The Danny's Car Incident

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

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"

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

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

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.