University]. There was a show I did at Oakland in 1988 or 1989. It was censored in a strange way. One of the governors of Michigan had been an ambassador to Africa for John F. Kennedy, while I was [at the Oakland University Gallery]. He had a huge collection of African artifacts. He donated a lot to the DIA, and he donated the rest to Oakland University, so they were having a big show of that stuff, and I did three video pieces to go with it. One of the video pieces was all text and I think maybe I had music in the background from Africa. The director of the gallery came walking into my house one day. I didn’t really know him. He just walked in and said “Hi there!” Anyway, he walked in and said, “I can’t tell you to change the video, because that would be censorship. But if you don’t, I’m going to pull it from the show.” And I thought, what’s the difference, you know? It was absurd what they wanted me to change. At this point, it was a white middle class University, everybody on the Board was white. He had one of them come and say what he thought might be offensive to black, and that was that on one of the videos I just had the text about things that are unique to Africa—flowers, fauna, flora, animals…and then I included diseases, the good and the bad. There were two diseases. And he said, just remove those. Why? It’s not reflecting on blacks in any way, shape or form, these diseases are passed by mosquitoes like yellow fever or anything. So, I just thought that was strange, and I didn’t [change it]. So what they did is they managed to censor it without really censoring it by saying that they didn’t have enough room so I had to merge the three videos into one, and although that [text] didn’t get cut, people who came [to the gallery] didn’t have time to see it. It didn’t really matter—it just seemed strange.

So in 1995, I had a show in Chicago, and I was driving back. It takes about 4 ½ hours to drive from Chicago to Detroit. And on the way back I was thinking, why do I have to go to Chicago or anywhere else to have an art show? Why can’t Detroit support its artists? Why can’t you make a career in Detroit? One of the puzzle pieces on this long drive home was, well, we don’t have a contemporary museum. It’s probably not the key piece of the puzzle, but without that, you can’t get the energy going, because without that-- A contemporary museum usually stimulates interest in contemporary art, which helps out the gallery system, and it works out well for everybody. So that was in the first two hours. In the next two hours, I thought, What does it take to make a museum? You need a bunch of rich people to be on your board… and then I thought, No you don’t. You need a lot of money, you need this you need that, all the things you supposedly have to have… no you don’t. So I thought, I’ll go back and I’ll start a museum.

So that’s what I did. I came back, and the reason I found Pontiac was, the gallery I was showing at, OK Harris, in Detroit, moved into a smaller space and said that I ought to look for a studio space in Hamtramck, which isn’t anywhere near my house. I drive to Pontiac at least once a week to visit my parents, so I thought, Oh, I’ll look in Pontiac, and that’s how I ended up in Pontiac. This happened kind of organically, I didn’t plot all this out. I started with a gallery called Jane Speaks Modern Art and created this fictional Jane Speaks and did an interview with her in a local arts magazine. I think I created 13 or 15 different images of women, ranging from old to young, Asian to black, caucasian, so that everyone who got a different edition of this art journal would get a different Jane. (Laughter) Some people could say, “Oh, this is some young 20-year old kid”, you know, and others could get a mature woman and say, “Oh yeah, she knows what she’s doing.” So, I did that and I had someone volunteer to go around to the galleries and introduce herself as Jane, and she had a French accent.

JDB: So someone played her?

JB: Yeah, and it was impressive. That was 1996, probably September. By the end of that year, I killed her off. I sent [her obituary] out. Back then I didn’t have email, so I sent a fax, more effective. So, after I killed her off, I visited a gallery for an opening, and someone told me that the woman who ran the gallery was so upset, that Jane Speaks had been so important to the community in Detroit. She never existed! Anyway, so then I had Jane’s supposed husband take over the money from her trust and create a Foundation that would support the museum. And at that time, I hadn’t come up with “MoNA”. I wanted the most generic name possible, so I came up with the “Museum of Contemporary Art”. There are probably the most “MCA”s. So then I founded that in a gallery in Pontiac, in a small walk-in closet without a door. I think, originally, they were going to use it for jewelry or something, but that fell through, so it was this small space that they didn’t know quite what to do with, so I rented it from the guy for a dollar a year and started MoNA there as the MCA and started doing shows. It was effective in the sense that, part of the reason why I did it was to create—you know, I didn’t have any money—to create this museum and say, Is this the best Detroit can do, a walk-in closet? And I was showing artwork that had been pulled from books and magazines, ripped from those, and then well-matted and framed and we—we… I would mount the shows from the floor to the ceiling. And actually it was quite effective.

JDB: Did a lot of people come to see the shows?

JB: Well, since it was built into another gallery, yeah. It was a relief to me, because I didn’t have to be there all the time. So a lot of people saw it, and word-of-mouth got out, but not to everybody. There were a few people who didn’t—But the press was always supportive, but not everyone read the press. There was a story that there were some collectors in Detroit and some of their friends from New York came to town and had heard about it, and they wanted to go see Detroit’s Contemporary museum. So they came down, and I was showing them through the show, you know, all cramped into the closet, and I could tell that the Detroiters were really uneasy, sweating bullets and dying to get out of there. But I hadn’t even finished getting half way through the show and they just ran for the door, literally, I mean they ran and didn’t even say goodbye. And later, I heard from another gallery—I walked in and the guy kind of jumped on me and said, You made us all look like crap, and I said, What are you gonna do about it? So that was that.

JDB: So, at some point the gallery transitioned from this closet to the Book Building?

JB: Well, we transitioned to a larger space, which was probably 800 square feet or something, and I put up a show, the first version of Documenta USA, where I contacted all the galleries. I think there were about 200 or 250 galleries that responded, and I wanted to create—and I redid this when MoNA opened, in a bigger way—but I wanted to create a show based on… Most of everything I’ve done are things that are interactive with people that walk in the door so they don’t feel so intimidated by contemporary art. I had worked at a University gallery when I was a student, and people would stop at the threshold and would even come in because [the artwork] was abstract they said, “Oh, this is stupid.” They didn’t understand it, and there hadn’t been enough exposure here, with the galleries and the museums. And in the school, they’d cut back on the arts… So, that was probably 1997 or ’98– I did that, and all the galleries responded. Essentially what I wanted from them were the materials that most curators use. Most curators can’t run around the world looking for artists’ shows, so they usually curate through slides, so they have a lot of archival material. So that’s what I asked [the galleries] for, so I got, like, 15,000 slides and all these catalogues from all over the place.

JDB: And so you showed the slides and the catalogues?

JB: Yeah I showed the slides, I projected them on the window of the space, it had a big storefront window, and then I also added in that thing called aperto where the artists could walk in—we had set aside a small space where they could hang their painting or a pedestal for a sculpture, and the next artist would walk in and they’d have to take it down. That had a great turn out; I didn’t expect it to. During the day, a few artists came in, stood in front of their piece, got their picture taken and then ran back out because they wanted to add it to their resumé. They didn’t want to stick around. But what happened the night of the opening, the reception, was that the artists stayed. They would hang their painting on the wall, another artist would walk in with another painting, and instead of leaving, they’d take their painting down or their sculpture, and it would slowly build over the night, and the whole place filled up with all these paintings. There’s no space for artists to meet each other in Detroit, so they started talking. In the middle of all this, a curator from the DIA came in, and I heard later that she went back [and said], “It was like a happening. There was so much excitement. How do you do this… how do you do that?” That’s the way it should be.

And that was the stimulus for approaching me to do [Art Until Now]. I think they have like a ten-year waiting period before they bring in contemporary art. When I was setting up the show in the contemporary galleries—this was 1999-- they had artwork that they had bought in the 1990s, but it was all 80s art, like Julian Schnabel, Peter Halley and David Salle, work like that from the 80s. But there wasn’t a single 90s artist. So, it was a good thing—Encyclopedic museums like the DIA or the Met in New York, they’re encyclopedic, but there’s a volume missing, the contemporary volume. [The DIA was] going through a period where they didn’t have a director, so the contemporary curator felt free to approach me to put together a survey of art of the 90s. They gave me three months [for the exhibition], and because it was a small space, it wasn’t a huge gallery, I thought, well, I’ll break it into twelve separate shows, one week each. We had ten years to cover in just one show. That’s what it was going to be. And, included in that, since they were excited about the aperto show, I thought, they’ll never let me do that at the DIA. I had been in a show there before, and they were so sensitive about security. I knew they wouldn’t let all these artists line up with paintings under their arms, walking in and out of the museum, so I developed this other box show where artists could create a piece to go into the box. That way it wouldn’t freak out the security there, and that way we could have Detroit artists finally show at the DIA as well.

JDB: But that never happened?

JB: Well, I told them what I wanted to do, and I said, I know you won’t let me do the aperto because of the security thing, so I’m doing this box thing. And they said, “No, no, no, we’ll do the aperto! That’s what we got excited about.” The curator, of what was called at that time the Department of Twentieth Century Art, said, “I’ll walk down with you personally if I have to.” So, that was on the list, the aperto plus the box show. It was a way of getting Detroit artists’ and artists of the 90s work into the show as well. So the first show was based on the cult of personality and how most of the art now [is about that], like the Young British Artists, like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Their personalities and their own lives are almost as important or more so, especially with Tracey, than their art and [used to] promote it. So that was what the show was about, and I tried to soften it by creating pieces that weren’t replicas of their work but referenced it. Like, for Serrano’s Piss Christ, instead of taking a crucifix and putting it in urine, I had a bottle of urine with a wall label saying that it was the urine he had used, so it was all kind of referencing the [original artwork]. I had previewed all the shows at the MCA in Pontiac over the two years that I was putting the twelve shows together. And those pieces that eventually were the ones that supposedly shut the show [at the DIA] down were written about in newspapers, so it was no surprise to the curators. It may have been a surprise to the new director. I don’t know how many people were in that show, maybe fifteen.

JDB: I wondered if you could talk about the kaBOOM! show, at MoNA in 2002.

JB: Well, let me finish up with Van Gogh’s Ear. I don’t know if all museums are this way, but there was so much paperwork and the whole premise of the shows I was doing there was that it was [part of] the MCA. My name wasn’t listed anywhere, since I really didn’t exist at the MCA. It was Cesar Marzetti, Richard Mann and Jane Speaks daughter, Christina. But what had happened was the new director had come in a few months before the show opened, and I guess he didn’t sit down with the curators of the contemporary department to find out what was happening. So, it was the second day of the show, and he caught wind of it, and he came down and was kind of rude. He didn’t even talk to me, he just talked to the curator, and it was a small gallery, and I’m standing there thinking, what am I chopped liver? He was talking about what he should do… “I can’t shut the show down, because that would be censorship.” Finally, he turned to me and listed a bunch of things, “Do you mind if we put a sign a sign outside the gallery saying that this is the work of Jef Bourgeau and he’s responsible?” and I said, “Fine.” The next day when I came in, the third day of the show, they called me upstairs to talk to me, but as I was going upstairs, obviously, they were pulling the sliding door to the gallery shut and locking it. And they had locked a photographer inside.

JDB: Did they get any pictures?

JB: They did. In fact, I came back down and said, “What the hell?” and I heard this little voice on the other side saying the same thing. “Let me out!” We had to get somebody to unlock it to let him out. He had taken the pictures, if I ever needed them.

JDB: So, do you have them?

JB: No, I’m sure they were destroyed. So, to get to kaBOOM!, essentially after that [incident] I decided that either I shut down my artist’s project, the MCA, or transform it into something more real, and that’s when I turned it into the Museum of New Art and applied for 501-C3 non-profit museum status. And we formed a Board-- of course you need a board for all that stuff, but with all the right people, I thought, on it: an architect, a lawyer, an art dealer, an accountant, a collector, and the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, so we had a good collection of people but no money. I figured that any project you start, like a museum, should have growth to it, with a timeline and a vision—start with square one and move to something bigger, and that creates a lot of energy. I had functioned for four years without money, and initially we had a little bit of money. We had an auction, which raised about $40,000. That was in Pontiac– we opened in October [2000]. In November, I heard from a woman in downtown Detroit, right in the heart of Detroit, who said that she owned a building and that we could have the second floor. It had been unoccupied for about thirty years, and we could have it for free. We had always wanted to be in Detroit, and there were some people on the Board from Detroit. So it took us till the summer to gut the place and build walls. We opened with a large-scale version of Documenta USA, and we had enough information and slides and catalogues from all the galleries that we could change the show every 90 minutes. The regular Documenta, I think, is 90 days. We condensed it all into 90 minutes so that anybody could come any day and it would be a different show.

So, we opened and kaBOOM! came along. What stimulated it? Alexander Brenner had painted a dollar sign on a Malevich [print], maybe White on White, and it was in a museum in Europe. And some of the art magazines were supporting him and saying that he had the right to do it, so it was kind of a hot topic then. So I thought [we could] do it more. So that’s what we did, and some artists gave us work, like Hans Steinbach…he recreated some pieces, like Man Ray’s “Object to be Destroyed.” At the time he made it, in the 1920s, he had written out instructions on how to go about destroying it, so when we recreated it, we printed out the instructions, so people were able to destroy it. But what’s curious about that story too was that somebody actually did destroy it in the 1960s, so Man Ray remade it; he didn’t like it being destroyed, because it had suddenly become worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we recreated a bunch of the Duchamp pieces, since none of them have survived. So we filled the gallery and we had some performance artists– one guy sat in a chair and sawed the legs off it at the same time. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard, but there’s all the pressure on [the chair] from sitting on it. And we did a Nam June Paik piece, “Solo for Violin.” So it was a strange and interesting and kind of exciting show. There were people there from New York who said they’d never been to a show that was that exciting and had that much impact. There were people there from Detroit, some of the critics, who literally ran out [of the gallery] with their heads ducked and covered, fear in their eyes…. I stopped them and I said, “Wait, at least talk to the artists and hear their side,” but by the time I brought the artists out, they [the critics] were long gone. There was a kid, probably about seven or eight, who said, “I’ve never had so much fun anywhere in my life!” Some people got carried away; someone lit a Duchamp piece on fire and someone pissed in the urinal…which was good, because when I went to put the fire out there was a urinal full of piss…. So we were able to do shows that normal museums wouldn’t even go near. kaBOOM! was probably the most exciting [show], as far as exploring the whole history of [destroying art]. I think we went back to about 1858, to a group of French artists who put a beard on Venus di Milo, twenty years before Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

JDB: How do you feel about MoNA now? Do you feel it’s been successful as a place for contemporary art in Detroit?

JB: Yeah, when you consider that it never had any funding. One of the last shows we had here was a New York artists, and an Italian artist and Stella Vine, who came to me because they wanted to do a show here, and I had to explain to them, “I don’t have money– I don’t have money of postcards, shipping, anything…” And they all understood that and still wanted to go ahead with the show. So just to see that outside artists want to come to Detroit to do a show [is exciting] especially when you consider that they don’t have money themselves. So I think that proves that we’ve gained recognition outside of Detroit.

JDB: What are your thoughts on MoCAD?

JB: I don’t know, because theirs is the opposite approach from ours– ours is a grass-roots operation. They’re coming from the position of money first; it’s all about money. So the art community here is being locked out. I met with a group of people twice in the past year to try to press the idea that they [MoCAD] include Detroit artists; there’s no good reason not to. I talked to a guy that was on our Board, Jan van der Marck, the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, and asked him if he included Chicago artists when he opened the MCA, and he said, “Of course!” He said that there’s no good reason not to. But of course, their excitement, with the money, is bringing in artists they’ve either collected or that they would like to collect or that theyre excited about from outside Detroit. There are very few collectors of Michigan art. Collectors here will go to Chicago or, especially, New York just for the bragging rights, to say, “Oh, I bought this at Gagosian” or whatever. So, those are the people in control of [MoCAD]. And I said they should have an auction, so local artists can feel like they’re a part of it; we had an auction. Well, they’re going to have an auction in the Spring, but it’s going to be at some rich guy’s house, so the artists are locked out of [the museum] for that too. There’s no sense of inclusion, and I think that’s going to hurt [the museum] initially. I think long-term all that will fall away, hopefully, and they’ll get somebody in there who’s professional enough o realize that the art community has to be a part of it.

JDB: Do you feel like the problem of artists being excluded from Detroit museums is specific to Detroit or part of a larger problem?

JB: I think it’s really specific to Detroit, to this degree. Like I said, the MCA opened up with Chicago artists. There’s a guy named Paul Klein (?) who runs an art newsletter and a gallery in Chicago. One of the points he made in his last newsletter was, to be able to watch an artist’s career from when they’re still in grad school through mid-career and on– it can happen where you can watch an artist, and they don’t leave Chicago. At the same time, he’s trying to start a museum strictly for Chicago artists. At the MCA there were a bunch of artists who fought to have Chicago artists shown there on a regular basis, so they started a program there a couple of years ago called “12 x 12.” Every month they have a different Chicago artist in the gallery. When you walk in, it’s one of the first galleries you happen in on, so it’s a good location. They DIA [tried] that in the late-1980s, and the [gallery] was in a horrible location because it was at the opposite end of the building from the contemporary art. It actually became a locker room after, that’s how great a space it was. They forced Michigan artists out. I think in Detroit it’s more difficult.

JDB: Why is that?

JB: You can’t build a career here. You have to go somewhere else. I think that LA, Chicago, New York…they’re bigger cities, but in the smaller ones even, artists can stay if they want. When the Houston contemporary art museum opened, the director exclusively showed Texas artists at first. He also created a lot of interest and excitement for Texan artists that wasn’t there before. So there’s a lot of give and take. A lot of cities have done it, which is why it’s important that Detroit do it. It’s funny, as much money as is involved with MoCAD, from the Board, they’re not really forthcoming with it. There’s Al Taubman, who built the first shopping mall in the US and the world, and went to prison– his daughter’s on the Board. Manoogian’s on it and the guy who owns Compuware… Any one of them could give money to MoCAD to make it work, and they still seem to be struggling. When they opened up, they hadn’t even finished any of the walls. It’s a strange situation, so we’ll see what happens.

A year ago, last April, they brought a bunch of collectors and builders together at MoNA, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen at MoCAD, and we had a presentation on this building called “Lodge.” It’s three stories and I think it has two theatres in it, so it was perfect, and it looks like a museum, and it’s in an abandoned area right downtown. Actually the oner of the building owns the building I’m in now, so we’re friends. About two days before the meeting, MoCAD announced that they were going to open within a year, so when we had the meeting, everyone including the architect said, “Well, why don’t we just wait and see what happens with MoCAD?” So what do you do, wait five or ten years?

JDB: So do you see MoNA moving again?

JB: I never wanted to leave Detroit; we were kind of pushed out for a lot of reasons. The city owns the DIA, and the DIA has never been happy with my show or with me. So there’s that. And then the Superbowl was coming to town, and everybody got greedy, so the rent [went up] and we got pushed out. The woman who owned the building we were in was moving out all the tenants and wanted to sell the building. About when I was looking for another building downtown, other landlords were asking ridiculous amounts of money for these abandoned buildings. The building I’m in now, in Pontiac, had all been art galleries– there were seven art galleries– which had been empty for four years, so that’s why we moved out to Pontiac. But yeah, I’d love to be back in Detroit. It’s the heart of the region.

Detroit’s coming back, it really is. My brother works down there [in downtown Detroit] and I visited him and we walked around the same area where MoNA was at, and I know the Superbowl helped accelerate all the development that happened. But there were new restaurants and lofts. Across from where we were, condos were selling for $24.5 million and they were sold out. When [MoNA] was downtown, people would come in and say, “Nobody wants to live in Detroit,” and that was usually someone older. I’d turn to somebody younger and say, “Where do you want to live, in the suburbs or in an urban environment?” They’d say, “We already do.” I think this younger generation wants to live in an urban environment; it’s more exciting. That’s what’s happening now.

JDB: Do you think that’s reflected in young Detroit artists? Is there a lot going on for them now?

JB: No, it’s gotten worse. We’ve lost something like twenty-five galleries over the last ten years. They’re always student-run galleries, but as soon as [the students] graduate, they shut down. Normally, you show your work at the entry level and slowly work your way up through the gallery system, but there is no gallery system here. There are three galleries. There’s [Suzanne] Hilberry, who pretty much spearheaded MoCAD, and there’s Lindberg (?), who been around for a long time, and there are a few Michigan artists showing there, maybe one or two a year. Other than that…I don’t know why I said three. We’re down to the bare bones. I saw this artist’s work, she was graduating from the Center for Creative Studies, and I contacted her and said I’d love to do a show. She said, fine but I’m moving to New York at the end of the week. She just graduated, and she’s already on her way out the door. But we managed to get the show up before she left, and I got a call from a French couple, big collectors from Paris, and they said, “We’re in front of the museum, but it looks like a house.” We’d been at six places in the last ten years, so in gallery guides I always put my home address, so he’d flown into Detroit and had the limo driver drive him all the way out to Rochester. They came downtown [to MoNA] and laughed about it, so I showed them the Detroiter’s show I’d just put up, and they loved it. I could tell they wanted to buy it, but we’re not a selling organization. I tried to sell them two pieces and he said, no, I want the whole show. We tried to set up a dinner that night with the artist to work out the details, and to show you the low self esteem going on with Detroit artists, she was upset that I’d sold them those pieces, and now she’s have to create new pieces to take to New York… And I said, “Hey, listen, these are the biggest collectors in the world and they want to buy your work, so just do it. Just take the money and run with that.” We have a lot of good artists here– some are quite famous right out of grad school, like Dana Schultz, who’s from Levonia, and she has a show right now at the Cleveland museum. She’s also in Saatchi’s “USA Today” show. Another one is Julie Merehtu. And it goes back to people like Mike Kelley, so there’s a tradition of good art here.

JDB: I read that you’re working on a Detroit Codex.

JB: I started to and then I lost energy– there’s no place to research. There’s no archive or documentation of Detroit art. You can’t move ahead if you don’t have references.

Catching up: Final days of the first semester

2006-12-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

Wow, it’s been a while. I’m sorry about that. It’s the end of the semester (one week left), so I’ve been-mega swamped. The majority of the craziness ensued last week, which went really well, with the exception of two disappointments not related to school: Phil Collins did not win the Turner prize (but congrats to Tomma Abts), and my bike was stolen last night. Let me just ask, completely in earnest: Who steals someone’s bicycle? That’s just mean.

OK, it’s better if I just jump off that train before it really gets going. So “finals”, in my program, consists of papers, presentations and conversations. I think I did well, if I do say so, and most of the end-of-semester assignments were good opportunities for reflection upon the semester, my thinking and my concerns. Among my concerns is the very general problem of most people seeing a show and then forgetting about it when they leave a gallery or museum. How do we make curatorial projects more lasting? For example, I’ve been thinking that someone should set up a legal consulting firm for artists to advise them about intellectual property rights and copyright issues. (I don’t think I’m the right person to do this, but it would be cool.) But in terms of exhibitions themselves, I’ve been thinking about models that extend and expand the geography of a show (like connection different locations, exhibition-as-compass) and the duration. Heather Johnson’s “Cracks in the Pavement” project is a great example. Check out: www.cracksinthepavement.com

Anyway, my next post will include assessments of the Detroit trip and research project. Stay tuned.

Phil Collins at SFMoMA and Detroit Prep

2006-11-13T14:47:00.000-08:00

Hi. Sorry to be the slowest person ever-- I know I haven't posted in forever, and no, I still haven't finished transcribing my interview with Detroit artist and MoNA mastermind Jef Bourgeau, but I'm working on it. We're leaving bright and early tomorrow morning for Detroit, but I thought I'd say a thing or two before I disappear for another week.

I made the gallery and museum rounds this weekend and saw some good stuff-- including a show on food and activism at The Lab Gallery. (By the way, food is a hot topic in contemporary art these days...something to ponder.) Another highlight was a video by Phil Collins (no, not that one, the British artist who's up for the Turner prize this year). He had people in Istanbul sign karaoke to all Smiths songs, and the video is really funny and really sad, at times. Definitely worth checking out.

So, otherwise I've just been getting prepared for the Detroit trip, which I will report on fully when I return. For the moment, suffice to say that the week is really packed with tons of great things-- visiting galleries, MoCAD, collectors, etc. AND I'll be going to Canada for the first time ever-- exciting!

Correction: There was one other piece at the 06 Whitney Biennial that I liked

2006-11-01T20:15:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I realized later today that I was mistaken-- in additon to Paul Chan's piece, I also LOVED Francesco Vezzoli's fake trailer for a remake of the Gore Vidal film, Caligula. Here's the Whitney's page for Vezzoli:

http://www.whitney.org/www/2006biennial/artists.php?artist=Vezzoli_Francesco

It's hard to understand how hilarious and brilliant it is without just seeing it. Anyway, I liked that too. Otherwise my synopsis of "Day for Night" (the 06 biennial) was "Oh look, more work by Robert Gober..." (I like Gober, but geez, he had a show at Matthew Marks last year that was up for months....

Paul Chan: National Philistine

2006-11-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

This will be a quick one. Check this out:

http://www.nationalphilistine.com

This is a project by Paul Chan, an awesome video/ multi-media artist whose work was perhaps the only exciting discovery I made at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (I also liked the Wrong Gallery installation). Anyway, on this site, you can access fonts, audiobooks and videos that Paul Chan has made. It's a really great site, what an amazing artist. The piece of his that I saw at the Whitney was a black and white projection onto the floor (which reminded me of those lamps that kids have with rotating shades and shapes cut out of the lamp shade, so that shadows in the spapes of animals are projected onto the walls. In the Chan piece, silouettes of things from the street-- bicycles, telephone poles-- are floating into the air, toward the sky and then all of a sudden bodies fall, both up and down. I immediately thought of Sept 11, of course, but it was so much more thoughtful and beautiful than any other artistic production I've seen that came out of Sept 11. My other favorite Sep 11-related thing is the Sleater-Kinney song "Far Away", off the album One Beat. Very good stuff.

Some Concerns

2006-10-30T09:08:00.000-08:00

On Thursday night, I entered the weekend with a few concerns that I thought I might share. Finally pushing past the residual social anxieties from the beginning of the semester, I'm now getting into the really meaty stuff: concerns about being a curator, how I want to shape my career, how to create an identity for myself in this field now and in the future, etc. Partially, the concerns are stemming from the fact that the first year CURP (as it were) class is so bonded-- everyone's so enthusiastic and entrepreneurial, and I think we've really formed a group identity. All of this is really positive, but now I find myself thinking about forming an identity apart from them, in terms of breaking away and doing my own projects. It will definitely happen, and is starting to happen, and I'm curious to see how things will unfold over the next two years.

Another (much bigger) concern is, basically, that I’m just not good enough. This is something that everyone worries about and that being in graduate school only exacerbates, and in a way the sheer normalcy of this concern makes it almost comforting. But I worry that I don’t have enough ideas about exhibitions and that I might graduate from this program with lots of great tools and connections and possible venues for shows without any real content or substance in mind. The substance is what I’m cultivating outside of class—going to exhibitions, seeing as much as I can, meeting as many people as I can and hopefully visiting peoples’ studios and talking to them about their work. But there’s this constant, nagging fear that it’s not enough and that I have a lot of passion without specific enough ideas. That’s pretty scary.

Another concern this about the nature of what a curator does, at the core of it—which is to interpret and present artwork. Artwork, by definition, is something that’s incredibly important to the artist who creates it, and it’s so easy to misrepresent someone through bad curating. So I worry about the intensely person nature of curating and working with artists. For me, this points to the need for real collaboration between artists and curators (and viewers, as well) in exhibition-making, but that brings up another concern—that I might not truly be as committed to collaboration as I feel that I am or should be. Ideologically, I’m all for it, but when it comes right down to it, many people aren’t very good at it. I’ve felt pretty good about the few collaborations I’ve engaged in, but there’s a concern there too.

Anyway, I haven’t condemned myself as a bad curator or anything, but these are very scary thoughts, and I think it’s healthy to get them out there, just to come clean testimonial-style. That’s it for now.

A Full Week of Insanity: LA and CCA

2006-10-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Last Friday (Oct 20)

I left bright and early with seven of my classmates for LA in two cars, me behind the wheel of mine. It was my first trip to LA, but I won’t dwell on my reactions as a tourist (“It was so big! We drove so much! We got lost!” etc…). On Friday afternoon, we drove straight to the UCLA Hammer Museum to meet Russell Ferguson, a curator and co-organizer of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition (which originated at the MCA in Chicago). The show was the first US retrospective of his work; there was a really broad range of work shown that spanned his career, so there were a lot of amateur photographs alongside (and above and below) some really amazing ones. It was a great visual exercise in doing a show that points to both high and low points in an artist’s career, which I think is really interesting– generally, exhibitions try to just pick the gems out of all the crap and show them, but I like the acknowledgment that an artist’s career is a process of trial and error, so why not reflect that in a show of their work? It also reminded me that you can “get away with” showing a lot of crap alongside the good stuff if someone (like Tillmans) has a good reputation. My favorite piece was a video of light fixtures in a nightclub (like strobe lights) moving in a very anthropomorphic way to the soundtrack of bad club techno. The way he filmed the lights made them look like little creatures dancing to the music– Sarah pointed out that it felt like watching the lights play and entertain themselves after all the clubber had gone home. So Danny and I danced along with the video for a while, which was a highlight of the trip– also the site where I coined the “I’m totally going to write about this in my blog!” dance.

Saturday

We spent Saturday getting the lay of the land in terms of galleries– we started at Bergamot Station, a conglomerate of commercial galleries, which also includes the Santa Monica MoA. Virtually the only really great discovery I made there was Jeremy Mora, who shows at Richard Heller Gallery, and makes these amazing, miniature worlds that are incredible intricate, funny and smart. Check it out:

http://www.jeremymora.com/

We then headed to the Culver City Galleries, which is where all the good stuff is. Blum & Poe has a group show called Werner Herzog up that was good, particularly Matthew Benedict’s work. Taylor de Cordoba is showing Jeana Sohn (whose work I thought was Rachell Sumpter’s when I first saw it) and Lisa Durow, which was a nice pairing. There’s also a show of John Bankston, who I have mixed feelings about, at Walter Maciel Gallery. In the back of the gallery, we discovered Oscar Cueto, who’s in an upcoming show. I won’t try to describe his work, just take a look:

www.waltermacielgallery.com/ocueto.html

That night, we drove for what felt like hours from Venice Beach (where we were staying) to Chinatown, where a bunch of galleries were having openings, including Jack Hanley, who is showing Alicia McCarthy, which I have to say I wasn’t that impressed by. The Chinatown galleries were really cool though, including Fringe Exhibitions and one that I can’t figure out the name of….

Sunday

We drove down the Orange County Museum of Art for the 2006 California Biennial, which was a really great show (though also a great example of the fact that the word “biennial” doesn’t mean much. It was a large group survey of young artists working in California, many of them from all over the world. Gems from this show are a video by My Barbarian (a performance group from Southern CA), a video called The Purple Cloud by Marie Jager, work by Bin Dahn (whose work keeps slowly revealing itself as more and more interesting), amazing work by Goody-B Wiseman, Tim Sullivan photos, Hank Willis Thomas, Lordy Rodriquez, Kate Pocrass and Joel Morrison– among many others. It was a rad show. And the building is amazing. Half of us headed back to SF straight from the OCMoA after a very productive weekend of seeing art.

Monday

Recovery– caught up on schoolwork and prepared for a week with two visiting professors. I also registered for classes, which are mostly continuations (part 2) of classes we’re taking now. I did get to choose an elective, Field Guide to Social Practice with Ted Purves, which I’m psyched about. I’m also trying to devise an internship plan for next semester.

Tuesday

We had a class with Jan van Woensel, a visiting professor and independent curator from Belgium who’s currently living in Brooklyn and is working on about a thousand projects right now. He gave us a presentation on some of the stuff he’s currently working on and what he’s done in the past. Check out his blog:

www.janvanwoenselnyc.blogspot.com

He even mentions our class in his latest entry:
“The seminar was also fun. An interesting, energetic and bright group of 10 new curators will soon start realizing innovative projects that will rock the scene.”

Rad.

We also had the second of three seminars with Raimundas Malasauskas, a curator from Vilnius, Lithuania, who’s one of the figureheads of the Contemporary Art Center there and has done a ton of shows and projects, such as CAC-TV. Raimundas is incredibly interesting and funny; he’s done a “telepathic interview” with George Maciunas, the figurehead of the Fluxus movement ad talks about hypnosis and time travel. You can tell that he’s one of those ubiquitous characters who always shows up everywhere and gets involved with everything.

That evening, Yvonne Rainer gave a talk at CCA as part of the Grad Lecture Series. She showed a hilarious video by Charles Atlas (in collaboration with Rainer) about her life and her dance and film work. She’s such a prolific person, but the video was refreshing and gave her a friendlier dimension.

Wednesday

After working and then a class on writing wall text with Renny, I rushed over to TART, a little gallery run by Anne Colvin and her partner Neil, who are artists originally from Scotland who opened the space a couple of years ago. Anne and I have been in touch for a month or so, and she’s been really receptive to my ideas and just generally talking about life and CCA and TART. On Wednesday, we discussed TART’s history and tossed around ideas about a possible show of her work in the space– I’m particularly interested in the fact that TART is a site of artistic production and exhibition. I’m scheming about a show that would highlight that in an interesting way. I’m also talking to Anne about doing an interview with her and Neil and maybe some of the artists in upcoming shows about the space to pitch to magazines and radio programs to increase TART’s visibility.

I then rushed back to CCA for a class meeting with Jens Hoffman, the new director of the Wattis Institute (originally from Germany), who just left the ICA in London. He’s spearheading the Americana Bulletin Project that I mentioned a while ago and will be teaching one of our courses next semester. He gave a presentation of a couple of shows he curated at ICA, Artists’ Favorites and London in Six Easy Steps. He’s very interested in exhibitions in relation to place (as in the London… show) as well as theatricality and staging, so he focuses on exhibition design and installation, which is something that I’m also very interested in. He talked about only working inside, because he’s interested in creating specific, controlled environments, which is a philosophy of exhibition-making that I was really serious about for a long time too. I still like the idea of the exhibition space as a controlled environment, but I’ve also relaxed on that a lot too as I became interested in many different kinds of art.

About half of us took Jan and Raimundas out that night to North Beach, where we had some authentic Italian coffee and then headed to SFAI to hear Harrell Fletcher give a talk about his work, which was incredible and really overwhelming. It was astonishing to see what a volume of work he’s produced. Check this out if you haven’t already:

www.learningtoloveyoumore.com

After the lecture, we headed to Kennedy’s, an Irish pub/Indian restaurant that reminded me of Medieval Times.

Thursday

A long day of classes– Art History and Theory and Professional Development (Detroit class), where we decided on three different itineraries for our free afternoon for personal research in Detroit in November. On group is spending the day in downtown Detroit, around Woodward Avenue; another is going to Belle Isle, the Boggs Foundation and some urban farms; and my group is going to several places in Detroit’s periphery: Pontiac (my pick– where the Museum of New Art is located); Levonia (another suburb of Detroit); and Windsor, just across the Canadian border. Very exciting!

Raimundas gave a lecture that evening at CCA, which expanded upon some of the things we’ve been talking about in his seminars.

Friday (last night)

Our class organized two slide shows, “3 Minutes, 3 Slides– BASTA!” for the MFA students to show each other (and us) their work and talk a bit about it. The first slide show was last night, and I think it was a definite success. The turnout was really good (maybe 30 people or more?), and about 10 or 15 people showed their work. We saw some great stuff, and it’s so fun to ask artists about what they’re making.

We then headed over to the Dog Patch (an up-and-coming, DUMBO-esque industrial/artsy neighborhood) for Silverman Gallery’s first opening; the gallery is run by Jessica Silverman, one of the second year curatorial students. The space was pretty huge and looked great, and the opening had a good turnout. Raimundas read a piece by Adrian Williams with a sock on his right hand. It was a good time. I have four last words for you: champagne in a can.

Cult of personality + Tara Foley

2006-10-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

I’ve developed the terrible habit of “taking a break” and falling asleep around 11 or 12 and waking up in the middle of the night, feeling kind of wired. Need to fix that– but as Jan van Woensel, a Belgian curator who is a visiting faculty member in the CCA curatorial practice program, would say, “okwhatever.”

I was thinking superficially about qualities that make a good curator, beyond the obvious (knowing lots of artists, being resourceful, reading and writing a lot). Qualities that came to mind were: being easy to talk to; being interested in a lot of things outside your own field and having the savvy to apply those interests to what you do professionally; being energetic and fun; and being a really good listener. But as soon as I compiled that list in my head, I thought, isn’t that just what makes a good person? I guess this is what happens to your thinking when your specific discipline starts to seem so monumental and important that it no longer seems specialized, it just seems like everything. Sometimes I’m kind of in awe when I realize that I really do eat, sleep and breathe art and curatorial issues these days. No wonder I’ve started to equate good curating with a good way of life– my specialization has become a microcosm for living my own life, so I’m channeling ideas about myself as a person through the issues and questions that are constantly running through my head.

But there’s also something about that list of personal qualities that I think says something about curating itself as a construct in the “art world” (lame but convenient term). We think and talk a lot in this program about the term “curator” and what exactly that means. To me, it seems that on the one hand, the term is worn as this badge of specialness, and part of this specialness is this cult of personality– a curator has to have this magnetic personality, exude all the qualities in the list. This line of thinking very much reflects ideas and constructs around the term “artist” as well, recalling ideas around “artist –as-shaman”– in a lot of ways, curating has become the new shamanistic practice for a lot of people (curator as the magical link between art and the world). This is where we might get into the whole “is curating an art form/ is the curator an artist?” debate. On the other hand, the term curator is meant to do the exact opposite, to separate “curating” from “art-making”; this idea of curating falls staunchly on the other side of the “is the curator an artist?” debate. It’s been great so far, because we have a lot of different guest faculty in our Curatorial Models class, and we’ve met several curators who fall on either side of the debate. It’s really interesting to compare all of them; they’re all doing amazing work, and you can kind of respect each of their approaches to curating, even though they completely contradict one another. We’re so lucky that contradiction is welcome and invited in our curriculum.

Personally, I’m not sure where I stand– a cop-out finale, I know. But I do think that “art”, “artist” and “curator” are totally fluid terms that only mean things because peoples’ passion for what they think art is and should be and should do are so strong– this is what charges up these terms. This is what makes art so damn interesting and gives art practice and exhibition practice so many possibilities for real change and effect in peoples’ lives. So in that light, I think the debate really doesn’t matter that much– that is, I think the task of settling on one answer to the question, “is the curator an artist?” doesn’t matter. It’s the debate and questioning and rethinking that does matter and that makes the discipline interesting and alive. OK, I’m jumping on the old soapbox, so I’m going to curb my enthusiasm. Okwhatever.

I also just wanted to briefly plug Tara Foley’s installation, Give Me a Simple Life, at Triple Base (24th and Treat/Harrison), on view till November 10. I helped her a bit with install a couple weeks ago by painting one of the walls, and it was a lot of fun hanging out with her and her mom and a friend of hers. It was a good lesson for me, who hasn’t worked with that many artists yet, in trusting that what the process looks like can and will be totally different than the product. I helped her about a week before the show opened, and I have to say it was a mess. But I could tell that Tara had a really clear vision and really interesting ideas. Indeed, it turned out really well– she turned the very small, one-room gallery, into a sort of artificial forest, with two big, clear, plastic trees, and real grass on the ground with little mechanical sculptures growing out of it. She painted wind turbines and mechanical cranes on half of the walls, using pink and purple as her palette, and little blue honey combs on the other two walls. Parts of the room and the entire doorway are filled with tree branches she collected, giving the whole thing a kind of “magic forest” feel to it. It looks really great and really does transform the space. I recommend it.

Is everything an art piece??

2006-10-18T23:36:00.000-07:00

OK, first of all, I want to acknowledge what a heinous crime it is that I’ve neglected to post for so ridiculously long. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to post all the updates that are due. Hopefully tomorrow…but I’ll be in LA for the weekend, so if not tomorrow, I’ll catch up on Monday for sure. Here are highlights of the last couple of weeks that I need to catch up on:

Detroit research– getting right down to it
Volunteering at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts annual auction and Artists’ Ball
Various shows– 2 at Jack Hanley, more at other galleries
Helping install Tara Foley’s installation at Triple Base (opens tomorrow night)
Thinking about alternative “exhibitions”– McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia Pirate Supply Store, Aquarius Records, Little Otsu

So that’s just a little teaser of things to come. Oh and I’ll do a season finale tribute to Project Runway, because people care about that.

But to get to the subject of this post: Parking at CCA is downright ridiculous, and today I parked further away from the actual school than ever. This evening, I trekked through the beginning of Potrero Hill (the closest neighborhood to CCA) to get back to my car. On one particular block (Arkansas St between Mariposa and 18th), which is lined with big, voluminous trees, the sounds of birds chirping, from up in the branches, was so loud, it really caught my attention. And it wasn’t the usual one or two birds making noise every once in a while– this sounded like a whole cornucopia of birds of all types, all making a racket at once.

I had to wonder if it was an art installation– could that many different species of birds just happen to be yapping away in those particular trees? It seems unlikely. It sounded really harmonious and peaceful, like a recreation of a really beautiful moment that really did occur somewhere in nature. But then I had to ask myself whether I’d assume it was a sound installation if I wasn’t going to art school and constantly thinking about how art is all around us, blah blah… As I neared the end of the block, I looked up, half hoping that a bird would poop in my eye just for the sake of poetic irony. It didn’t happen.

The Danny's Car Incident

2006-09-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

Alright, I’m really supposed to be summarizing Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood”, a seminal essay on Minimal Art blah blah blah… But I had to include this: Yesterday, our class took two cars out to Napa, where we are having a course at the di Rosa Preserve (an art museum and nature preserve where Rene di Rosa’s collection of Bay Area art is housed). I drove one car and Danny drove the other. As he pulled into the di Rosa, one of his tires blew out– it was ripped almost completely off the rim, which was bizarre looking. Then after a tow truck has come and gone and someone had helped Danny put the mini spare tire on, the mini blew out on the way to the auto shop… While Danny waited on the side of the road for another tow truck, the rest of us tried to figure out how to get ten people back to SF with one car… Eventually, I followed the tow truck to a nearby auto shop and delivered half my classmates to Danny, leaving them once again in the hands of Danny’s now-fabled car of doom. All in all, it was entertaining and it took up the better part of, well, the whole day. This will now be known as The Danny’s Car Incident, and Danny’s car is now subject to relentless ridicule… For posterity, here are the pictures documenting the formidable flat:

The Drama & Rachell Sumpter

2006-09-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

OK, here’s a very quick one. I’ve been dying to get this out all week, but I’m no longer able to steal wireless from home, so internet access has been touch-and-go all week. I want to say that I “discovered” (I put that word in quotes because it gives me way too much credit) an art magazine called The Drama at an indie bookstore near my house. The magazine is a quarterly conglomeration of art, interviews, music reviews, features on artists of all kinds and comics. I’d say the magazine is curated, as there are lots of beautiful reproductions of artists’ work and full spreads by artists. The current issue on stands is their eighth but apparently the first in wide distribution. From what I can tell, the mag has gone from very low-budget, black and white to beautiful full-color. The cover artist of the current issue is Josh Petherick, who also gets a feature and interview inside. Rachell Sumpter, a California artist, is also a contributer (of art and writing) to the magazine. Coincidentally, I also encountered her work at Giant Robot (arty gift shop/bookshop/gallery space in the Haight, as well as the East Village in NYC, and they also have a magazine). Her show at Giant Robot just opened, and I really liked it. It reminds me of Marcel Dzama but even more sparse and delicate. I’ve included a few images to give you a sense…

Now I have to finish the mad amounts of homework that have been pushed to the last minute…more later.

"throwing a popsicle into a volcano"

2006-09-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

I wanted to add one thought related to my weekend at Austin City Limits Music Fest– one highlight was seeing the Flaming Lips, one of my all-time favorite bands. Wayne Coyne (lead singer) prefaced one song (don’t remember which one; doesn’t matter) by saying that a lot of people have interpreted it to be a protest song about the Iraq war and the general current state of the world. He said, in actuality, that he’d never thought of his songs that way, because he’d always thought of a song as something so happy and fun and celebratory– how could a song, with all those qualities, even begin to address (let alone protest) something as horrible as war? He said that this would be like throwing a popsicle into a volcano; what good would it do? Would it ever affect any change?

This perspective really struck me, as someone who thinks a lot specifically about the potential power of art (in all its forms) to alter peoples’ consciousness in relation to the events and ideology of the moment and how they are portrayed in mass media and understood in popular consciousness. There are so many artists, many of whom are musicians, who use their practice for this very purpose. So to hear this was pretty astonishing, and it made me wonder how many artists feel this way. Do we constantly take artists’ work out of context and make it about something outside of its intent? Probably, but I think that’s actually a great thing. Freedom of expression goes hand-in-hand with freedom of thought, and the meaning that audiences brings to all kinds of art keeps it alive long after it’s created. Something to think about….

Catching up: First Two Weeks at CCA

2006-09-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

So, I’ve been on a slight blogging hiatus, thanks to the head-first nature of my first two weeks of school. My feeling now is an overwhelming sense of total immersion into everything I’ve given thought to in the past few years, artwise. I’m finally surrounded by students, teachers and practitioners (and there is a lot of overlap between those factions) who “eat, sleep and breathe” curating, and more specifically, ideas about how to make curating vital, urgent, and fresh. CCA is, for me, the perfect academic environment. The main building of CCA’s San Francisco campus was once a Greyhound station, situated in a neighborhood once filled with industrial and warehouse spaces that were reborn as artist spaces, as happens in so many industrial neighborhoods of major American cities. (Is this a European, Asian, and South American phenomenon too?) Because of the building’s past identity, it has the perfect amount of fluid, open, well-lit spaces for an art school; classrooms and studios flow into one another in the spirit of collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking (which seem to be two pillars of CCA’s ideology). I have the constant, comforting sense that this campus couldn’t be a site of anything negative or traumatic; only good things happen here.

But that’s my naïve, ignorant-and-blissful perspective as a new student, so we’ll see.

Our classes, so far, have been a great mix between theoretical and practical. On Tuesdays, we have Curatorial Models and Exhibition Practice. Curatorial Models is team-taught by Kate Fowle, the chair of the curatorial program, and practitioners from various institutions and art spaces, namely the di Rosa preserve, in Napa, and the Berkeley Art Museum. The class is about discovering and delving into different ways of curating, particularly in non-traditional or non-institutional spaces. Exhibition Practice is primarily taught by Leigh Markopoulos, a curator who's had an amazing career working at Serpentine Gallery in London, the Wattis Institute in SF (on CCA campus), and now at Rena Bransten Gallery, her first commercial job. Rena Bransten Gallery is one of the major blue-chip SF galleries, which are mostly concentrated on the first block of Geary Street, just above Market Street. This course will get into the nitty-gritty of curatorial tasks; our first lesson consisted of a slide show in which Leigh went through the majority of shows she’s worked on over the course of her career, adding anecdotes about the specific challenges of each show and bizarre problems that had to be solved, which was hilarious. Only a curator could truly appreciate the humor in having to have special glasses made for gallery sitters who have to stare at a 6-foot Dan Flavin piece (made of neon green, fluorescent light bulbs) all day. Our second lesson detailed the minutiae of budgets and loans, including loan forms and contracts with artists. That lesson was kind of frightening and incredibly useful.

Wednesday, we have Writing for Curators with Renny Pritikin, another curator with a totally enviable career, including having been Chief Curator of Yerba Buena and one of the initiators of New Langton Arts (both really interesting SF contemporary art spaces). Renny’s class will focus on the various kinds of writing that curators are responsible for, such as grant proposals, correspondence, wall text and catalogue essays. Extremely practical stuff. The highlight of this class, so far, was Renny pulling out our exhibition review essays, which we submitted as part of our application to the program, on the first day and critiquing each one in front of the class to “break the ice”. Amazing.

Thursday begins with Contemporary Art History and Theory, outlining important theory and art practice of the second half of the twentieth century to now, co-taught by Jordan Kantor (former MoMA curator), Ted Purves, Lydia Matthews, and Larry Rinder (former Whitney curator, current Dean of Graduate Studies at CCA, and one of my personal heroes), which we take with the MFA students (artists). Our first lecture, given by Larry, dealt with the intersection of national identity/ political agendas and artistic practice in the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically looking at Germany, Senegal and Brazil as case studies. The lecture is followed by a small discussion section; mine (yay!) is with Larry.

The week ends with Professional Development, which, contrary to its title, is probably the most interesting and challenging of all our classes. The class is subtitled “Mirror-Travel in the Motor City” and is taught by Julian Myers. As you might guess, the class is basically a case study of Detroit and the artistic community there (“mirror-travel” is a reference to a Robert Smithson essay and is applicable to the physical layout of Detroit). The premise of the class rests on Detroit’s unique history as a former bastion of Modernism and the birthplace of the American auto industry and Fordism and the city’s eventual degradation and decay, largely due to class disparity and racial tension, culminating in (and exemplified by) the riots of 1967. We began by looking at the moment of the riots, which occurred around the same time that a piece called “Dragged Mass Displacement” by Michael Heizer (one of the big names of American Earth/Land Art, along with Smithson, Walter de Maria and co), which was executed on the lawn of the Detroit Institute of Art. Basically, the piece was completely ill received, particularly by the DIA trustees, who subsequently took the piece down after one month and drove Sam Wagstaff, curator of the piece, out of Detroit (to New York...). Part of the negative reactions to the Heizer piece included reviews that practically equated the piece with the violence and destruction happening in the streets of Detroit at that time. Julian’s interest in this moment involves how this piece of art came to stand for the socio-political climate of a city in a particular moment in time and how this moment has contributed to Detroit’s decline ever since. Today, downtown Detroit is 80% empty, and there are chunks of housing and various buildings throughout the city that were abandoned, many of which were demolished and never rebuilt. How did this city become underpopulated and why didn’t it experience the same ebbs and flows of decay, growth and development that cities like New York and Chicago experienced? As you can imagine, this socio-political climate and physical space make Detroit incredibly interesting and, in many ways, an artistically inspiring place. In particular, a subculture of artists and musicians has developed in Detroit over the past several decades. Julian’s interest lies in looking at and juxtaposing both mainstream and underground art coming out of Detroit. The city’s first contemporary art institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD) will open this October, born out of a do-it-yourself, groundswell art community, and we’ll be visiting Detroit in November for five days, just after MoCAD’s opening. During the trip, we’ll get to know the city and visit various sites relevant to our research, and we’ll get to visit MoCAD and meet several people who founded the museum.

So, our coursework for the semester will consist of collecting primary and secondary resources and artifacts related to specific aspects of Detroit as a setting for its unique art community. Each of our individual research will, more or less, take on a particular focus. We’re slowly compiling secondary sources/artifacts right now as preliminary steps in the process. I began by thinking about MoCAD and the importance of how it presents itself upon its opening and inauguration. I’ve started looking into “Meditations in an Emergency”, the first show at MoCAD to open in October, which is curated by Klaus Kertesz, who commissioned something like eight artists to make pieces related to the “dark moment” we are living in as a country and as a world. This led me to compare the moments of the 1967 riots and the Heizer debacle with the current moment. I looked to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which is an amazing forecast of all the race riots and explosions of mounting racial tension of the late 1960s in America. To me, these “dark” moments are quite comparable, so I’m looking into that….

Aside from classes, we’re, of course, expected to keep up with shows at the many art spaces in San Francisco. Last Friday was the opening of Kottie Paloma’s show at Triple Base Gallery (run by two CCA Curatorial Practice alumni) and an opening at Southern Exposure, who’s involved with a project about reclaiming spaces throughout SF that were supposed to be set aside by the city as leisure spaces during the dot-com boom but were never actually open to the public. These galleries are both staples of the Mission District, which is filled with alternative art spaces. I ended up at the Triple Base after-party with two of my classmates (in the apartment of someone I never met, on top of the gallery), where I ended up talking with Dina Pugh, one of the women who run Triple Base. It turns out that the thesis exhibition created by her class at CCA (which was a collaboration with LA artist Jeff Valence in the form of a campaign to institute a 1% tax on all art sales to go into a fund to benefit all artists, regardless of merit) is going to be shown (not sure how exactly, yet) at LACMA in late October. So, the majority of my class is interested in going down to LA the weekend it opens to help with installation and be there for the opening, which I think will be really amazing and a good excuse to check out various galleries and museums in LA (including the Wolfgang Tillmans show at the UCLA Hammer Museum, which I’m excited about). Exciting.

Also in the works is a bulletin board project at the Wattis (similar to the bulletin board at White Columns in NYC). Ariane Beyn, visiting curator, and Jens Hoffman, new director of the Wattis, want to do a project on Americana, featuring a rotating exhibition in the bulletin board space about the eccentricities and artifacts of each state in the US, so Anna (a first-year classmate) and I are interested in getting involved with that…probably a lot of research. I think it’s an important thing to get involved with.

Thursday night, the openings dance included New Langton Arts (in SoMa) and Queen’s Nails Annex (in the Mission, close to where I live). The show at New Langton, featuring video work by Adrian Paci, Juan Manuel Echavarria and Adrià Julià, was really impressive– the space is beautiful and the work was so amazing, particularly the two pieces by Adrian Paci. The Queen’s Nails show was your typical young/emerging group show with a few gems.

Whew. If you think it was exhausting reading all that, try living it.

And now I'm in Austin for the weekend at Austin City Limits Music Festival....

de Young Kick-off

2006-09-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday was my first experience at the de Young Museum, situated in Golden Gate Park near the Japanese Tea Gardens, since the new building opened– or ever, for that matter. As a friend said to me today, “People go for the building, not the art.” I don’t know if I’d be quite that harsh, but it’s certainly true that the de Young is a sub-par, second/third-string collection housed in an amazing building. But as much as it sounds like one, I don’t mean this as a criticism; not every museum can have “quintessential” collections of, for example, modern art, like MoMA and the Pompidou. In fact, most museums have second and third-string collections, but the way a smart museum deals with this and makes their permanent collection relevant and interesting is by (1) putting it in a really interesting, dynamic space; (2) frequently reexamining that collection and reorganizing it carefully, creatively and selectively; (3) making curatorial connections between the art of that particular collection and its surrounding region or geographic and social environment; and (4) creating and inviting important and unique temporary exhibitions to supplement that collection. From what I saw on my first visit, the de Young is working to do all of these things. It reminds me a lot of the Brooklyn Museum– another institutional with kind of a large but not great collection that was able to reinvent itself when it got an architectural facelift. I think it’s so smart and also important for museums to go through this process; they are force to completely reevaluate their place and identity as institutions and are thus able to avoid the kind of stagnation that plagues certain other major museums (the most obvious example that comes to mind is the Met). The MoMA went through a similar reinvention and reorganization when it was redesigned, which was a great thing, particularly because its collection is so prolific and its physical organization has literally affected the way modern and contemporary art is understood and taught. Anyway, I’ll just hit the highlights of my first visit to the de Young, because I could go on forever on this topic.

The building opened last October and was designed by Herzog and de Meuron, so naturally it’s amazing. The shape is asymmetrical and angular, and the building is coated with a puckered, textured metal that becomes rusted and corroded, literally documenting the physical wear on the exterior. The interior is riddled with lots of fun windows that provide awesome views of various parts of the museum interior, beautiful courtyards and the surrounding grounds of Golden Gate Park. Every material in the building, from staircases to beautiful mix-and-match geometric benches was carefully chosen and feels authentic to the building’s geographic location. There are also several large commissioned artworks in the open foyers and courtyards of the museum. My favorites were an Andy Goldsworthy piece in the main outdoor entryway involving the local geology and topography of the San Francisco area (he’s so awesome), a huge mural by Gerhard Richter, and a large-scale triptych by Ed Ruscha. The Pazzioni Murals Room is really beautiful and has a huge wall-length window facing out into the park, although as Tyler Green pointed out in his awesome blog, Modern Art Notes (www.artsjournal.com/man), the odd choice was made to have bars across the middle of each mural, literally in front of the works of art… very bizarre. There must be an explanation for this. The Fern Courtyard (a very long, triangular strip located behind the two main staircases, moving with the elevation of the building) is exceptionally beautiful.

The temporary exhibitions currently on view at the de Young are Chicano (a three-part show) and The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. I spent a lot more time at the Chicano show, so I’ll give the very brief review of the quilt show: It’s a show of (and about) quilts made by this community of women in Alabama. The quilts are really beautiful, and the museum provides some nice background info about the quilters as well as photos and a video of them “in their natural habitat”. It was a little anthropological, but I appreciate the effort to bring a “craft” into the realm of fine arts and acknowledge what beautiful and complex works of art these quilts are. Cool.

So, the Chicano show is divided into three parts: Visions, Encounters and Now. Chicano Visions is painting by various Chicano artists (mostly from California and Texas) from the collection of Cheech Marin. It was a really interesting collection– eye-opening in the sense that virtually none of the work or artists are well-known, though it all looked familiar to me, having grown up in Texas, but certainly not from a fine art context. The wall text gave background info about each artist, introducing them in a mini-CV narrative format, which was really refreshing (as opposed to being lectured at about how to interpret the art, as most wall text does). It was actually the type of information you want to read and doesn’t prevent you from having your own opinion about the work. The introductory text was also really well written and informal, breaking the usual academic, didactic language of wall text that’s pretty uninviting. The text situated the exhibition in the context of Chicano socio-political struggle with a plea at the end for young Chicanos to remember that this struggle is not over. After all, this is the first survey of Chicano painting that I can even remember seeing, so clearly we have a way to go (Chicanos and the rest of us). However, I have to point out that I’ve never seen more prominent acknowledgement of corporate sponsorship in an exhibition before; there were two huge panels next to the intro, one for Hewlett-Packard and one for Target (and every time the title of the show appears on any of the museum literature or walls, it’s accompanied by “presented by Target”). I guess this is unavoidable, and I suppose a positive spin on this is to say that at least these companies are supporting worthy cultural endeavors. But it’s still incredibly distracting… I wouldn’t prefer that they hide all the names of sponsors and trustees, because it’s important to remind people that this didn’t all just happen for free, but it’s sad to be constantly reminded of how much money is involved with just getting art out there for people to see….

The painting itself was very interesting, especially some of the more surreal stuff. There was a lot of political commentary, often about stereotypes in the Chicano community. Many of the artists made art historical references, such as religious painting and imagery, Goya, and Stephen Shore (that one might not have been intentional but it really reminded me of him). It was all very colorful and interesting, and a lot of it was very funny, which is sort of hard to do well in painting. According to the bio texts, the majority of these artists have worked on murals, which is a pretty astonishing reality check; most Chicano artists only have alternative avenues of art production available to them, so making art becomes much more community-oriented, as most Chicanos are ostracized from art schools and the art world, generally.

Chicano Encounters was a small exhibition of posters made in Mission Gráfica, a printmaking shop in the Mission district of San Francisco (my neighborhood!), many of them political and used as tools for community organization. The posters were my favorite part of the whole Chicano exhibition extravaganza. I’ve always really loved posters as a medium in general, and it’s always so interesting to decontextualize something like a poster and put it in a museum. It’s kind of fun, because the posters made the museum seem out of place and not the other way around, as you might expect.

Chicano Now is really hard to describe. It was basically an experiential fun house about debunking Chicano stereotypes and celebrating authentic parts of Chicano culture at the same time. My favorite little station was called “Juiced”, a tongue-in-cheek model and explanation of hydraulics and sparking, giving detailed instructions about how to “juice up” your car. There was also a little diner booth where you could sit down and read about various Chicano musical contributions on the table top while listening to the songs on a little jukebox. The best thing was the introductory video, which involved these three men from outer space coming to America and absorbing all the ridiculous Chicano stereotypes. It was pretty funny. This whole section of the exhibition was loud, colorful, chaotic and overwhelming– which, I realized, is probably the most true way to try to design a physical space that tackles issues of identity and debunking stereotypes. It was pretty clever.

A final note: The entire three-part Chicano exhibition was organized in a giant horseshoe shape, which meant that you could enter from one of two sides, and I noticed as I exited that it would have worked either way, which was well done.

Another Go at SFMoMA

2006-08-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

Maybe I was just too wrapped up in the Matthew Barney hubbub, but after going to SFMoMA last week, I found out that there was a site-specific piece by Janet Cardiff that I totally missed, so I went back today to check it out. Let me first say: I’m soooo glad that I did. SFMoMA, from the shows I’ve seen and read about, is a near-perfect museum– the building is beautiful; their permanent collection is interesting and important; and their temporary exhibitions are always unique and worth seeing. But one of its only flaws, so far as I can tell, is that they sometimes don’t publicize things very well, which I think is tragically the case with Janet Cardiff’s “audio/video walk”, as sfmoma.org calls it. Even on their own website, I really had to hunt to find any information about it. The piece is mentioned at the end of a blurb about the ongoing show, “Between Art and Life”, the installation of modern and contemporary art in the museum’s permanent collection. The website does mention that the Cardiff piece is on view until September 4 but it doesn’t even give a title… I have trouble believing that it has no title… Whack.

OK, now that I’ve moved past that rant– The audio/video guide is located at the same desk as the regular audio guides. Visitors take a hand-held video camera with headphones attached and sit facing a certain direction on a certain bench in the museum’s lobby. You press play and watch the video through the viewfinder, in which Cardiff directs you to walk through the museum on a certain path as she walks through in the video, so that your movement is synchronized. You hear and see all the things she experienced on the day she made the video while also seeing the museum as it actually is around you, so in effect, you get two visual experiences of the museum set to only Cardiff’s soundtrack. At various points during the 16 minute walk, Cardiff cuts to disparate memories and scenes, which are very fragmented and dreamlike and vaguely David Lynchian. The walk through the museum includes looking over the museum’s balconies down to the lobby at people, to whom Cardiff attributes imagined dialogue from afar. Her voice feels like it’s just in your head, and the whole experience makes you feel like you’re not her exactly, but as if you’ve left your own body and gone into hers, while also floating through the museum as it actually is on the day you are visiting. There is also a point where you go through a “Staff Only” door (which the guy at the audio guide desk warned me about), which is exciting but only leads to an ugly, echo-ie staircase where you hear the sounds of this creepy guy following Janet Cardiff and running up and down the stairs around you, which is pretty surreal. One of my favorite moments was walking up one of the grand staircases in the museum to a balcony to the soundtrack of this very religious organ music, reminding me of the idea of the museum as the “modern cathedral”. The moment is placed in the perfect location in the museum which really does feel like a religious space. There’s also an awesome moment where you look through one of the huge circular windows up at the bridge, where this woman is singing a gospel-ish song that resonates and fills the entire museum, but all of this is just in your ears and in your tiny viewfinder. I loved experiencing all of this privately but with all of these oblivious strangers all around me. What an awesome experience. I really wished it were longer.

The piece was the perfect homage to the SFMoMA building, which was designed by Mario Botta and opened in 1995, which really is beautiful and very iconic, and to the experience of an individual moving through any museum. Cardiff meditates on conceptions of space, time and memory and how all three become fragmented in our minds. At the end of the tour, she talks about how we create narratives to piece our memories and experiences together so that they tell a story. It was interesting to use the museum space, which we move through in specific ways, as a mini version of the world in which we move. One of my favorite things to do, after I walk through an exhibition to see the art, is to walk through and just watch how people move through the space. There’s something so graceful and beautiful about how people move, almost always in slow motion, through museums and galleries and how they really look at things and consider them, which we rarely do for very long in “real life”. Exhibition spaces are really the only places where we are free (even invited) to linger as long as we like. Cardiff’s piece gives you the experience of being inside someone else’s head as they walk through the museum, and you get to join them when their minds wander. I would love to bring a pad of paper along the next time I’m in a museum and note every time my mind starts to wander– what I'm thinking about at a given moment and exactly where I am and what I am looking at when my thoughts drift.

I also revisited “New Work: Tim Gardner, Marcelino Goncalves and Zak Smith” (which I saw last week too but forgot to write about), located in that back room behind the permanent modern and contemporary show. The wall texts discuss the themes of representations of masculinity and playing with traditional ideas of manhood as the thread between the three artists, which was really interesting and a great comparison between them, but I found the ideas much more interesting than the actual work. Tim Gardner I’d seen before and really like; he does these paintings after every-day snapshots that look very photographic until you get very close to them. His painting is very realistic, but more than that, he captures the very particular aesthetic language of snapshots that allows us to recognize them instantly as such. For example, snapshots are usually exemplified by amateur cropping and lighting and a combination of posed, smiling people and scenery that’s typical of tourist photos. There is one large-scale family portrait that’s especially impressive; it really looks like a blown-up photo until you really study it, and the family in the portrait is so stuck in time (the 1970s or ’80s). It reminded me of old fashioned commissioned family portraits that only the very rich would have had done, for which families would have to sit for hours (Las Maninas, anyone?). It’s interesting how commissioning a family portrait used to be a sign of luxury and wealth, whereas now it is considered one of the most normal ways an American middle class family documents their collective moments. It would be so fun to do a show of Christmas card family photos collected from many average American families… I’ll have to keep that in mind.

Zak Smith’s work is very rough, sketchy comic strip-esque and pretty interesting to look at, but it didn’t really get my brain going the first or second time I saw it. Marcelino Goncalves does these small paintings of men and boys doing various every-day things together in mostly pastels and in a very painterly, simple style. Again, the ideas were really interesting and totally there, but the work didn’t particularly strike me. I really hope a major museum does a solo Tim Gardner show soon, though, because clearly there’s a lot of there there.

CCA: First Impressions

2006-08-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm still biding my time until orientation next week and the beginning of classes the week after, but I've now met a few of my classmates at an evite-organized bar thing and seen the Oakland campus as well. I'll admit right now that I don't have anything too inspired to say about this (so please excuse the fact that my observations will be littered with adjectives like "cool" and "nice"), but I thought I should mark the monumentality of my first CCA-related experiences with a post...

I met about half of my classmates (OK, exactly half-- there are only 10 of us total, after all) at the bar thing last Saturday and about half of the second-year class, as well. Everyone seems...really nice, friendly, normal... which was unexpected. Not that I didn't expect people to be normal, but I guess I was letting my imagination of the sullen, artsy, inaccessible personality stereotype run away with me. Which really has nothing to do with what I expected of other people and far more with what I expected of myself, in relation to the group. As a 23 year-old, I expected to feel young in comparison to everyone else and, as a consequence, to kind of take on the role of the boisterous runt of the group who's always running circles around everyone else to prove that I should be here. Strangely enough, this is a role that I actually idealized... in reality, of course, this would have its drawbacks. Granted, I haven't met everyone yet or gotten any sort of sense of what the group dynamic will be like (much less how any of us will interact in an academic setting), but so far everyone seems to be on similar wavelengths.

This afternoon, I drove to the Oakland campus with Danny, a fellow first-year and new friend, to check out the Oakland CCA scene and drop off my work-study applications (for a couple of gallery positions). The campus was really beautiful and far more traditional than the SF campus (which is a small cluster of converted, industrial buildings situated on a convergence of side streets), plus it was all abuzz with undergrads and their parental figures, so it felt very cute and collegy. Danny and I both marveled at the fact that we were "the new kids" again, which we'd already experienced freshman year of college, only this time without the requisite angst and cynicism that any self-respecting high schooler achieves. All in all, the campus was... nice. It's also situated next to a high school that's housed in portables covered in really beautiful graffiti idolizing hip-hop superstars, which was cool.

One thing that the visit to Oakland did make me think about was the question of whether undergrads, namely freshmen in college, are ready to go to "Art School". My instinct is, no: the best thing about my undergrad education was having the freedom to change my mind and dabble in many things before finding a focus or declaring a major. Going to a school like CCA as an undergrad seems very limiting. This won't really affect my own academic experience at CCA, but it will be interesting to think more about this question if and when I become a TA, which I'm hoping to do. For now, just something to ponder.

“Beth Cook: It’s Not You, It’s Me”

2006-08-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went to my first gallery opening in San Francisco. The show was at Triple Base Gallery, a very cute, small exhibition space on 19th Street in the Mission—from what I can tell, the perfect introduction to the SF gallery scene. The artist, Beth Cook recently graduated with an MA from CCA (as a studio art student). The show is guest curated by Zoe Taleporos, who I believe is in her second year of the curatorial program. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Beth does these amazing, large-scale pencil drawings which literally chart, diagram, graph and model aspects of her past relationships. She calls herself a “relationship anthropologist”, which I think is hilarious. Some of the charts are extremely complex, and they reminded me of scientific charts that you stare at in the doctor’s office while wearing that horrible paper robe that’s totally open in the back, waiting for the doctor to come in. Anyway, her work was really amazing. It’s the kind that you want to describe and explain every detail—which is a great sign. It’s really memorable, accessible, and gets you excited….

For various reasons, I was feeling really emotional the whole time I was at the gallery, which struck me as an odd response to the work. I mean, some of it was sad, but it was mostly just really biting and funny. I think, for me, it was a combo of all the relationship stuff reminding me of missing my own far-away bf (particularly this really great piece: 2 letters, one written by Beth and the other by her current boyfriend, Tom, to each other, describing their first “experience” together as each remembers it with revisions and comments written on the letters by both of them; it became this very sweet, but not cheesy, conversation on paper). So, I was getting emotional because of the emotional content of the work in combination with feeling social anxiety about being at the first gathering of a lot of people from my program… I’m sure the majority of twenty-somethings at the opening were curatorial students (and studio art students, as well), and I probably could have struck up a conversation with any one of them, but… I didn’t. I’m terrible about that when I don’t know people yet. I kind of hate meeting people because I hate how I come off at first. Kind of a harsh self-review, actually, but it’s one of my only real social anxieties. Anyway, I’ll actually be meeting everyone tomorrow night at this bar thing, so it’s not a big deal.

Half-way through the opening, Beth made a little speech (I guess you could call it a “performance”) where she gave her rules and tips on dating, which was very funny. She, of course, was as awesome as her work and was really great to listen to. Following, there was a short Dating Q&A, for which she brought her extremely cute current boyfriend up to give “the guy’s perspective” alongside her own. It struck me during the Q&A that one of the most impressive things about Beth’s work is how accessible it is and how true it is to her as a person—she’s 25 years old, so the trials of dating is a very real, immediate subject for her (and most everyone at the opening). Having such a rich subject on the table sort of took away the pressure of this scenario being in the context of “art”. It was a very unique feeling, for a gallery opening. I think it helped that most of the people there were CCA students, so the opening had a friendly feel to it… and yet I still didn’t talk to anyone. Ugh. The show is only up through August 30, so get to it, San Franciscans!

www.basebasebase.com

Drawing Restraint, take 2: The Politics of Appropriation

2006-08-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

I noticed a letter yesterday in the current issue of the SF Bay Guardian from a reader who took issue with “Drawing Restraint”, suggesting that audiences consider the implications of a white, American (not to mention male) artist using Japanese culture as a focal point of his art and pointing out that Matthew Barney is appropriating Japanese culture in doing so. I wanted to bring this up, firstly, to applaud this person for making such an observation; this series of Barney’s work can and should be considered from this viewpoint. But, after thinking about it, I also want to play devil’s advocate and point out a few problems with this accusation (and not just to play devil’s advocate, which I find annoying, but because I actually disagree with the point).

My first thought was, Shouldn’t we, in turn, applaud Barney for taking an interest in Japanese culture and customs and making them a part of his artistic subject matter, rather than simply ignoring the non-Western world, as so many stereotypical Americans tend to do? Also, the way in which he uses Japanese symbols and cultural elements is in the context of himself (and Bjork) as the Occidental Guests; there is a pretty large amount of humility attached to Barney’s “appropriation” of Japanese culture. I think this is one of the wisest choices he makes in this series: He places himself within the narrative, it seems, precisely so that he is not just appropriating a culture and pulling the omniscient strings from offstage. Instead, he places himself within the action, as with the Cremaster series, sothat we consider both Barney himself and the character he plays within the context of the world he has created in combination with the world he is appropriating.

I think “appropriating” is precisely the right word for what’s going on here. What Matthew Barney does is create mini-universes, which resemble ours in various ways, some obvious and some obscure, but are at the same time unquestionably unique. He creates and crafts these worlds down to the smallest minutiae, meticulously constructing every last detail. He’s a genius and a control freak. In the case of Drawing Restraint, he’s appropriated aspects of Japanese culture (which is rife with complex symbolism and ritual, Barney’s favorite meat) and weaved them into his own mythology.

I’m going to put myself right up on the chopping block and say that appropriation in art is not always a bad thing. Kara Walker appropriates and quotes Victorian silhouettes in her very popular cut-outs and no one takes issue with that. The difference, of course, is that in Walker’s case, she is a female, African American artist (typically marginalized) drawing from a part of Western, white culture, in part, to subvert it. Barney, on the other hand, is a white, Western artist working within the hegemonic sphere, drawing from a non-Western culture that has long been marginalized in the Western artistic cannon. And I think this is an important point to make about Barney’s work. However, I think it’s also valid to reiterate that it can also be seen as positive and productive that Barney, as a very popular, successful Western artist, is bringing aspects of Japanese culture into American sight lines. I think it’s also worth mentioning that the exhibition began in Japan (Tokyo?), and Barney spent a lot of time in Japan before and during the making of Drawing Restraint 9. It will be interesting to see how Barney writes about all of this in whatever catalogue accompanies the show.

I also had a response on a personal level, getting away from Matthew Barney. One of my major interests as a curator is creating exhibitions that focus on artistic practices in Asia and Latin America. But what does it mean for me, a white, privileged, American curator to “appropriate” Asian and Latin American art in exhibitions? Obviously, I could write a few novels on this, but I thought I should throw it out there. I’m actually reading an excellent essay on this exact topic right now, as part of my preliminary reading for grad school, so I’ll have to add to this discussion once I’ve waded through more of it.

Drawing Restraint

2006-08-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I went to SFMoMA to see Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint show. I went with a friend and my dad, which was fun, because it gave me the opportunity to try to explain Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series and how all the disparate parts of the show fit together, which is a huge challenge. But I always find that seeing art alone versus with other people are vastly different experiences-- either way, I get excited about the work (either because the show is wonderful or because it sucks), and I talk a lot. Adding the fact that Barney's work is so infinitely complicated and manic, I felt like I never shut up. So the result is the opposite of one of my favorite Modest Mouse lyrics: "My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth". When I go to a museum with friends, I talk so much that I forget to think, or rather I'm thinking but don't actually hear the thoughts. So I can say that I enjoyed the show, especially having seen the movie, Drawing Restraint 9, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to go through it again to actually have a nuanced opinion... I can say that I reeeeaaally want to do a show on symbolism, juxtaposing contemporary artists (Barney being an obvious example) with Northern Renaissance painters. This body of Barney's work is perfect, because it includes so much maritime imagery. All of the photos and sculptures that include sea life remind me so much of vaintas paintings, often still lifes of seafood and fruit, food that looks beautiful at first and then rots quickly, which were (and continue to be) symbols of the fleeting nature of life. Barney's Drawing Restraint series adds to that ideas about the contrasts between East and West, man and nature, guest and host, particularly emphasizing the fact that people are merely guests in the house of nature. This work shows how Barney has matured as an artist; issues of sex and gender are still present but take a backseat to issues that are far less explored in contemporary art, so Barney is able to pull away from being "just" a body artist. I also thought the film was really beautiful, and I definitely recommend it. I have to admit, I never saw any of the Cremaster movies from start to finish, but I'm pretty sure that Drawing Restraint 9 is much less frenetic. It has a very hypnotic rhythm to it, largely thanks to Bjork's amazing musical score. So, I'll be visiting SFMoMA again before the show closes. I have more to say about other temporary shows there, but that will have to be for another post.

Me With Some Art: Palais de Tokyo, Spring 2004

2006-08-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

Summer in NYC: Brief Rundown

2006-08-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Before I totally leave New York mentally, I thought I'd give some mini-reviews of the shows I saw in NYC in July/August before I left. I hope people will feel free to comment, especially if you've seen these shows...

MoMA
Dada

This show began in France, I believe, and then traveled to D.C.'s National Gallery before coming to MoMA. It's the most comprehensive survey of the Dada movement I've ever seen, organized geographically rather than chronologically or thematically. The exhibition design is very whimsical and fun; there are two entrances (New York and Zurich, if I'm remembering right), so that the audience chooses their route through the show like a notorious Dada game of chance. Dada is one of my favorite art movements, so I loved the show, and one thing that struck me was the inclusion of a few artists who I wouldn't normally think of as Dadaists, like Otto Dix. My favorite blogger, Tyler Green (who writes Modern Art Notes-- artsjournal.com/man ) pointed out in his review of the show that the interesting paradox of Dada is how humor is juxtaposed with and used to mask the incredible violence and trauma of WWI, in which many Dadaists fought. I think the show hilights this well. Closes September 11.

Also at MoMA is the amazing Artist's Choice: Herzog and de Meuron, Perception Restrained, a single room surveying the MoMA's permanent collection curated by Herzog and de Meuron and organized by Terrence Riley, MoMA's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. The idea behind the show is the utter impossibility, as H & M explains, of finding the "gems" within a vast collection of gems. The resulting show is a room of small windows to various parts of the MoMA's collection that restrict the audience's view and suggest all of the thousands of works not included, which bleed off, out of view, in every direction. Herzog & de Meuron also hilight the museum's video collection with flat screen TVs lined up in rows along the ceiling. The idea of restricted perception is so smart that the physical exhibition doesn't have to be vast in scope to mask any kind of conceptual shortcoming. The result is an incredibly succinct, controlled, precise environment that really fits with the ideas at hand. I was really impressed by this show. Closes September 25.

The Jewish Museum
Eva Hesse: Sculpture

This small show spans Eva Hesse's short but amazing career, partially recreating her only other solo sculpture show at Fischbach Gallery in 1968. One thing that struck me when looking at her work was what an obvious precursor she is to Matthew Barney-- it's weird to think of them together, but they work with such similar materials, and it's kind of astonishing how different their subject matter is. On the other hand, I think what makes Eva Hesse's work so interesting, besides being so experimental with materials and how they react to one another in a very scientific way, is that its minimalism gives it a distinctly serene feeling. Similarly, while Barney's work as a whole is complicated and detailed and overwhelming, the frames, vitrines and sculptures he makes out of petroleum and similar materials provide a sort of neutralizing force-- part of that is the monochromatic nature of the substance. Petroleum is kind of the Matthew Barney Universe equivalent to soil on planet Earth. Anyway, the Hesse show reminded me of how amazing she is. She's not someone who I think of often without prompting, so it was great to see her work in a solo exhibition to put her back in the front of my brain. The Jewish Museum often likes to incorporate a biographical element to their shows and, I think, does it better than any other museum I've seen. The last room of the Hesse show is filled with artifacts from her life: photos, scrapbook pages, a couple of videos and letters which provided a brief chronology of her life. Often, I think rooms like this turn out looking kind of cheesy, but in this case it really worked. It was especially powerful to see video footage and snapshots of her in her studio alongside certain sculptures-- she was so young when she made her most influential, inspired work, and actually seeing that moment captured visually was very cool. This exhibition was mounted concurrent with a show of Hesse's drawings at the Drawing Center, which I missed, sadly. The show at the Jewish Museum closes September 17.

The Asia Society
Projected Realities: Video Art from East Asia

This show closed in early August, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because all of the six or seven artists showcased were really unique, and a lot of the work was very funny. It seems that there's a tendency among American video artists in particular to take themselves too seriously, maybe because new media had to fight its way into the realm of fine art more recently than other mediums. But most of these East Asian artists' work had an element of surreal humor about them, which was really refreshing. There seemed to be an interesting common thread between several of the artists around the idea of mechanizing humanity and, inversely, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The exhibition was conceived in memory of Nam June Paik, who passed away in January of 2006.

The Guggenheim
Zaha Hadid

My first reaction to the show overall was one of satisfaction; I think architecture exhibitions typically tend to require a lot of explanation supplementary to drawings and models on display. Hadid's work, however, actually lends itself to exhibition-- much of what was on display included paintings and multi-media artworks portraying a concept for a building or study of an urban area. Hadid's renderings and models are also so much more conceptual and less precise and nit-picky than the average architectural rendering, you can sort of trick yourself into forgetting that it's architecture you're looking at. I really appreciate how conscious her designs are of urban planning and how buildings relate to each other; she never designs one structure in a vacuum. But, as a non-architect, I found it frustrating not to be able to get any sort of idea how it feels to be inside a Hadid structure, because none of her renderings are on a human scale. Everything is shown from a bird's-eye, panned out perspective, so we never know how this architecture is actually experienced. I find it interesting that the only really famous female architect is from Iraq-- there might be a lot of implications there, but it's something I'll have to mull over.

I also have to say that this was one of the more poorly installed shows I've ever seen-- I don't know whether hadid's firm or the Guggenheim were responsible for framing, but there were several framed drawings and paintings which were puckering and bubbling under the plexi glass, a wood frame that had one corner splitting, and there was one frame in which one corner of the plexi was actually coming out of the frame, jutting right off the wall. It was astonishing to see these very obvious, sloppy mistakes; if they're that obvious to me, who knows a little about framing but not a ton, I can't imagine a professional framer getting away with that... sigh. A good show nonetheless. Closes October 25.

The Met
On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

This tiny but very touching tribute to Susan Sontag, drawing from the Met's permanent photography collection, really reminded me of what an amazing and unique writer she was; Susan Sontag completely invented a language with which to describe art and singlehandedly shaped photography criticism. We really have to give Sontag partial credit for legitimizing photography as a fine art in the eyes of the rest of the art world. Photography would never have evolved as it did, as an art form, without the vocabulary that Sontag created for it. The show pairs individual works and groups of works with Sontag quotes (and even provided titles of essays in which the quotes can be found, encouraging audiences to revisit her texts or read them for the first time), which act as the wall texts for the whole show. The most touching and striking piece, for me, was Robert Mapplethorpe's early portrait of Patti Smith in which she's squatting in a profile fetal position, naked, in an empty hardwood floored studio, looking up at the camera. The quote was something to do with how Mapplethorpe always had to make people look perfect, like the most perfect version of themselves. It was so powerful to have the relationship between Patti and Robert as well as the relationship between Robert and Susan Sontag both intertwined and displayed so purely. Closes September 4.

The New

2006-08-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know me, I'm going to do a bit of exposition. My name is Jessica Brier, and I'm 23 years old. The prompting for this blog is my eminent dive into the California College of Art's master's program in curating contemporary art. I grew up in Austin, TX, where I had an art history teacher (Marsha Russell) who completely changed my life and opened my eyes to the possibilities of studying and immersing myself in art, as she does. She's one of those teachers who completely molds you as a person; two of my best friends from high school are also in the art/architecture fields, and all three of us doubt we'd be doing what we're doing today without Marsha. I earned my bachelor's degree at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a small gem of a program that allows students to design their own curricula. Mine focused on art history (and curatorial issues toward the latter half of my undergrad carreer) and American race studies. Living in New York during my college years meant that the art-minded part of myself was more or less weaned on the New York museum and gallery scene. During my time at NYU, I also spent a semester in Paris, which provided another unique perspective on the contemporary art world. For the fourteen months after I graduated, I moved to Brooklyn and worked as an assistant/novice everything at the Robert Mapplethorpe Fouundation. I've just moved to San Francisco for the CCA curatorial program a few days ago.

I've done a lot of observation of the art world over the past five years, and I'm hoping that this will be a place where I can organize and gel these observations. I'm in a unique position, coming from the New York art world to that of San Francisco and California, on a greater scale, which has a completely different feel to it. I'm studying to be a curator, but I'm also a critic and a designer and a reader and a writer and observer, and this blog is meant to combine all of these things.

Also-- a note about the title... while I was thinking about starting a blog, my friend and former boss Joree suggested a blog where I review french fries at various food establishment, as fries are one of my favortire foods... I couldn't imagine having enough to say about fries for a whole blog (though I do have an idea for a fries and milk shakes-only restaurant, with nuanced condiment choices, but that will have to be a special bonus post for another day). However, I wanted to start an art blog and the fry thing got me thinking: I love art and fries, and the "art fry" combo kind of invokes my relative novice status in the art world. It borders on cutesy, but I'm willing to risk it... Hence: The Art Fry. Thanks, Joree!