Some Concerns

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

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

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??

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.