SFMOMA and Waltz with Bashir

On my first day back in San Francisco, my first full day anyhow, I woke up, walked around my old neighborhood (the Tenderloin, for those who are familiar,) and spent a significant chunk of my day at the SFMOMA.

I spent a good amount of time sitting in Yerba Buena park, reading, watching the old-folks practicing tai chi, other people working out and running around the small circular path, the young children playing. The weather was unseasonably warm, the sy clear, and I was quite happy to be in America sharing public space with so many people from various backgrounds and of various ages. The exhibit I was about to participate in was made all the more interesting by this mindset.

I spent several hours exploring the entire museum, which I had not visited since my first time there in October of 2007 for Olafur Eliasson's solo show. I spent most of this time viewing "The Art of Participation, 1950-now," though I also briefly took in Martin Puryear's retrospective, which was pleasant, but I won't discuss here.

The Art of Participation covers many different styles and movements, but the temporal distance is never jarring, and even the oldest works still seem fresh and relevant. The curator has more or less resisted the urge to organize works by decade, instead organizing them by theme; "Utopia Revisited," "Testing Authority," "Instructions for Use," "Calls to Action," "The Open Work of Art," and "Public Dialogue." I was pleased to see that much of the work was rooted in the philosophy of John Cage and the Fluxus movement, both of which began to orient our understanding of the work of art as involving not only the artist and the artobject, but also the viewer. It is important that I stress, for me at least, it is necessary to remember that only great art is capable of opening a space for community to be sustained, and much of this 'postmodern' art is incapable of being raised beyond the category of Thing, a site of temporary gathering. Nonetheless, many great pieces certainly were included, and not all from the big names like Abromovic and Rauschenberg.

I won't bother to explain each and every piece, but here is a stream of consciousness recap of my highlights. Upon first entering the exhibit, I saw a printer and mounds of paper, part of the Open Work of Art section. I cannot recall the artists name, but the piece actually made an impression on me. The printer was printing news headlines from around the world, and had apparently been doing this since the exhibit opened, creating a long steady stream of text and paper. A grand piano was in the middle of the room, and the score to John Cage's 4'33" was on a wall nearby. Apparently regular performances of the work are given.

I noticed on the sign that SFMOMA has createda rather ingenious alternative to carrying around those silly audioguides. Each work has a unique number on it. By pulling out your cellphone and dialing 415-294-3609, and then keying in the work number, you can have access toa free audiotour, from home or in the museum.

Before coming to this floor to see the exhibit, I had first gone to view a short documentary about the composer, adding to the secondary literature and films I've already absorbed about Cage's life and work. Somehow, it is still striking to see an original annotated score of a work that was so transformative in American music. On the wall across from the piano was one of Rauschenberg's White Paintings, (1951,) which Cage sighted as an influence on his creation of 4'33". Instructions for Use included pieces that tell the viewer to do something. This could include using your body to hold 6 objects against the wall (with your feet, knees, waste, stomach, chest, and forehead,) or to bat another object around the floor with a broom. Another exhibit asks your to merely take a print, which are stacked in a 2-foot-tall pile on the floor. As I grabbed my copy, which was a bird in the sky, a young man with a thick accent asked, are you sure you can do that?, to which I replied, after removing my headphones, yes, look at the instructions on the sign. "Take One." The piece which really stuck out however was an installation by Tom Marioni, made from the remnants of a performance piece he's been doing since the '70s called "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art." Marioni would invite friends, and museum goers, to drink beer with him. The installation on view is a document of one of these performances, made of a shelf filed with hundreds of empty Anchor Steam bottles (a great beer brewed in SF,) a refrigerator, and a chair.

The next room, Utopia Revisited, consists mainly of digital/new-media/internet based pieces, some of which were pretty groundbreaking. Lyn Hershman Leeson's work in particular has stayed with me. Entitled "Life Squared," she uses Second Life as a way to explore her back catalog and to interact with her work in a way the traditional gallery space does not allow. Check out http://slurl.com/secondlife/NEWare/128/128/0 for more on her project. Along those lines, I was also impressed by Warren Sack's "Conversation Map," a work from 2000 which you can read more about at http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/conversationmap. I really enjoy seeing artist experiment with the internet as a medium, and have some ideas I'd like to try out on my own in this regard.

Another piece which was interesting, though I've forgotten who the artist was, was in the next room, a giant lattice of rubberbands. The spectator is invited to grab a rubberband and extend the grid, and then to do weird things with others with the rubberbands, stretching them out and whatever. The museum apparently hires folks to encourage the viewers to actually participate, and explain the works to the museum going public. The etiquette here is quite different than we have been trained to expect, and this is actually a bit discomforting, though ultimately it should be liberating. In the next section, Testing Authority, is a video piece by Francis Alys, a Belgian living and working in Mexico City whose work I was first exposed to in a Neuberger Show last year called "Person in the Crowd," which was also about performance art and sometime included participatory actions. Alys' work can be described as psychogepgraphic. (See his piece walking around Mexico City with a dripping paint can, something he's done in other cities as well. Also, here is a link to a web project he did for Dia, http://www.diaart.org/alys/intro.html.) His video in the SFMOMA consists of two shots projected side by side, in which Francis walks into a shop in Mexico City, buys a pistol, loads it, and then walks down the street until the police arrest him. One is of the actual event/walk, which lasted for almost 12 minutes, and the other is of a recreation of the event, in which the police agreed to take part. The recreation is heavily stylized to be reminiscent of a police/crime drama, with close ups of the gun and so on. In both case, particularly the 'real' walk, the attitude of the passerbys is astounding. It says a lot about Mexico City, but would be interesting in any city.

I should mention the pieces by Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Marina Abromovic, and Vito Acconci, but I won't. As much as I like all their work, they seemed more there for historical reasons, and I wasn't particularly enthralled, tho Yoko's "Cut Piece" was very interesting. Oh, that reminds me, of another film dramatization by Pierre Huyghe, called Third Memory, showing the reenactment of a crime on which the film Dog Day Afternoon was based, led by one of the actual participants... Lygia Clark's wearable objects bring to mind Charles LaBelle's similar work, and Joseph Beuys' piece was fantastic as well. An image of his signed by the artist, letting us know, in italian, that we are the revolution. Another was a cheap replicated box, empty, ready to be posited with meaning. The last is a TV address he made by satellite in the '70s, as a teacher, explaining his concept of social sculpture, that art has a social implication, and that art and politics coexist. The works themselves do not stand out in my memory, but his ideas do, and I think he'd be pleased by this.

Another interesting aspect of the exhibit was "Freecell," which was in th museums "D-Space." Modular cardboard which is intended to be folded and stacked to create tables, chairs, and other environmental components.

But the absolute highlight, easily my favorite, was an audio-video walking tour by Janet Cardiff. I took her audio walk of Central Park back in 2004 (?) and also had the chance to see 40-part Motet when it was at MoMA in NY. This piece is easily my favorite of the three. I would like to see more of her work, both av guides and installation, which are frequently collaborations with her partner George Miller. http://www.cardiffmiller.com/ So, she created this piece back in 2001 or so for SFMOMA. I checked out a video camera, but on my headphones, and began the tour. Her pieces instruct you to begin in a specific spot, and follow her instructions, letting her guide you on a narrative tour. In some ways, this piece was incredibly disorienting and at times uncomfortable. She lead me through a staff only door and up the stairs, while the sound of footsteps chased us. Where they real or in my headphones? She pauses in front of a window that is no longer there, musing about the beauty of the peaks in the distance, peaks I can only see through her lense. As we ascended the final stair case, I follow my camera in place with hers, paused on a large women singing soulfully. In front of me, I see a man wondering why I am 'filming' him, giving me a dirty look, while on the little screen of my camera I see the woman belting out the blues. These awkward moments make me love her work all the more, as they create real human emotions and interactions, often misunderstanding and disorientation. In this case, she is engaging with the museum setting as a space and imagining the lives of it's patrons.

Last spring, I took a course entitled "Aesthetics and Politics," and one of the texts we read was Nicolas Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics," a collection of critical pieces and curatorial explanations contextualizing a non-movement of '90s artists known as 'relational.' I later wrote a piece on pyschogeography and contemporary/performance/conceptual art, and Bourriaud's work was important in my understanding of the aesthetics behind these types of works. Lucia and I recently attended the "anyspacewhatever" exhibit at Guggenheim NY, and there was some overlap in the types of work presented in SF, though the scope and tone were completely distinct.

All in all, another impressive show at SFMOMA, one of my favorite art museums, and hopefully a future employer (?).

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Last night, Lucia and I went to the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville. I had decided to take it easy this weekend, so we took the train away from White Plains, had a nice dinner at Bollywood (contemporary indian, i had cocunut curry mahi mahi, which was delicious,) and went to see Waltz With Bashir. I had heard much about this movie, beginning with an interview Ari Folman, the film maker and lead character, on NPR months ago. Almost entirely animated, the film is a documentary of Folman's attempt to regain his memory of the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut during the first Lebanon War. Folman was 19 and in the IDF at the time. The score is composed by Max Richter, a German whose work I've written about before, and who I am a big fan of. The movie begins with Folman meeting with a friend at a bar late at night, and listening to his friend's recurring nightmare of being hounded by 26 dogs, the ghosts of 26 dogs he killed to keep from alerting the enemy more than 20 years prior. At this telling, Folman realized he had no memories of his own from his war years, and begins to track down his friends and comrades from the war. We are presented with a diverse and imaginative look at the experience of being at war. Folman doesn't really get into the politics of it all. No attempt to rationalize or justify the otherside is given, nor are any of the enemy combatants ever presented as characters. A clear anti-war message is intended, but Folman focuses only on the actual horror of war as experience by these young boys, and any group of young people really. This is the most striking point, for me, and an important point often missed more generally. After Folman regains his memories, he is describing them to his therapist and friend Ori Sivan. He remembers the nights of the massacre. His unit was shooting flares into the night sky, lighting up the area so that the Phalangists could carry out their massacre. He cannot recall if he launched the flare himself, but he still regards his action as comparable to carrying out the massacre itself. As Sivan mentioned earlier, it was another massacre that has haunted Folman as well, the much more terrible and sustained massacre at Auschwitz. Sivan says to Folman that he "took on the role of a Nazi." He isn't judging him, though, but explaining Folman's own worry. Later, a friend of Folman's, or maybe it was the TV host, describes the scene of the Palestinians leaving the camp as being reminiscent of the line of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They are not comparing the Israeli's to Nazis, however. Many lines of civilians who have been mistreated have looked like this. The point is an important one, however.

It has been argued that the concentration camps are the logical end of industrialization. The development of weapons, bombs, and other technology of death has made killing so much more efficient than in the past, and so it was inevitable that a people would develop a more efficient and industrial way of murdering. The camps, which were this but even more importantly were a means of dehumanization of the victims, were this end. But it's not just the Nazis. It is so easy to take on that role, it is inside all of us. That is the most horrifying thing about them, and about a movie like this. The last bit of the film is actual footage from the refugee camps after the massacre. Some film critics have suggested that the transition from animation to film is too abrupt and disorienting. I though I would agree, but it is actually necessary. Although much of the film can be disturbing, we have been lulled into a fantasy world. When the archival film footage comes on, we see actual dead bodies, murdered children, women crying out to god for help, and we are brought back to the realization that these events really happened. These poor young men were in some way involved in this massacre, though all they did was launch flares. No wonder they may have blocked out their memories of the event.

While I was in London back in 2006, I visited Oxford, and stopped by to a contemporary art museum. There was an exhibit at the time of Lebanese artists. I will never forget one of the pieces which showed a film of fireworks going off over Beirut. Or maybe they were rockets. It is hard to tell, but the point was just that. We often forget what fireworks stand for, but I doubt the citizens of Beirut do. So used to the shellings and falling rockets, the flares that light up the night sky so that their own citizens, Christians, can butcher Palestinians. And many other tragedies that occurred during the war that followed. About a week after I saw this exhibit, I was sitting in a cafe/laundromat doing laundry in Berlin, and my new friend came in to tell me that Israel has begun to bomb Lebanon. It never ends. Just like the line of refugees leaving the Warsaw Ghetto, or the Sabra camp, or Beirut in 06. I can't help but think of Nietzsche. What a crushing weight indeed if this is what we are meant to perpetually repeat. I think it is important that we recognize where we have gone wrong in the modern world, and that we understand that we are all capable of such things. We must therefore take steps to allow for authentic political engagement in society, but it seems naive to write even this after seeing such dreadful reality in this film last night.

Makes an exhibit about participatory art seem a bit hollow.