Curating Now 08

Curating Now 08 Contents

Introduction File Under Matt Coolidge Tanner Borskey Trevor Paglen Ralph Rugoff Mark Allen Could be Asked, Might Choose to Answer Americana continued

Leigh Markopoulos Alejandro Cesarco in conversation with Courtenay Finn in conversation with Jaime Austin Base/Basin: A Photographic Survey Making the Invisible Visible

2 3 7 10 12

in conversation with Jana Blankenship and Tamara Loewenstein 14 Machine Project Raimundas Malasauskas in conversation with Chris Fitzpatrick and Matthew Post Introduction Sally Szwed: Hawaii Matthew Post and Xiaoyu Weng: Illinois Tanner Borskey: Indiana 15 18 22 22 22 23 24 28 30 32

History Doesnt Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme Zhang Qing Bruce Altshuler Robin Carlson

Maria Antelman, Julio Cesar Morales, and Mark Tribe in conversation with Sally Szwed in conversation with Xiaoyu Weng The Challenge of Installation Art Labor Pains of an Institution Colophon
Cover image: Julio Cesar Morales in collaboration with Max La Riviere-Hedrick, Norma Listman and Daniel Gorell Interrupted Passage, 2008 HD Video Projection Production still (detail) Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles Curating Now 08 Produced by the MA Program in Curatorial Practice California College of the Arts, San Francisco

Introduction

e should view the function of education in the light of its Latin etymology: e-ducere = to guide out of. . . . This, I feel, is the true function of schoolthat of trying to liberate the critical capacity of the student. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, SuperStudio: Life Without Objects exhibition catalog, 1982

The above quotation prefaced Joseph del Pescos presentation at the Banff Centres Trade Secrets: Education/Collection/History symposium in November 2008. Del Pesco, a 2005 alumnus of CCAs MA Program in Curatorial Practice, was one of five graduates of similar programs who spoke on the subject of Curatorial Education and Its Discontents, and this quotation is one that I have returned to repeatedly in thinking about expectations of these programs. Acknowledging the growth of the art market, Trade Secrets sought to examine critically the concurrent huge growth in the number of graduate curatorial programs1 and the implications of both for curatorial practice today. It seems obvious that the curatorial profession, in the face of an overweening market, would be compelled to assert its validity by rationalizing its existence. Perhaps less obvious is the fact that curatorial programs can be seen as a manifestation of this process, as they define the profession and formalize its tools and methodologies. And indeed the recent economic downturn further underscores the importance of education as a way of navigating limited job availability. Trade Secrets proved a particularly innovative and constructive forum for considering these issues, as the sessions were led not only by educators and practicing curators, but also by graduates of a selection of curatorial studies programs from around the globe. The marked ambivalence on the part of some conference attendees about the practical value of curatorial practice programs seemed to arise mainly out of the familiar objection (not exclusive to this discipline) that two years in academia do not equate 2
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to two years in the field. One of the key questions was: How can one teach a hybrid, cannibalistic, deregulated practice?2 In response it was generally concluded that while it might not be possible to teach curating, it is viable to educate curators. In other words, curating may not be a streamlined, coherent discipline, but individuals involved in the process of becoming curators can benefit from study, particularly when they lack previous curatorial experience. The value of curatorial studies programs, therefore, lies in defining the discipline, providing tools to analyze existing institutional structures and exhibition-making methodologies, and understanding the possibilities implied in the realization of a personal curatorial practice. Furthermore, it was ultimately agreed that the various curatorial practice programs afford a significant advantage in certain aspects of the job market, and that rather than seeking to quantify their differences, it is more helpful to look at their shared benefits: - courses in critical theory aimed at providing a shared set of references - the refinement of critical capacity in both thinking and writing - supervised experiences in exhibition making - constant exposure to practitioners, both established and emerging - institutional information, not least in the form of email and telephone directories Organized by Kitty Scott, director of visual arts at the Banff Centre and herself a curatorial studies alumna, the conference also provided a welcome retrospective of two decades of curatorial education, and proof of the consequence and achievements of the various programs. Curating Now 08 marks the fifth anniversary of CCAs Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. The fact that Joseph del Pesco (part of the first graduating class and now an associate curator at Artists Space in New York) was asked to weigh in publicly on the benefits of such programs is evidence in itself of our achievements. This past year has seen the successful realization of Self-Storage, the class of 2008s

final exhibition project; the addition of new courses such as Steven Leibers Property from an Important Collection; research trips to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Tijuana; the launch of a three-year project in Wendover, Utah, with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI); the continuation of the multiyear Americana exhibition in partnership with the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; and yet another impressive roster of national and international visiting lecturers. The curriculum continues to develop in response to changes in the field, but certain elements remain notable staples. This sixth issue coalesces loosely around two: landscape and humor. San Franciscos proximity to a number of deserts and other noteworthy geographical phenomena as well as the programs close relationship with the CLUI continue to influence our thinking. And the contributions from Mark Allen, Raimundas Malasauskas, and Ralph Rugoff provoke as much through the acuity of their ideas as through humor and an appreciation of the absurd. Leigh Markopoulos Program Chair

The activities of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice in 20078 were made possible in part through substantial funding from The Getty Foundation, which has supported the development of the international visiting faculty and site-specific courses (20048), and the Asian Cultural Council in New York, which has supported a student scholarship (20078), as well as Mrs. Frances F. Bowes for generously offering her collection for the purposes of study and additionally funding the class Property from an Important Collection (spring 2008).

1 Trade Secrets program information, http:// www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=762 2 Cuauhtmoc Medina, Creating Frankenstein, Trade Secrets, Banff Centre, November 13, 2008.

File Under Alejandro Cesarco in conversation with Courtenay Finn

Self-Storage, installation view, 2008 Photo: Curatorial Industries

his conversation took place via a series of emails over the course of Self-Storage.1 Cesarco, an Uruguayan-born, Brooklyn-based artist, was one of 30 invited participants in the exhibition. Cesarco uses words and found narratives as pretexts, inscribing his practice in the lineage of conceptual artists focused on language, the instability of classification and the possible reverberation of the linguistic system within the visual system. His multimedia practice ranges from video to drawing, and from installations to book publishing.

Courtenay Finn: I have been thinking a lot about the role of the curator today and how it has changed since the 1960s, beginning largely with Walter Hopps and Harald Szeemann. It seems that curating has moved from being identified with institutions to a more independent model, from the category of caretaker to something more like an artistic practice. I am interested in how you see curating today, how you view its evolution since the 1960s, and also how you see it as an artistic practice . . . if you do at all?

Alejandro Cesarco: Your question perhaps has to do more with the sociology of art and the sociology of art professions, whereas my rather amateurish approach to curatorial practice is more inclined to consider its effects on actual exhibitions. It is clear, however, that various structural factors in the art world have contributed to changes in the role and status of the curator. Expansion of the field, increased authority, and changes in the nature of exhibitions have combined to allow curators, or at the very least some curators, to attain the status of auteur. Do you think there is perhaps a possible parallel between the developments in curatorial practice and those observed in cinema? The economic characteristics of film production appear to have several points in common with those governing the production of exhibitions. An auteur is not defined functionally, as accomplishing this or that task, but rather by a certain symbolical quality, and the recognition that an individual possesses that quality. Though in the end, of course, a product or event is produced, socialized, and takes a place in culture. How autonomous is this product? And how much does the symbolical aura of the author
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Self-Storage, installation view, 2008. Photo: Curatorial Industries

tint the evaluation of the product or event? I do think of exhibition making as a medium, and to assume a curatorial role is indeed a form of artistic practice. Marcel Broodthaers pointed out that the museum is one truth surrounded by other truths that are worth exploring. His statement in a way is perhaps the best answer to your question. Hasnt there been a trend lately for curators associated with the independent model you mention, perhaps best identified with curatorial strategies of the 1990s, to reenter the institution? CF: I think the notion that a curator can obtain the status of an auteur is really interesting, and increasingly relevant to both the independent and the institutional models. There are curators, much like film directors and authors, whose exhibitions are recognizable, with a distinct style and personality. Jens Hoffmann 4
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and Paul Schimmel immediately come to mind. This notion of the curator as auteur immediately raises the question of influence, as in your reference to the tinting of evaluation. Is the curator the author of an exhibition? And do the works of art within an exhibition, then, no longer operate the way their creators originally intended? Is the interpretation of the artwork changed by the curator, and if so, is this necessarily a bad thing? This brings us back to the notion of the curator as artist, or, to quote Hans Ulrich Obrist, the curator as producer. I think the question of whether or not this is positive or negative is misleadingit ignores the fact that we now have new models for reading, new devices for how to approach and interpret art today. Marcel Broodthaers is an excellent example, both in terms of how a curatorial role can relate to an artistic role, but also

with respect to this notion of the auteur. He once said, since Duchamp, the artist is the author of a definition. Choice can be considered evidence of artistic practice. Nicholas Bourriaud outlined this further when he said that there is a new definition of creation: To create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative. This definition also highlights the fact that every exhibition tells a story, operating as a narrative space, something that I find especially interesting in drawing a parallel between exhibition making and cinema. I have been thinking about various connections between developments in curatorial practice and those in cinema. The economic characteristics of film production have several points in common with those governing the production of exhibitions. I know that in your own work, ideas of narrative, language, and authorship appear quite frequently. Do they manifest

themselves differently in your artwork than in your curatorial projects? Or is it rather that in each situation, you select the most appropriate medium for your investigation? Do you see your role as that of an auteur? AC: Works of art and exhibitions are both collections of discrete entities compiled or edited for purposes of validation and distributionvehicles for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The organization of this knowledge creates various histories or narratives. Perhaps all that art is, is a point of observation for other people to notice. That is, the communication of someones observation to hopefully bring about a change of state in someone else. A work of art returns its viewers to themselves changed. The form in which the data is selected and compiled bears messages. So, yes, each project determines a form that best communicates its meanings. From this perspective, multiple histories are essential, enriching rather than impoverishing interpretation. To take a concrete example, many of the ideas we are talking about are addressed in Self-Storage. The exhibition allowed each invited artist to create an archive, to play curator in a way, within a formal, predetermined structure of presentation. In other words, there seemed to be an intent to work outside traditional roles. Could you elaborate on the methodology of, and reasons for, the show? CF: What you said about the importance of multiple histories, the notion that multiple voices aid interpretation, was a large part of our thinking as a curatorial collective. As a group of eight we have multiple opinions and individual ideas, requiring constant negotiation and discussion. Self-Storage mirrored this situation in the sense that it brings together diverse opinions and practices under a unified rubric. This model is interesting because it simultaneously departs from and engages in the notion of a themed exhibition. While our group did have a specific mode of engagement, a particular thread of investigation, we did not want to select work that necessarily reflected our own views. We decided rather to invite a multitude of artists, engaging in a variety of discourses, to participate. The unified rubric was the standard architecture of the box, coupled with the notion of the archive. We were interested in how each box could exist independently, as its own solo exhibition, curated exhibition, archive,

or artwork. Each box could be examined independently. Unlike a gallery space, where the curator makes connections among artworks through spatial relationships, physical juxtapositions, Self-Storage left these choices to the viewer. The viewer decided which boxes to see, and in what order. So in a way the viewer also got to play the role of curator. Each box also allowed its creatorcontributor to assume the role of curator. Is that how you approached your box? What was it about the project that intrigued you? That made it something that you wanted to participate in? Did it relate to some of the ideas that we have been discussing?

the historical process. After these loose parameters of content were determined, my subsequent curatorial-editorial decisions had to do with tone and point of viewa place from which to read the material. This brings me back to what we were talking about before in relation to ideas of practicethat interpretation has superseded intention and that the struggle to originate is now a struggle to choose.

AC: When I received the invitation to participate in Self-Storage I immediately thought of Andy Warhols time capsules and Felix GonzalezTorress wood letter boxes. Both are ways of documenting time and specifically relate to ideas of public and private, and the authors participation in these spheres. They are ultimately, of course, a kind of self-portraiture. What I liked about SelfStorage was its direct relation to the everyday, or that it allowed for that possibility. I also understood the invitation as an opportunity to make public what usually remains private or hiddenliterally things that end up in storage and perhaps dont graduate to exhibition status, such as works in Self-Storage, announcement progress, research materials, private correspondence, et cetera. I am actually most comfortable working CF: I really like the term desk-scale, and at this, lets call it, desk-scale. Taking Warhol I think it is very applicable both to our and Gonzalez-Torres as starting points I working practice as a curatorial collective decided to concentrate my compilation and to our approach to Self-Storage. around ideas regarding the nature and Many of our contributors seemed to echo possibility of portraiture. Playing somethis practice, collecting archives of correwhat with the fine line between self-prospondence, notes on projects, research motion and self-preservation. The archival materials, and bits and pieces from their and documentary impulse seems to be a own archives. They then presented these way to write ones own subjectivity into source materials, or building blocks, as
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finished works of art worthy of admiration and attention. They did, as you have said, operate in the vein of self-portraiture, allowing the inner workings, the intimacy of the studio, the manner in which one constructs an idea, to be made public, and precisely at desk-scale. Viewers had the opportunity to handle the material in the boxes, to spend as much time with the boxes as they wanted. I have been thinking about the notion of desk-scale as a medium or practice. Research, archiving, using cultural objects and reediting them to say something new. This idea of choosing as a method, moving from Marcel Duchamps readymades and being geared more toward creating or expanding a narrative. I wonder what you think of this, if you see this as a growing tendency in contemporary art? It seems also to reference again the notion of exhibition making as an artistic medium. Once Within a Room, your project currently on view at New Langton Arts in San Francisco (April 10May 31, 2008), makes use of narrative as a way to explore choice. Can you tell me a little bit about how that installation came about, and how you see it approaching or diverging from your Self-Storage box? AC: Once Within a Room is the spatial manifestation of a narrative dominated by the phantoms of particular pasts. It presents the collision of two illusions or the gap between two appearances: the classic trope of lover, beloved, and the space between them. The traces of two characters are staged but not made explicit. Some works within this configuration might be looked at as strategies of forgetting, others as indexes of the past-ness of the pastsouvenirs, or remains, that which is to be remembered, what is still standing between what was and what is no more. In a different context, this could perhaps function as a possible definition of photography, or at least a pre-digital conception of photography. That which has been very much relates to the documentary and archival impulse addressed in Self-Storage. What was your experience of seeing that exhibition at work? How were the boxes used? How did the public respond to them?

CF: I like your description of Once Within a Room, and this parallel between forgetting and remembering. The boxes in Self-Storage reflect these exact functions of the box: placing important things inside so that they are preserved, protected, and not forgotten, as well as using the box as a means to let go, almost an allowance to forget. Some of the boxes really came to lifethey were used regularly and began to show evidence of wear and tear. They were discussed, and their information and contents were debated, questioned, and passed on to others, who came in later to seek them out. Some boxes sat silently on the shelf, only occasionally discovered and enjoyed. There were days when the space was full of people interacting with each other and with the boxes, and other days when it was completely quiet with not a single visitor. Some people made it their mission to check out every box and to see the entire show. Others used the index to select boxes based on their interests, and some asked us, the librarians, to select boxes for them; they were just as interested in engaging with us and learning about our relationship to the works as in the works themselves. The show certainly achieved one of our most important goals, which was for each visitor to have an intimate and in-depth experience with the material. The disparate boxes came together for a brief period as a single installation, a unified collection, and as they dispersed back into the world, they manifested that brief experience. Perhaps this is giving too much weight to the ability of an object or work to reflect its own experience. Maybe what I mean is that the visitors to the library, if they encountered a work from Self-Storage in another context, would bring to their viewing the knowledge and memory of the exhibition, of the box, and of its connection to the collection. It was also interesting to see how visitors effectively curated their own viewing experience. They saw works of their choosing in an order that they initiated. For every box checked out, there exists a name written in pencil on an envelope, accompanied by a date stamp. These envelopes have become the index of the show, and all that remains of the visitors choices.

1 Self-Storage (April 18May 18, 2008) was organized by Curatorial Industries (the 2008 graduating class of the Curatorial Practice MA Program) at Devon Self-Storage, 300 Treat Avenue, San Francisco and featured work by Ant Farm Archive, Archigram, Fern Bayer, Alejandro Cesarco, Josh Churchill, Dexter Sinister, Trisha Donnelly, Patricia Esquivias, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Kristan Horton, Iman Issa, Marie Jager, The John Fare Estate, Stephen Kaltenbach, Steven Leiber Basement, Micah Lexier, The Long Now Foundation, Tom Marioni, Musuem of Jurassic Technology, Lisa Oppenheim, Prelinger Library, Lisi Raskin, Amy Robinson, Sean Snyder, Andrew Tosiello, Frances Trombly, Tris VonnaMichell, and Winchester Mystery House. http://www.curatorialindustries.org/

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Matt Coolidge In conversation with Jaime Austin

he Great Basin is a vast geological depression covering most of Nevada, the western half of Utah as well as sections of California, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyomingthat has no drainage to the sea. What happens in the basin stays within the sprawling expanse largely defined by emptiness. This very emptiness, often confused with insignificance, fueled 19th-century dreams of westward expansion, 20th-century efforts at world domination, and currently is trapping its inhabitants between 21st-century desires for wealth, McMansions, and sparkling casino lights, and the daily realities of neglect, pollution, and disparate wealth. Over time one of the most natural geological features of the western United States has become marked by sites that are intensely manmade: Bingham Copper Pit (the second largest open pit copper mine in the world), Bonneville Salt Flats (where the 300, 400, 500, and 600 mile per hour land speed barriers were broken), MagCorp Magnesium Chloride Plant (which the EPA has repeatedly designated the nations worst air polluter), and the largely abandoned remains of Wendover Air Base(which in 1943 was one of the largest military reserves in the world). The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has made its mission the research and documentation of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States in an effort to understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the earths surface. In 2008 the Curatorial Practice class of 2009 had two opportunities to travel to the Wendover Interpretive Research Facility with Matthew Coolidge, founder and Director of the CLUI. Nearly six months after our last trip, I had the chance to follow up with Coolidge to discuss the curatorial models that inform the CLUIs practice and to reflect on the Centers relationship to its Wendover outpost.

acres of suburban storage sheds full of fallow American artifacts. At the other end of the spectrum was the individual curatorial work of Robert Smithson, whose ideas about museums, offsite representation, and monumentalizing places and sights constituted a sort of implosion or de-physicalization of the other Smithsonian. Visitor centers, like those run by local chambers of commerce, municipalities, or government agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management or Park Service, were also models we looked at. Perhaps most inspiring though were the small, locally and independently run regional and thematic museums across the country, like the John May Museum Center and RV Park, Colorado Springs and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles. JA: Has the CLUIs mission or focus changed at all in the fourteen years since it was founded? MC: Weve had the same mission and methodology since the inception of the organization, namely that the CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Nothing has changed except the context that we operate in the changing timesand the resources available for getting things done. JA: Over the years your organization has collected source material and information on land use in the United States and compiled it within the Land Use Database. This database could exist as an online hub of information, why was it important for you to have a physical site with an exhibition space? MC: Weve had exhibition space since beginning in Oakland, California in 1994. As the Center deals with physical places we thought it crucial, and part of the fundamental mission of the organization, to have a physical presence. We wanted to join the community of museum/visitor center type spaces, adding our voice to the legions. A physical exhibition space also allows us to provide services to the communities where we are located, and to explore methodologies of presentation and representation beyond the web. While our audience largely accesses us through secondary mediapublications and the webwe humans do exist three-dimensionally in space, and
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Jaime Austin: What curatorial models did you look to when you were first thinking about forming The Center for Land Use Interpretation? Matthew Coolidge: We looked at as many curatorial models as we could. Starting at the top, in size and scope at least, was the Smithsonianthe American Museum of Museumswith its various themed venues, far flung research facilities, monthly magazine, and

physical and tactile media are still important and meaningful. Being in close proximity to the real object, or even better touching it, makes an impact, penetrating perception, imprinting more strongly on emotion and memory. Since our medium is space and place itself, something you cant put in a museum, you have to go to the source to experience it directly. So to have a network of places for people to physically visit has always been important to us. JA: One of the more interesting things about exhibitions at the Center is that they present visitors with heaps of information in a non-proscriptive way. How do you provoke people to think without spoon feeding them or becoming too didactic?

set up a filtering and sorting process using layers of criteria that are inclusive, but selective. We call the first level of criteria unusual and exemplary. When we began our initial collection of sites in our database, something we are always working with and adding to, we put a sort of a grid, like an archeological grid, across the entire nation, looking at everything section by section with a broad, general view.

MC: While on one hand we have studied and looked into things and have a plan and a methodology, on the other we JA: The Centers outpost in dont know what we are doing, Wendover is very different exactly, and we hope to never to your LA base. How do know entirely, frankly! We the contrasts of two sites consider what we do to be fuel different projects and research (though we usually dialogues? have no hypothesis we are trying to prove or disprove) and MC: We have several sites experimentation. People tend that we operate out of, like by nature towards resolutions, New York and Houston, but uncertainty is a compelling but Wendover was our first state, one where you feel more field location, or outpost. open to new ideas and experiWe set out in 1994 to find ences. Part of what we try to an offsite interpretive and convey to others in our exhibiprogramming location, and tions and other programs is a selected Wendover partially sense of this uncertainty, and because it provided the the excitement of exploration. greatest contrast to the We try to convey the wonder, urban spaces we, and most alarm, dissonance, incredulity, people, inhabit. It seemed or surprise of the discoveries to be a sort of American we make. While, of course many antipode, the most away of these discoveries are known place. Yet it was central, Signage at the Center for Land Use Interpretations facility at Wendover Air Base, Utah. Photo: Jaime Austin entities, they are recontextualtoo, lying in the middle ized through our interpretive of the nation, between the process so that they can be seen West and the East, literally in a new light. Exploration of the globe as Some places within the grid stood out as connecting the two coasts and bisected by a virgin entity is complete. We are now unusual. They appeared to be unique, the New York/San Francisco interstate. looking at ourselves, reflected on the spaces irregular, anomalous. So we noted them Historically, too, it was the place of passage we inhabit. and added them to the database. Also, patand national development, from the Native terns of repetition appeared, common Americans to the 19th-century immigrants, JA: How do you begin to identify potenthings like cornfields, suburbs, streets, the railroad, the Lincoln Highway, the first tial areas of research and then reflect the reservoirs, etc. So we began to single out telephone line, microwaves, the interstate. location and history of a site within your examples of these more ordinary things And because the region is empty, it attracts exhibitions? based on their ability to represent their all sorts of things that like emptiness and genre. This is the exemplary part of the that, although non-urban, are the product MC: To us everything harbors potential criteria. Floating above, we have instituof urban American existence, such as meaning, significance, and value. So we tional directives and programmatic themes radioactive and chemical wastes, defense 8
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that draw from this base material and act as additional filtering screens, further concentrating and refining the material. These also provide a sort of curatorial infrastructure and include themes we have identified as trends in the landscape data, like communication technologies, recreation, prefabrication, waste generation/disposal, de-industrialization, and adaptive reuse. We periodically revisit these themes through exhibitions and other programs. We also use a network of zones of differing magnitude to divide the nation into thematic regions, based on their respective overall trends and historic patterns of land use and development. All these things add up to one final level of resolution, a view of the entire nation as a whole. From the micro, to the macro.

R&D, and the burning desire to drive as fast as possible, in the middle of nowhere on the Bonneville Salt Flats. People sort of explode out there. JA: For people who havent been there, how would you describe the Wendover landscape? MC: Flatness punctuated by protrusions. Wendover is built on liminality. The undulating waves of Nevadas grey mountain ranges stop at the border of Utah, where Wendover is, and spill into the ultimate flats of the Salt Lake Desert, the desiccated, salty seabed of ancient Lake Bonneville. The Utah side was built first as a rail town, which has nearly entirely collapsed into battered trailers and living conditions that rival those on the poorest Indian Reservations. It was a stop on the rail heading into and out of the mountains, and later a big gas stop on the highway for cars and trucks. These east/west lines of travel bisect the north/south border and mountains. The borderline is made visible by the casinos, whose walls hug the state line like slices of pie, turning the Nevada side into a desert boomtown in the late 80s and early 90s. Most of the Utah side though is characterized by the remains of one of the largest military bases in the world, built to train bomber crews in WWII. Nearly 700 buildings were built for 20,000 people, and the few, less than 100, that remain have been converted to new uses, or are in various states of decay and collapse. Its a sort of deflated place on one side and a hyper-inflated one on the other. Surrounded by an ocean of sagebrush, salt flats, and bombing ranges, and nearly totally open expanses. JA: On our way to Wendover, you took us to see Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty. You mentioned Smithsons influence earlier in the interview, could you elaborate on the effect his works and writings had on your practice? MC: For me Smithson addressed the gap between environmental science, which is what I studied in college, and the rest of the universe of possible meanings. Rather than acting as a bridge though, he pointed out trajectories, notions suggesting alternatives. His Spiral Jetty is an illustration of this. It draws people to the Great Salt Lake like a lure. On the way there, people get excited, anticipating the arrival at this remote area, at this object they have heard about perhaps for years and that has taken an iconic or even mythic form in their minds. The prominence of the work in art

history gives it an authority, a power to draw people and to allow them to think more deeply, metaphorically, and poetically about its significance. The stimulated sensitization kindled by anticipation causes people to pull other things into their web of perception on the journey. The things they noticeencounters, trailers, rocks, signsbecome part of the experience of the Jetty Journey, and by extension part of the work, almost like a film being recorded and played back simultaneously. On arrival the notional Jetty and the actual Jetty merge into one multilayered object. Visitors stumble over the rocks to the base of the Jetty, and walk out to its end. But what then? What Smithson did in his film Spiral Jetty (1970) is run to the end, a dead end, run his hands through his hair in the downdraft of the helicopter filming him, then turn around, and go back. In a sense, what we are trying to do is to sustain this sensation, this state. The Jetty becomes not just a destination, but a point of embarkation. You jump off the end of the Jetty in a state of heightened awareness and you look at the rest of the spacethe detritus of the nearby oil jetty, the desiccated pelicans, the miasma of the Great Salt Lakeand continue to draw it into your matrix of meaning and significance. This ability can continue even as you head back home from the journey, and maybe make the world more interesting, meaningful, and engaging. JA: Was an artist residency program always part of your vision for the CLUI? How did this program become established at Wendover? MC: The residence program began soon after we established an exhibition space at Wendover. Our first project was to put up an interpretive exhibit about the area in a former barracks. The exhibit was open 24/7 and was accessible by calling a phone number posted on the door to get the combination for the entry keypad. Gradually we realized that this area was so rich that we needed help mining its interpretive resources. And we thought that others, too, would be inspired by this place if given a chance to stay. Wendover is normally passed through quickly by people who do not live there. It seemed like the perfect place to assemble a sort of interpretive research and development center, a proving ground for ideas about place and landscape, to examine this remarkable region as a mirror reflecting culture. It was also relatively inexpensive for us to

occupy buildings, so the program could exist outside of the typical economic constraints for such things. We just had to spend time and effort to bring in trailers and fix up buildings. It was very DIY. We eventually got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which continued over several years and solidified the program. It is really a collaborative effort supported by the people that go there, many of whom return to work on larger projects. The users tend to leave it in a better state than they find it, and that energy keeps it improving and expanding along the way. JA: By selecting specific artists for the residencies and then asking them to produce and exhibit work that explores themes related to the area, do you think of your work as curating the Wendover site and the way people experience it? MC: I suppose thats one way of looking at it. There are many other interpretive layers at Wendover, too, as there are everywhere. Think of the road signs that dictate the rate at which we pass through space, when we stop or go, where points of interest are. Or the roads that direct access to the landscape. Architecturea public faade that reflects intentions about the activities in town, the local newspaper, the chamber of commerce brochure, the highway visitor center. All these shape the ways that people see and understand the place. Ours is just another channel. We all select things to notice or ignore as we go through life. We are all curators of our own experience. We are all centers of our own world. The art of curationliterally where art and curation mergeis where the perspective of one is shared with another making contact in a way that transcends normal literal communication. Where the ideas are more of a summation of conditions rather than simply a statement about things. Where overarching notions and truths become apparent. I suppose you could say that we, the CLUI, provide an institutionally selected perspective that others can access and share, should they choose to do so. If what we do is of value then this perspective helps others see things in a way that moves them and the collective understanding of the world forward, improving lives in some way evenor perhaps especially.

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Base/Basin:A Photographic Survey Tanner Borskey

elcome to the Base Basin Project. Base/Basin looks at the bottom and the top of Wendover, and through an inversion process, emits reoriented participants out the other end upside down. So to speak. Here we are, afterall, in the Great Basin, the vast geomorphological area that covers much of Nevada and Utah, and has no drainage to the sea. The salty mudflats that surround you form the silty bottom of a giant lake that evaporated away thousands of years ago. This is the bottom of the basin. You are also standing on a former military base, where the final rehearsal for the atomic bombing of Japan took place. Zero time at the birth of the anthropotechnological era, with the instantaneous irreversible invention of the man-made end of the natural world. We are now sentient, and awake. Matthew Coolidge, Introduction, Base/Basin, 2008, p. 5

With our sights set eastward, we left the city behind. For many the idea of heading inland towards the landscape of the encompassing desert meant surrendering to unknown elements. For others it may have become a lesson in clarity, of entertaining the possibility of getting lost, of shedding a burdensome urban shell. 493 miles from San Francisco, just beyond the Sierras and on the state line between Utah and Nevada, the city of Wendover lay waiting to reveal fragments of its profound history. We spent the journey to our post observing the transitions taking place on the ground below; winding highways and bridges ceding to prominent mountains and the eventual immensity of the desert plateau.

Racing the setting sun we battled the snows attempt at obscuring our path. The van dipped and swayed with the weathered trail, our journey a crusade against relentless nature. Eventually the road opened to reveal a clear view of the Great Salt Lake. Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty had until then existed in highlymediated referential zones. As proximity began to dispel the Jettys mythic allure, no photograph or previously recorded account seemed to make sense. There was only the lake, the rock, the fading sunlight, and a familiar storytraversing the spiral to its center uncovered its ground truth.

The remaining buildings on the abandoned Wendover Air Force Base sit just below the sediment lines etched on the surrounding mountains. From the tower at the Center for Land Use Interpretations headquarters we observe the residual traces of militaristic activity now in a state of simultaneous decay and regeneration.

Reordering and reinventing our surroundings with an acceptance and negotiation of the past has become our contribution and purpose at the Wendover site and as students. The attempts by our predecessors to preserve and reconstitute what Wendover and the surrounding landscape have come to symbolize over time remain in the continuum of an evolving history.

To counter complete stagnation as a result of inactivity and disuse many of the facilities on the Wendover base have been salvaged as spaces for exhibition and artistic production. Out here the focus seems grounded in exercise and experimentation, in the self-reflexive modeling of the surroundings without anxiety over a quantifiable audience. Each space, whether occupied or vacant, retains the marks of transience.

The desert gives the illusion of complete disclosure, of offering nowhere to hide. Beyond the Wendover airstrip adjacent to the firing range, igloos once used for the storage of artillery have now become the dumping ground for the tax records of the citys casinos. Almost completely indiscernible from the towers on the base, these World War II weapons containers continue to camouflage and obscure their contents; inside are the munitions required for the entertainment blitzkrieg that takes place between the military base and the towering mountains. Slot machines and blackjack tables, chips and dice await their call to the field.

Are we moving forward or is the ground just shifting beneath our feet?

Out here there is nowhere to go but down.

Time stands still inside Wendovers casinos. The absence of windows adds to their disorienting conditions: the mirroring of patterned carpet on the ceiling, the blips and bloops from flashing strobe teleprompters and slot machines, the sound of ice clinking in rocks glasses, the smell of grease and cigarette smoke, the lingering of paper decorations from holidays long passed, the neglected arcade in disrepair, hopeful first timers and embittered regulars anxiously sucking on cigarettes, eyes glazed and unblinking, awaiting riches and a reason to leave.

Our investigations of the Wendover site lead us here, the swimming pool used by soldiers and families for training and leisure. Some 12 feet below ground level at its deepest point, the pool sits as a metaphor for the desertion of the base as well as for the Great Basin extending out past the airstrip. We enact the eventual loss of the base to entropic time as we recede into the earth. Photos: Jaime Austin, Tanner Borskey, Robin Carlson

Trevor Paglen LACROSSE/ONYX II Radar Imaging Reconnaissance Satellite Passing Through Draco (USA 69), 2007 C-print, 48 x 60 inches Courtesy the artist and Bellwether, New York Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen Making the Invisible Visible

work in UC Berkeleys geography department, which is in a building called McCone Hall. John McCone took over from Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence in 1961. I like the idea of a social science department housed in a building named after a CIA director. I think it keeps us honest, or at least reminds us that producing knowledge is never neutral.

I got my MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a very theory-heavy program. Art theory is usually taught through a kind of semiotic tradition that derives from literaturethinking about words and the extent to which language actually maps onto, or corresponds to, external reality. Do images tell the truth? I got really frustrated with that way of thinking about images

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and art because you end up talking about art as if it lives in outer space, in a vacuum. As if it somehow exists independently of people seeing it and independently of the conditions under which its produced and displayed. I wanted to go beyond this limited way of thinking and find other theoretical languages that would let me account for relationality. I got interested in geography because it is really the last materialistic discipline and it has a very, very powerful theoretical language. Although my geographical work has shifted my art practice towards the realms of research and information, I assume that people can see that I still participate in artistic traditions. There are obvious references to Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and the genre of heroic landscape photography in many of my images. In foregrounding the fact that I am participating in certain kinds of visual and exhibition traditions, I find it important to work very closely with curators to try to figure out exactly how to present my work in such a way that theres enough information to contextualize it but not so much as to ultimately render the shows didactic. I write books if I want to be didactic, but in terms of making exhibitions and artwork Im more interested in playing with questions about what we know and how we know it, the status of evidence and of the witness questions which are synonymous with the history of art, really, and trying to develop a visual vocabulary with which to see the world around us. I always start from the beginning in terms of deciding what media, from photography to installation or video, and what visual language will best express my ideas. Although it is liberating not being attached to any particular kind of stylistic device, it is hard to work across multiple media and maintain a level of formal rigor, because it takes four or five years to master a medium well enough to be able to put something in public. So I often end up collaborating with other people who know what theyre doing. The sky photographs took me years and years to figure out. The starting point for finding the subjects is modeling the orbits of spacecraft through accurate observation of the night sky. There are a handful of people around the world, amateur astronomers, who actually do this. I was given a commission by the IBM Center for Art and Technology, which was augmented by Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), for the series The Other Night Sky. We got hold of an amateur index of classified spacecraft orbits and built a software suite that

would actually track them. In this way we could model the orbits of what are essentially secret moons around the Earth. There were around 189 of these things when we put the show up at BAM (June 1 September 14, 2008) and I think there are a couple more now. The computer program helps us to predict accurately where, and when, something is going to be in the sky and how bright it is going to be, based on where the sun is and how far the spacecraft is from the Earth. I have a mount that is motorized, its very heavy and has giant gears on it which you can control with a computer. Theres a telescope on the mount and it is attached to a pretty sensitive CCD camera. I start the photography process focusing on a star that is going to be near the satellite and sending that information to the computer which uses software to keep the star in the frame at all time. It also sends commands out to the mount motors to track the movement of the star, or more accurately the movement of the Earth. On top of that Ill either have another telescope with a camera attached to it or a camera with a wide angle lens, either digital 35 millimeter or 4 x 5, depending on just how bright things are going be and what I want the image to look like. You can take a long exposure of the sky (anything between 10 seconds and four hours) and things will appear if youre shooting in the right spot. The star trails show up as little scratches in the image and little white points are actually spacecraft orbiting the Earth at the exact same speed as the Earth itself rotates. I have images of various types of classified aircrafts and also of geostationary satellites used in targeting and secure communications. Most are the property of the National Reconnaissance Office, which is the United States other space agency and is in the business of reconnaissance satellites and other classified projects. It was started about a year after NASA and its existence was kept secret until around 1992. The whole process really requires an unbelievable amount of patience. Once Id mastered the technique, I shot most nights for three or four years and ended up with two thousand plus images. I think there are 15 or 16 images in The Other Night Sky. I keep working on them, mostly from the roof of my house in the city. This means I really have to figure out how to use light pollution and other irritants to my advantage in terms of developing an aesthetic. The deep sky images are shot out in the desert, really far away from any artificial conditions.

I have also used the tools of astrophotography and astronomy to try to photograph some of the unacknowledged places that are on the land. Many of the USs classified sites have huge buffer zones around them. They are surrounded by dozens and dozens of miles of restricted area, and there is often nowhere on public land from which to observe them with the unaided eye. So Ive been trying to use telescopes with anywhere between about 1200 to 7000 millimeter lenses to help me see. Its like taking an Ansel Adams photo and blowing it up hundreds or even thousands of times and learning that in fact the desert is not nearly what it appears to be. Youre looking through so much heat and so much haze in my images that they themselves start to collapse. All the colors fall apart creating impressionistic blurs out of surveillance towers or aircraft, flight test centers etc. The way that I think about the project is not only as documenting these places but also as photographing what it looks like when youre pushing your eyes as far as they will go. At around 4445 miles the images really start to collapse completely. Ive photographed a naval site off the coast of Malibu at a distance of 65 miles and the only evidence that you see of it in the image is a slight indentation in the horizon. In terms of developing a visual language with which to try to see this invisible world, this process takes you in a direction of complete abstraction, where your eyes are pushed to the point of collapse and vision falls apart. Its abstraction with a meaning so terrifying and loaded that it becomes an interesting new art form. As a viewer, you have to trust me. A critic who saw The Other Night Sky at BAM asked, how do I know you didnt just scratch the film. Thats what it looks like. It would make my life a hell of a lot easier. I didnt do it but you shouldnt believe me and that becomes part of the work as well. I think that the real world is infinitely weirder than anything I could invent.

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. http://www.paglen.com/ This text is an excerpted version of his presentation in a seminar that was part of the spring 2008 Professional Development class, The Void: Interpreting Wendover with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
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term. In either case, one of my main goals in making exhibitions is to give people a space in which they have the freedom to think and see and feel in different ways, and to actively respond to the art theyre encountering. JB & TL: A sense of play and imagination both appear important to your practice. How do you keep a sense of whimsy while tackling serious concepts? RR: I think Ive always been leery of pomposity and self-importance because they are symptoms of a closed circuit or network. Humor and playfulness have appealed to me in part as tools for deflating pretensions and opening some air vents in stuffy systems. And also because of the pleasure they provide. Theyre both ways that artists can disrupt habitual ways of thinking and seeing. It is possible to be humorous in very dark ways, to use humor to articulate complexity rather than to simplify. Of course a lot of great art deals with or conjures experiences that dont lend themselves to humor. In one of the last shows I organized, The Painting of Modern Life (2007), there werent many works that involved humor (though some did, including the painting Woman with Umbrella, 1964, by Gerhard Richter, whos not always the funniest artist). But even serious art can fall flat if it isnt informed by a sense of play at some level. In my experience when art has some kind of playful relationship to the environment in which it is presented, it can really enable audiences to jettison a lot of the usual assumptions and expectations that hinder their ability to respond playfully. JB & TL: Thinking about your appreciation of amateur approaches to art, as evidenced in your recent exhibition Amateurs at the Wattis Institute, have you seen any notable amateur approaches to curating? RR: I think most of my favorite exhibitions have been curated by amateur curators, who happen to be artists in their day jobs. People like Mike Kelley, Jeremy Deller, Fred Wilson, Tacita Dean, Jeffrey Vallance, and Jim Shaw. Theyre not amateurs in the art world, but they approach curating with the amateurs open thinking. JB & TL: Can you share some writers, curators or exhibitions that have inspired and shaped your practice? RR: Brian ODohertys book Inside the White Cube; Robert Smithsons writings; Mike Kelleys writings for Artforum and his exhibition The Uncanny; Douglas Blaus Fictions exhibition in the late 1980s and his catalogue essays; Jeffrey Vallances exhibitions
Gelitin Normally, proceeding and unrestricted with without title, 2008 Mixed media Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London Image Steve White, courtesy Southbank Centre, London

Ralph Rugoff in conversation with Jana Blankenship and Tamara Loewenstein

alph Rugoff is the Director of the Hayward Gallery in London. Prior to moving to London, he directed the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco from 200006. During this time he and Kate Fowle established the Curatorial Practice MA Program. He recently curated Amateurs (2008) at the CCA Wattis Institute and Psycho Buildings: Artists Take On Architecture (2008) at the Hayward Gallery. Rugoff gave a seminar presentation in the spring 2008 Professional Development class. Jana Blankenship & Tamara Loewenstein: At the opening of Sudden Glory: Sight Gags and Slapstick in Contemporary Art at the Wattis Institute in 2002, artist Martin Kersels caught you completely off guard, swept you off your feet and had you dangling by your ankles. In your recounts of this experience you note feeling thankful for having your perspective so dramatically shifted in an instant. How did this experience affect your practice? Do you feel it is possible to create such an experience through exhibition making? Ralph Rugoff: Getting flipped upside by Martin was a very memorable experience and an unforgettable physical sensation, and I guess I have used it as a benchmark for the disorienting thrill of having the way you see things turned upside down; a radical point-of-view change that makes you feel more alive by unhinging your habitual perspective. Of course art can engineer a radical perspectival shift in ways that are less dramatic and less immediate, but equally engaging over the long

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in Las Vegas; Jeremy Dellers recent show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Thomas Hirschhorns exhibitions, especially his Precarious Museum in Paris, and the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Many influential writers for me tend to be fiction writers who also write essays, like W.G. Sebald, J.G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michel Houellebecq. JB & TL: The current issue of Art Lies Magazine pronounces The Death of the Curator. What are your thoughts on this statement and how do you envision the future of curating unfolding? RR: I dont really see the death of the curator, though one sometimes longs for it after reading some of the unbearably

pretentious rhetoric that accompanies exhibitions. Instead I think and hope the field of curating can only become more lively and playful and thoughtful. I think the biggest challenge for curators is to keep thinking of ways to allow people to encounter art under circumstances that allow for intimacy and a sense of discovery. And by extension, to help every viewer realize they are participating in a discussion when they enter an exhibition, and that their responses are a crucial part of that conversation. So Im always a little suspicious when curators focus on earth-shaking global issues in speaking about their exhibitions but dont engage with how the exhibition aims to re-engage and activate the responses of individual visitors.

JB & TL: Appointed director of the Hayward Gallery in 2006, you curated two exhibitions last year, The Painting of Modern Life and Psycho Buildings, which engaged the space and the audience in innovative and challenging ways. What is in the works now? RR: Im working on Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Paintings and Art School, a project questioning how we teach art that will turn the Hayward into a public art school for six weeks. JB & TL: Sounds very exciting! We look forward to hearing more about these projects as they happen.

Mark Allen Machine Project

Reading While Trapped in the Secret Gallery, with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer March 18, 2006 Photo: Jason Brown Courtesy Machine Project, Los Angeles

tarting Machine Project was really about wanting to create a context for what I was interested in rather than plugging into pre-existing contexts that didnt feel like a good fit. I found our storefront in 2003. Its in a part of Los Angeles where people actually walk around, next to a caf and a film center that used to be a bookstore. I was really attracted to the idea of an accessible space where you would have some flow between foot traffic and destination visitors. Running a storefront project is relatively affordable in Los Angeles but for the first two years I had to fund the gallery by living on my friends screened-in porch while I paid the rent. I taught classes to raise additional

money and then after about two and a half years, I realized I was really invested in continuing the Machine Project so I asked a couple of people I had worked with to form a board and a 501 (c) (3) with me. So now we are a regular non-profit, funded through grants from organizations like the Warhol and the Annenberg, plus a very small amount of county and city money. Im an artist, I went to art school, art people visit us, but were somewhat adjacent to the art world and its a little misleading to say we run a gallery. We have a problem with people hearing about us and then coming by to check out the space as we only do about three shows a year and theres hardly ever anything on view,
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as such. Were also not particularly tidy so it almost always looks like were either about to be a business or have just gone out of business. In fact, were primarily an events space at this point. We do an event almost every weekend, and sometimes two or three times a week, and we use our basement space for classes and developing projects. The main window stays open permanently so that you can always see what were doing. That level of transparency is something that I value philosophically, but it is also a practical thing. We dont make a value distinction between the different activities or fallow times. Our audience is a third artists and art world, a third people who come initially for specific talks like the sex life of sea slugs and have such a good time that they start coming more regularly, and a third people from the neighborhood.

etc. I think this interest is partly driven by the space because in some ways a storefront functions better as an active arena rather than as a display case. We never do painting or photography shows at Machine not only because they are not where my curatorial interests lie, but because the work doesnt look good. You have to engage the architecture, in a way, or else the work suffers. Some of my favorite events have been organized in collaboration with the Austrian art collective Monochrom around the phenomenon of the experience economy. This idea is, of course, as familiar to Austrians as it is to Americans, but the use of the word experience is different. Here we could say, the Olive Garden, a dining experience, whereas in German thats a little nonsensical. Monochrom curated

Reading While Trapped in the Secret Gallery, with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer March 18, 2006, Photo: Jason Brown, Courtesy Machine Project, Los Angeles

We tend to draw pretty big crowds, but our capacity is around sixty people, which is why we have a TV monitor and sound system out front so people can participate from the street. My interest in exhibitions has become really specific. Im interested in ways that searching for meaning in the world can happen in a gallery and consequently Im interested in artists who have a fairly serious non-aesthetical research practice, whether anthropological, biological, sociological 16
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four different experiences for us and the one that created the most excitement was Experience the Experience of being Buried Alive (2005). They gave a lecture on the history of live burial and we then dug a grave in the garden behind the gallery so that volunteers could be buried alive for fifteen minutes. We made a box coffin, and once you were in we would screw down the lid and pile earth on top. There was no external air supply, but we installed a wire, and a black and white night-vision surveil-

lance camera, like a coffin-cam. Inside the gallery we had candles and a closed circuit TV of the burial site, and in front of the gallery we mounted a monitor, which everybody stood around, watching peoples faces during the event. There was a really great moment when a buried couple on a first date started kissing. Everyone out front began applauding madly. I love that they were applauding although they knew the couple couldnt hear them and that the couple was having this kind of private moment but they also knew they were on television. The relationship between singular, intimate aesthetic experiences and group experiences comes up in a lot of my curatorial work and when those moments emerge spontaneously, I feel like were really doing something. We also stage events in our basement Secret Gallery, visible through a lens in the floor of the main space. One of my favorite projects was called Basement Poets and involved Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer, who in addition to writing their own poetry create real-time collaborative poetry. They ask their audience to introduce a topic and word, add the second word themselves and then its back to the audience and so on. I like how this leads an audience through the act of writing poetry more or less unconsciously, and as one of my curatorial techniques involves taking things which I think are interesting and making them a little stupider, we stuck Joshua and Matt in the basement. You could see them through the lens, and we hooked up a funnel and tube so you could communicate with them, and also drilled a slot in the floor. Visitors put suggestions for a poem together with some money in an envelope, which they then pushed through the slot. The size of the tip dictated the length of the poem; so fifty cents might get you a four-word poem and twenty bucks might buy you half an hours worth. At the opening everyone was standing around drinking beer and socializing but at all times there were one, and occasionally two, people lying face down on the floor having an aesthetic experience. I like a lot of things about this event, one was that nobody was paying attention to the person on the floor. And I liked this ridiculous literalization of the aesthetic experience. Say youre at a museum and there are kids running around, theres the annoying docent tour, but you see something that really speaks to you and suddenly youre involved in a completely personal, one-onone experiencethis is the literal version of that moment.

We also do a lot of things with a pedagogical angle to them. Im interested in how you sustain and keep building your intellectual life after graduating from formal education. I think that one of the core missions of the gallery is acknowledging the need for that continued development and providing a place for it to happen. Weve worked on a couple of projects with the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which looks at how mathematics and physics are visualized. One of the projects that attracted a lot of attention centered around Hyperbolic crochet. Hyperbolic space is a type of non-Euclidian space that mathematicians have known about for a long time although they did not really have a good way of modeling it threedimensionally. The Institute developed a technique of crocheting models with crenellations, which could be used as pedagogical tools to demonstrate how hyperbolic space works. We were really interested in this process because it links a mathematical model with pedagogy and craft. So we exhibited a wide variety of the models and then we taught people how to make them. I learned that crocheters are a little fanatical. We had people who said, Ive done every kind of crochet in the world but not hyperbolic crochet so Im going to drive up from San Diego to do this. Some of the most interesting education happens informally between the participants and our workshop was a really nice intersection of hardcore crocheters, young local artists, and mathematicians. I think this interest in recreational pedagogy comes out of the kinds of cultural changes that have happened through the Internet. People have naturalized their relationship to information, and random learning as a form of casual entertainment has become part of our culture. In a way, this makes what we do seem very naturalits perfectly normal to learn about the sex life of sea slugs one week and jam making the next, because this mirrors how interests move through networked information. Looking at audience interaction informs our ideas about education and the kinds of workshops we do. The workshops actually grew out of my experiences of trying to teach myself electronics when I was in graduate school. It took me forever but I realized after about three years, when I was somewhat proficient, that I could more or less get people up to where I was in about ten hours. I was teaching so many people individually that at a certain point it made sense to get them all together. Today our aim is basically to help people past that initial phase where they dont know anything. The

workshops are short; we just want to get people comfortable with things, like sewing. There are a huge number of people that want to know how to sew, but they dont have a sewing machine, or they never learned as children. We also organize a lot of workshops, which are a bit less practical. Like our weeklong history of camouflage, which included a gilly suit-making workshop. We designed our gilly suits to match the neighborhood, and then sent everyone out to see how long they could remain undetected. I think we freaked out some of our neighbors. We also did a meat-cloning workshop with the artistic research laboratory SymbioticA. Sometimes workshops bring together people from different backgrounds and sometimes we deliberately orchestrate specific crossovers. For example, Id noticed that the electronics class and the sewing class were starting to gender. So we designed a class around felt-making and circuit board design. You started with wool, made felt out of it, learned how to dye it with natural dyes gathered from the neighborhood park, and then used it to sew together some kind of creature. After that you learned to design circuit boards using CAD software, printed out the circuit boards, etched and soldered them together. There are always going to be some people who want to learn felting but couldnt care less about electronics and vice versa, so we just kind of jam them together. Were not anti-specialization, but we do like to look at as many different things as possible, as in-depth as possible. We wont look at mathematical paper folding in general, well look at someone who took ten years to make specific fractal geometry paper-fold models. A lecture wont be about biotechnology, it will concentrate on the means of cloning actual meat cells. We try to drill into specific things, but just keep changing our focus a little bit. Who wants to be a professional? I think its more fun to learn about new things all the time and I particularly enjoy really absurd things. Being serious about the playful things and playful about the serious things is, not to be a clich, a guiding philosophy for us. We get huge satisfaction out of approaching projects as seriously and thoroughly as we canif were going to bury people, well dig a hole, make a coffin, screw the lid down, and pile dirt on top. Weve very slowly built up a reputation of sorts that has led to us being invited to do projects in other spaces. Whats really interesting is that as a gallery we function as a venue and project developer, whereas

for our offsite projects we transform into an art collective. We recently participated in a dusk-to-dawn arts festival in Los Angeles called Glow, and were now working on a one-day project for LACMA. The museum had approached us originally to do a piece for the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum but we turned them down because we felt like we were the party entertainment. We get a lot of invitations along the lines of we need something wacky, call Machine Project! and we try to resist them. But I subsequently had a really fantastic meeting with Charlotte Cotton, LACMAs new photography curator, and as we were wandering around the museum in some dusty corner that Id never been in before I said, Well, you should just let us take over the whole museum for one day of performances and interventions. And she said, yeah, that sounds great. It was really surprising, but thats what were doing. We have organized around 60 performances and interventions to take place throughout the museum. There will also be workshops, a nap area, ambient haircuts, and a video show with live music. Events on that scale are facilitated by the fact that I do tend to work with the same people over and over again. If I do a show with artists, or performers especially, Ill probably do something with them twice a year. I keep working with the same group of about 30 to 40 people and I think thats an important thing to think about as a curator because to a certain degree youre reflecting your culture, and how you create that group of people is an interesting part of the process. I very seldom see a work or event and think, I want to do this at Machine Project. I work with people and ask them what they want to do, and then together we try to develop an idea that makes sense for where we are in Los Angeles.

Mark Allen is the founder and Director of Machine Project, Los Angeles. http://machineproject.com/ This text is an excerpted version of his presentation in a fall 2008 Exhibition Project seminar.

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hris Fitzpatrick and Matthew Post recently conducted the following interview with Raimundas Malasauskas in a hot air balloon over Nice, France. Born in Vilnius, Lithuania during Soviet times, Malasauskas has curated numerous exhibitions and events internationally, is a widely published author, and has co-written a libretto. Malasauskas participation as visiting faculty (2007/08) in the Curatorial Practice MA Program was made possible by a grant from The Getty Foundation. He now lives in Paris and travels constantly. Chris Fitzpatrick: This is our first time in a hot air balloon; it is an incredible mode of transportation! We are above Nice, but are we still in Nice? Raimundas Malasauskas: No, I dont think the air belongs to Nice . . . it must belong to France, I believe. It is above city politics, air is national. Matthew Post: Is air only temporarily national? Maybe airflow presents a way of thinking about the interchange of systems and pressures from one zone to another. How have your projectswhich have taken place in different atmospheresreconciled their sectioning and exchanging of air in different contexts and locations? RM: Let me answer in the Chauncey-the-Gardener way: you have air, you have wind, you have storms, you have hurricanes, and you have typhoons. CF: I heard that Marcel Duchamp put 50cc of Parisian air into a vial. It also makes me wonder about Art & Languages Air Show, Michael Asher, and Robert Barry releasing inert gases back into the air. Do you think Barrys work may have traveled to France by now and become French? RM: Yeah, there is a lot of gas . . . I remember Chernobyl survivors used to say that the toxic air could be seen, orange, hovering over their heads, sometimes walking next to them. And no, it could not have gotten that farRobert Barrys. Air is a slow traveler and does not keep its identity for long. MP: When did you feel that other dimensions of reality were impinging on your own? RM: It is not very clear to me which dimension is mine. I like to think I can freely move through different ones. 18
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MP: How did you end up as a cultural producer? When did it begin? RM: It began in high school. More or less when the Wall came down. MP: Youve talked about how the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius was an alien in Lithuania. What was it like working there? RM: Like working in a flying saucer, of course. Later on the mother ship came to rescue me and take me back to my planet, where we are right now. CF: You seem to have worked in and outside of institutions throughout your career. What challenges do curators face when working independently and nomadically? RM: The major challenge is to overcome exhaustion, memory loss, and fits of rage. MP: In your experience of working mainly between Paris, Vilnius, and New York does the center differ from working on the periphery? RM: I dont think the binomial center/ periphery is valid anymore. Everything is periphery now. CF: How does illusion function as a revolutionary weapon? RM: When it blinds your counter-revolutionary opponent. MP: How does the production of the space between reality and illusion, fiction and non-fiction, play out in artistic or curatorial practice? RM: Honestly, I think that space is overcrowded. One has to get away from it, or die asphyxiated. CF: Did your desire to escape from space lead to your interest in the malleability of time? RM: I dont want to escape from space in general (I couldnt), but from that particular space between fiction and reality where honestly there is no place left for a pin. The whole terminology fiction/reality has to be re-named so that it makes sense again, because right now it has become desemanticized through excess use. I think any

Dora Garcia What a Fucking Wonderful Audience, 2008 Performance-based guided tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Performer: Kate Blackmore Photo: Greg Weight

sensitive person should be interested in the resilient nature of time because we witness it daily, and sometimes it is truly unbelievable. MP: Your projects do not follow a linear temporality. They take place in the past or the future, even both simultaneously. RM: Time is the place. CF: You have commissioned proposals for Documenta that could take place at any place in time. You curated 24/7 at CAC Vilnius. More recently I picked up a payphone at the 7th Regiment Armory during the 2008 Whitney Biennial and heard you at the other end, calling from 1977, perhaps from the very moment I was conceived, with Tom Marionis art-related predictions for 1978. You collaborated with Francesco Manacorda on 1972: A Proposal for the 6th Berlin BiennialSpring 1972 in which 1972 is conflated with 2010. Can you explain your interest in time-travel, temporal intersections, and simultaneity? RM: I love Ray Bradbury. MP: You recently led a seminar called Kaleidoscope Room at the California College of the Arts. How do the mechanisms and histories of the kaleidoscope inform or

complicate how we perceive vision? How can this tool be used to view and describe certain forms of cultural practice? RM: I cannot remember that seminar. But a kaleidoscope is probably good for imagining how a fly sees the world. CF: (laughter) Yet the forgotten seminar relates to your upcoming Paper Exhibition at Artists Space in New York. Is it a process of recollection and reconstruction? Can you tell us about this show? RM: No, I cant. It is a secret. Youll know when you are ready for it. CF: Everyone seems to call you a curator but yourself. You have resisted defining your practice. Do you see the gap between this and that, those and them also as a space you straddle or navigate? RM: I am an artist. MP: Do you think exhibitions should make sense? Traditional conceptions of curating involve the illumination and explanation of information, particularly putting works of art into context so that something makes more sense than it did before, and differently. Do you feel your

practice is a reversal of this process, one of obfuscation and complication? RM: The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. Reality has no obligations. I am an artist. CF: Do artists have investments in that divide? RM: Yes, artists and art dont have to make sense either and to force sense in them should be punished. CF: Your art practice often assumes the form of what is generally understood as curating. For example, you recently had an exhibition on display in Rome at Galleria 1/9 Unosunove Arte Contemporanea entitled One of These Things Is Not Like The Other Things, which used exclusion rather than inclusion as its premise, as well as Sesame Street. What were the results? Did any viewers figure out the One Thing? RM: Yes, we had some pretty smart people seeing the show. MP: Many of your projects involve inverting or tampering with the structures and tenets of exhibitions. While your selections in O.O.T.T.I.N.L.T.O.T were based not on a works relation to another but rather
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on how those works do not relate or even resist relation (which is an interesting relation in itself), youve also written a curatorial essay as a libretto with Aaron Schuster for Loris Grauds Cellar Door exhibition at Palais de Tokyo. These projects seem to signal a shift in the ways art can be organized or framed through traditional curatorial methods. Would you say that the curatorial fieldincreasingly defining itself as a discrete discipline with its own histories, dogmas, and clichsgenerated a need for its own inversion? RM: Yes. CF: Does it now depend upon its inversion in order to exist? RM: Honestly, I just said yes because I did not understand the question. CF: This also seems to relate to Black Market Worlds, The IX Baltic Triennial, which you curated at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius with Sofia Hernndez Chong Cuy and Alexis Vaillant. How did you end up in the shadows and how did you get out? What do you think draws artists to these non-spaces? RM: Artists are by nature abyss-observers. MP: What are artists looking for in this void? RM: For their chances of surviving if they leap into it. MP: Can you tell us what really happened on the airplane during BMW? RM: We were paralyzed with fear. CF: What, if anything, can we learn from Narcosophy? RM: I guess sophisms spoken by narcos. I do not think they write. CF: What about mind-travel?

Silverman Gallery, where the hypnotized audience created an artwork in their minds. How does the mediums incantation complicate the ideas of authorship and agency? Who are we speaking to? RM: Rosabelle, believe! The last words of Houdini to his wife before he died. He wanted her to believe that he would communicate with her from the dead, but according to Rosabelle he never did. Perhaps she did not listen carefully enough, too busy dilapidating his inheritance. I cannot say I believe, but I love observing people who do. Authorship, as well, is a matter of belief. CF: Maybe you dont remember, but we spoke in your Kaleidoscope Room seminar about the tendency towards the missing masterpiece and immaterial artistic practice and its relation to the accessibility of information today. Do you see it as a conscious reaction? RM: Unconscious. CF: Is it tied to the legacy of Conceptual Art, 19th century mail routes, patchwork quilts, and Balzac? RM: Yeah. It is also related to The Figure In The Carpet, by Henry James. MP: You commissioned Francis McKee to write Phantom Rosebuds, the autobiography of Clifford Irving, who infamously wrote Howard Hughes autobiography. The text then morphed into F is for Park, a variety act based on Orson Welles film F is for Fake at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. It included a video involving psychokinesis and astronauts by Fia Backstrom, anonymous balloons, an invisible magic show, prepared answers to unknown questions, a bass player who never played, Cake and Sake from Olivier Babin, Gabriel Lester, and much more. Was what happened what you intended? RM: Partially, yes.

RM: pffffffffffffffffffffff . . . MP: In a review of F is for Park, Killian referred to you as possessing PT Barnum-like showmanship, suggesting that you may well be a curatorial William Castle. This would make you both a ringleader and a swindler in the great tradition of capitalist spectacle, but also a master of gimmickry! I dont think he meant this in a pejorative sense, but probably more in the sense that you possess an acute understanding of the kind of creative framing that makes the event inextricable from its marketing. What if information no longer had anything to do with an event, but was concerned with promoting information itself as the event? RM: The no longer makes no sense; I believe this has always been the case. CF: During the Kaleidoscope Room seminar you also once showed us Thtre de Poche by Aurlien Froment looped twelve times and asserted that it was one film that repeats differently each time, which it definitely wasnt, yet somehow was. How do fakery, conjecture, incredulity, and doubt relate to possibility? RM: I just hope we dont end up in a Paul Auster script. CF: Do you think that artists participating in group exhibitions ever find themselves trapped in a Paul Auster script? RM: Probably artists are artists because they read too much Paul Auster as teenagers. You take away Paul Auster and soon art schools will run out of novices. MP: A magician makes the audience believe that something has occurred when nothing has changed. Yet while most magicians want us to believe in their power, Houdini showed us the artificiality of our own confinement. Todays street/TV magicians like David Blaine or Criss Angel want to show us the mechanics of the trick. Which kind are you? RM: Oh, they do that? Id like to see that! la Poe? CF: Im not sure about Poe, but I was surprised when Bernices teeth fell onto the floor. MP: Marcel Marceau walked against the wind, yet it ended up as Michael Jacksons moonwalk. Is walking just arrested falling?

RM: Would that be a sort of brain tourism? I guess we would learn something like people ARE weird. MP: Weve talked about An Evening With Joseph Cornell, in which medium Valerie Winborne channels the artist from the dead and then Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick lecture about him. Youve spoken a lot about Robert Barrys Telepathic Piece and you recently held Hypnotic Show at 20
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MP: The writer Kevin Killian recently restaged Phantom Rosebuds in Vancouver. Has Clifford Irving taken on a parallel life of his own? RM: Clifford Irving always had a life of his own. He does not need me to be in the spotlight. MP: How do you fake the fake fake of the fake? Does it matter?

RM: I am no expert on MM, a bit more on MJ. Yes, it probably is. CF: What will be the impact of the Marswalk? RM: You refer here to the chocolate bar or to the planet? CF: The planet. RM: Let me see . . . given the mass of Mars, I guess we would jump in the air. MP: And the chocolate bar? RM: No impact. Just a silly dance appearing in that Mars commercial. No impact for anyone older than ten. CF: Marceau to Jackson is also a jump. Or maybe it is a time-stretched collaboration not unlike you and Robert Barry or you and Tom Marioni, actually. You often collaborate with or commission artists for specific projects. MP: Sometimes not even resulting in exhibitions, but in publications or even 12hour brunches, which you have become famous for in San Francisco. Do we still need exhibitions? RM: Yes. They are the only things that justify us. That justifies this. We would not survive just on brunches and publications. This said, very little must be exhibited to call it an exhibition. CF: You are also a former television star. Yet fortunately you didnt go to jail like Willis and Kimberly Drummond. MP: One of the most interesting things about CACTVthe television program you produced for CAC in Vilnius, broadcast regularlywas that every show was a pilot and every episode was the last show. Can you explain? RM: Ever seen the pilot episode from M.A.S.H., the TV series? Then you could still believe it was going to be something and that Alan Alda could be a believable Hawkeye. Pilot episodes are by nature, potentially, the last show (because most of them do not meet the expectations of the audience), but also they still make you believe the next episode will be good . . . that magic evaporates with the second episode. MP: So the collapse of the beginning and the end provides for an alternative form of content-generation?

RM: Did you see the last appearance of Sarah Palin on SNL when she passes by Tina Fey? I thought that was brilliant. I liked as well the actor playing Todd Palin in snow bike attire. CF: I thought I heard: Shoot a molehumpin-Moose eight days of the week! MP: There was an interesting doubling and leveling in Palins proximity to Palin, no? RM: When their two silhouettes met I though time and space would explode. CF: You are also a former model. Are amateurs really professionals? Can these distinctions be made any longer? RM: We were amateurs but were forced to become professionals. No, you cannot make that distinction. It is just a matter of how much time you have left to read. CF: Is the art world too professional and productive these days? Even the terminology seems to reflect this: art production, cultural producer, practice. RM: Yes, it is a bore. You can read between lines: we do not want indolent lazy bastard sexually degenerate artists. That efficiency is terrifying, or worseit is a bore. CF: We can speculate based on some of your past-collaborations, but are there specific artists that have been essential to your work today, yesterday, or in ten years? Curators? RM: A great number of them. MP: John Fare? RM: You are reading my mind.

floated away without him. In terms of world records, art, anything, what do you think is most interestingpotential, failure, or success? RM: Potential. CF: How does your interest in potential correlate to the the missing masterpiece? RM: Your question contains the answer. CF: What about your article in Afterall? Can you tell us about the pseudonym Agnieszka Kurant? RM: I have used that pseudonym since I was in high school. MP: I heard you once sent a papier mch surrogate to attend a conference in your place. Was this about the potential of your presence or were you more present in your absence? RM: I saw it in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart Simpson creates a latex replica of himself to sit at his school bench. CF: Was that gesture also related to space being asphyxiating, or just conferences? RM: It just allowed me to be in different places at once. Sometimes you could not tell the difference between the surrogate and myself, especially at parties. MP: Its after the end of the world; dont you know that yet? RM: Yeah, thats what global warming is about. CF: Are you Raimundas Malasauskas?

CF: How did you come to be the head of the headless John Fare Estate? RM: Do you know Dionysius the Areopagite? He is referred to in the movie as the saint who wards off demons. Like him, I hold my head in my hands to say: I forgive you. MP: How high above the ground do you think we are now? RM: About 500 meters. CF: Maybe well see Michel Fournier parachuting from outer space! I dont know why the press made such a big deal of his recent failed attempt, when his balloon

RM: No, I am Dora Garca. Dora Garca (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland. She lives and works in Brussels, and her particular field of interest deals with the creation of situations or contexts that serve to alter the traditional relationship between artist, artwork, and spectator. Recently she had presentations at the 16th Bienniale of Sydney, Tate Modern, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. An excerpted version of this interview was published in Mousse Magazine, Issue 16, Dec 08Jan 09.
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mericana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions is a long-term presentation consisting of 50 displays, each approximately one month long, coorganized by Wattis Institute director Jens Hoffmann and the Curatorial Practice Program. Each months display examines an American state, in alphabetical order by state name. For full details please visit: http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/americana.

Hawaii: Island Forecast

September 220, 2008 The state of Hawaii has the distinction of being the most remote population center on the planet; a vast distance of 2390 miles separates the islands from California, the nearest populace. While the mainland United States covers a seemingly endless expanse of land, Hawaii is acutely defined by its modest physical boundaries. It is far more vulnerable than the rest of the country to the shifts of agricultural industry, technological development, military needs, and tourism. This state serves as an ideal laboratory in which to examine the effects of these forces of change, and provides a dynamic home for one of the most influential think tanks in the worldthe Hawaii Research Center for Futures studies. Futures researchers utilize foresight, strategic plans, and multidisciplinary analysis to formulate possible outcomes. In his seminal 1999 essay Four Futures for Hawaii Jim Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures studies, outlined a framework of four possible future directions for the state of Hawaii. His essay The Best Little 22
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Backwater on the Planet: Too Local to be Global 1 expands one of these in detail and describes a sovereign state that has been freed of rampant tourism and isolated from outside influence. This imagined future for Hawaii provides the starting point for the research of two of Dators PhD students, Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, whose work is featured in this exhibition. Exploring the idea of Hawaii one hundred years into the future and after 70 years of complete isolation from the outside world, their work takes a narrative form, as well as representing their ideas through the production of images and artifacts. As you look at the display, imagine you are three generations into the future and outsiders have not been able to visit the Hawaiian Islands for decades. The land of luxury resorts and tiki-torches that one might now associate with the state has disintegrated and Hawaii has become an independent nation. The objects that are on display are artifacts from this future. They tell the story of one mans experiences and discoveries while living on the islands during this time of seclusion, drastic transition, and cultural rebirth. Sally Szwed

Illinois: One Ray of Thy Light, O Sun! One Stroke of Thy Arm, O Labor!
October 14November 1, 2008 The exhibition One Ray of Thy Light, O Sun! One Stroke of Thy Arm, O Labor! examines the significance of the Haymarket Affair, a series of demonstrations by striking workers during the first week of May 1886, in Chicago. Integral to the foundation of the labor movement and the establishment of workers rights in the US, these events also led to the formation of an International Workers day, commemorated on the first of May. In the late 19th century, Illinois represented an important intersection in the middle of the country for economic and cultural circulation. The city of Chicago in particular became a flourishing economy and attracted many immigrants from abroad seeking to join the labor force. However, this rapid

1 Both Jim Dators The Best Little Backwater on the Planet: Too Local to be Global, as well as Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagans narrative, created especially for this project, are available as supplementary materials for this exhibition.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Installation views of Hawaii, Illinois, and Indiana

(a continuously evolving display).

industrialization and urbanization also produced exploitive conditions for workers. On May 1, 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions coordinated a general strike in support of an eight-hour workday. During the strike, infuriated by acts of police brutality, a group of mostly immigrant socialist and anarchist labor leaders called for a meeting near Chicagos Haymarket Square. When police marched into this crowd to disperse them, an unknown participant hurled a bomb into their ranks, killing a policeman. This started a chain reaction and led to eight prominent anarchists being arrested, convicted, and, in most cases, sentenced to death. Transmitted through wire and newsprint, these events became a rallying cry for workers rights and resistance around the world. The chaotic Haymarket Affair raised important questions regarding labor, immigration, capital, rebellion, and the prosecution of dissenters that still linger today. Immigrant laborers have long been treated as expendable labor; their marginalized status serves the system of production. Labor struggle continues to be seen as an outside force corrupting the status quo rather than a necessary consequence of the exploitive conditions of capitalism. In the exhibition, printed reproductions of Haymarket rally posters and flags call the present into action by awakening this past. The eight anarchists infamous speeches in their defense play from headphones and pulse in Morse code from a replica of the bomb, a reminder of their resistance. Matthew Post and Xiaoyu Weng

Indiana: Double Dribble

November 429, 2008 The state of Indiana is the center of basketball. First organized in 1892 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, basketball was reformed and integrated into YMCAs across the Hoosier state, rapidly spreading to Indiana high schools and universities. By the 1940s, this athletic profusion generated a frenzied statewide obsession with the sport and soon whole towns rallied behind their high schools team with a fervor that was quickly dubbed Hoosier Hysteria. On certain days of the week dedicated specifically to the sport, stores closed, schools implemented early dismissal, and special ceremonies and celebrations commenced in competing towns. Basketball in Indiana, however, also harbors a history of racial segregation and discrimination. In the early history of the sport in the state, white players in Catholic high school teams never competed against African American teams. Where mixed race teams did exist, African American players were prohibited from showering with white teammates, were forced to spend nights in hotel basements during away games, and were stripped of the possibility to play on college teams. African American player Bill Garrett faced such discrimination. On Saturday, March 22, 1947, Garretts high school team, the Shelbyville Golden Bears, defeated the Terre Haute Garfield team in the Indiana State Championship. Before that

year, no winning team in the championships had ever had an African American player and no player had ever been quite as revered and celebrated for his skill and knowledge of the game as Garrett. That same year, Garrett went on to win Indianas Mr. Basketball Award given to the best high school player. With the help of activist Faburn DeFrantz, Garrett brought on the integration of college basketball after the breakdown of the Big Ten Gentlemans Agreement designed to refuse African Americans. The composure he displayed in the face of the racial tensions that characterised Indiana in the 1940s preserved his legacy in the sports history. His story serves as the impetus for this exhibitions investigation of an American athletic phenomenon. The exhibition Double Dribble examines Indianas unique role in pre-Civil Rights era desegregation. Today, racism still plays a role in basketball as African American players are bound to the sport in such ways that reflect the racist parody implicit in early 20th century minstrelsy; skill is seen as racially determined and not the result of practice and hard work. This exhibition illuminates the sports stigmas and the underlying consequences for race issues in the US. In subtle ways, the sport of basketball illustrates, in three-pointers and double dribbles, the mistakes of a nation built around both the fear of difference and the fear of defeat. Tanner Borskey
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History Doesnt Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme Maria Antelman, Julio Cesar Morales, and Mark Tribe in conversation with Sally Szwed

his interview connects three artists who utilize historical reenactments in their practice as a means of simultaneously examining the past, present, and occasionally the future. Julio Cesar Morales is a Tijuanaborn, San Franciscobased artist, educator, curator, and co-founder of Queens Nails Projects in San Franciscos Mission district. His recent project, Interrupted Passage (2008), is a speculative reenactment of the events immediately preceding and during a feast that took place in the eight hours before General Vallejos arrest. Artist Maria Antelman was born in Athens, Greece and now lives between San Francisco and New York City. She is the creator and publisher of Ozon Magazine and shows her work internationally and locally, most recently in Bay Area Now 5 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Voyage: A Comprehensive Questionnaire (2004) is a 5 minute video composed of photographs shot at the annual Monmouth Battle reenactment in New Jersey and a soundtrack. Mark Tribe is an artist, curator, and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University. He is the founder of Rhizome.org, and co-author of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). The Port Huron Project, which began in 2006, is a series of reenactments of public protest speeches from the New Left movements of the Vietnam era. The project has traveled to the original sites of many important political 24
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speeches including deFremery Park in Oakland, California, The National Mall in Washington DC, and Central Park, New York City. Sally Szwed: I am interested in the different uses of reenactment in your respective works, and its increasingly prevalent appearance in contemporary art in general. How do you see reenactment functioning differently in your work from traditional historical reenactment? Julio Cesar Morales: Interrupted Passage is a project that is influenced by the events immediately preceding Californias secession from Mexico. I attempt to illustrate this overlooked period of time by uniting three very distinct versions of that occasion from the perspective of the American, Mexican, and official Californian histories. These histories focus on General Vallejos last hours in power in which he negotiated the future of California over an eight-hour feast prepared for his captors. The difference lies in this combination of perspectives, which negates any single dominant historical voice, and in their reduction to sound and motion only, as my project contains no dialogue. Maria Antelman: I shot the images for Voyage: A Comprehensive Questionnaire at the annual

ABOVE:

Mark Tribe The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis, 1969/2008 Courtesy of the artist Photo: Nick Davis
RIGHT:

Maria Antelman Voyage: A Comprehensive Questionnaire, 2004 DVD (still) Courtesy of the artist, and The Apartment, Athens, Greece

Monmouth Battle reenactment in New Jersey. Executed by heritage buffs from all over the United States, the reenactment is an elaborate two-day recreation of the battle with full period costumes, horses, guns, canons, the works. To accompany these visuals, I recorded a soundtrack that combines two sources. One is the voice of a medium channeling messagespromising a beautiful future that evades death, fear, and lossfrom an alien entity to her human followers. The other is a series of questions derived from an extraterrestrial resource website with the purported aim of evaluating and categorizing alien sightings. The questionnaire is offered to website visitors as part of an ongoing project to prove and map the existence of extraterrestrial life. This disjunct between the soundtrack and the reenactment imagery underlines the lack of connection between historical events and their interpretations, but also by presenting new kinds of folklore ultimately raises questions about the sanity of our society. Mark Tribe: Each reenactment in the Port Huron Project series was staged at the site of the original speech and delivered by an actor or performance artist. When casting, I looked for performers with strong oratorical abilities and an understanding of

the subject matter rather than those who resembled the original speaker. The performers did not wear period costumes, and I directed them to deliver the speech in their own way and not to try to imitate the original speaker. Outreach has been a big part of the project, both to build audiences and to connect with local communities. I organized community meetings in Oakland and Los Angeles, and worked with local organizations to reach out to their constituencies. Through these organizations, I was able to hire young people to help with the reenactments by operating cameras, taking photos, distributing flyers, performing as DJs, and cooking barbeques. SS: Reenactments in the realm of contemporary art seem to be utilized as a way of exposing overlooked histories, correcting falsities, distorting perceptions of truth, or giving past issues new alignment with current issues. Which, if any, of these objectives were you considering during the conceptual stages of your project? JCM: Yes, this project started with the statue in downtown Sonoma, which is dedicated to the raising of the Bear Flag by the Texas militia, or founders of California. The monument depicts an

idealized moment that is very different from Vallejos experiences in 1846. It symbolizes a vast distortion of variable truths in terms of the portrayal of the men who took part in the Bear Flag revolt and how they have became legends. MA: My interest was to show how war, either as a game or as a reality, is timeless, perpetual, and absurd. I think I could have used any battle reenactment, from any historical moment, without changing the concept of the work. Maybe this reenactment is more funny than most. Theres also an element of absurdity in the fact that what history commemorates most is wars. MT: My objectives had more to do with using the past as a mirror to look at the present. When I started teaching at Brown in September 2005, I was surprised by how little antiwar protest I found on campus. It was clear that my students cared deeply about American involvement in Iraq, about the Bush administrations disregard for civil liberties and human rights, and numerous other issues, but they seemed to believe that resistance was futile. It is not hard to imagine why. In 2000, they witnessed a presidential election that appeared to many to have been stolen. In 2003, many students participated in the

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largest antiwar protests in history, but the Bush administration hardly noticed. And in 2004, many of them worked on the Kerry campaign, only to see George Bush reelected by the narrowest of margins amid accusations of voting fraud. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that, [t]hings look bad for great Causes today, in a postmodern era when, although the ideological scene is fragmented into a panoply of positions which struggle for hegemony, there is an underlying consensus: the era of big explanations is over . . . in politics too, we should no longer aim at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects.1 In the absence of a unifying political theory, it has become difficult to sustain sweeping radical agendas. Todays students stage small protests focused on specific issues or pursue public service. For them the massive social movement that Students for a Democratic Society President Paul Potter called for in We Must Name the System2 exists only as history. It is difficult these days to think about radical politics and the place of protest in American culture without considering the legacy of the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s, their charismatic young leaders, and their revolutionary aspirations. The Port Huron Project seeks to take up this legacy in all of its unresolved complexity by reanimating largely forgotten yet remarkably illuminating historical speeches. It adopts the form of historical reenactment to intervene in public space and contemporary political discourse. It aims to produce experiences of temporal juxtaposition in which the complexity of historical transformations (such as the decline of radicalism in the face of a rising neoliberal consensus) are rendered evident. SS: Why do you think so many artists working today are looking to the past and utilizing the reenactment as a tool to both reconsider history as well as examine the status quo? JCM: I believe that this strategy is of interest to contemporary artists as it can encompass traditional as well as new and conceptual forms of art production. I think that artists have always sampled and created variations of historical events and brought them to light, going back as early as Goyas The Third of May in 1808. I myself am inspired by contemporary Mexican cumbia bands that appropriate the music of 70s British rock groups like Pink Floyd to create new takes on classics and simultaneously copy, 26
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destroy, and invent variations of each respective song. That to me is more in line with a critique of cultural history in the here and now. MA: The feeling of time traveling in the fast information lane, the pessimistic times we are experiencing and the need for some kind of resistance in a mediasaturated society make us want to pause and look at the past. The act of reenactment can refer to the circular nature of history, the impossibility of change, and the quest for authenticity. MT: Its a symptom of the postmodern condition: our primary relation to the past is no longer, as it was until about 40 years ago, one of novelty, innovation, or progress. It has become one of repetition, variation, recombination, and pastiche. In the 60s a new, radical student organization came up with a new name for themselves: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 2006 a new, radical student organization decided to give themselves a name from the history books: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SS: Do you think reenactments presented under the context of contemporary art have less of a responsibility to be historically accurate than other historical reenactments? In your project where, if anywhere, did you intentionally utilize subjectivity? JCM: We need to leave accuracy to the cultural anthropologists. Artists are able to translate historical material into a visual format that may have a longer lasting impact on a viewer or audience as opposed to a dry document. However, for my project I did collaborate with a food anthropologist on the recipes in order to get a good sense of what was available at the time, as only hints are given in historical material as to what this last feast may have consisted of. MA: In Voyage the reenactment soldiers are guided to the battlefield by the words of an extraterrestrial medium. Incompatible worlds are brought together so that new meanings arise, where the logical and the nonsensical, the comical and the tragic coexist. Usually in my work I use direct sources from my surrounding physical reality and the Internet in the form of visuals, voices, and sounds. Then I juxtapose these disparate elements in an attempt to create fictional realities. I guess I am looking for accuracy and subjectivity or imagination at the same time. Is this possible?

MT: Yes. I didnt intentionally utilize subjectivity, but I didnt try to make my reenactments historically accurate either. The very notion of objective historical accuracy is problematic. I only intended my reenactments to have two things in common with the original events: the text of the speech and the site. Everything else, from how the speakers dressed and how they sounded to how I documented the event, was contemporary. If I had tried to make my reenactments more accurate by using costumes, antique microphones, etc., I would inevitably have introduced more subjective elements. The way I approached it was, if anything, less subjective. SS: What role does the audience play in your work? Are they imagined to be passive viewers or engaged protagonists? JCM: Within the project there was a series of food tastings in which I collaborated with the culinary anthropologist and also Max La Riviere-Hedrick, a chef and former school mate. We took all the information we had on the last feast and presented our interpretations during the tasting as a way to fundraise for the video reenactment. We invited a certain number of gallery patrons to the dinner and hosted about 4 dinners for people from 40 to 100 a night, they essentially ate the same dinner that Vallejos captors had that day in 1846. MA: Voyage breaks with the linear narrative that is typically associated with historical trajectories and the film medium. Instead the narration is fragmented, complex, and multilayered; this effect works to disconcert the viewer, who must continually question the narrative and its meaning. MT: At the events, members of the audience find themselves playing the role of protestors in the reenactment applauding, and shouting in response to the speaker. In this way, they are engaged not only as spectators but also as active participants in the production of the event. I feature the audience prominently in my documentation of the reenactments. SS: Many artists working today are looking back to performance art from the 1960s and 70s and re-staging happenings and performances from the time. What do you think are the implications of reenacting a time- and place-specific event forty years later?

JCM: I think it is important to retain certain elements that made this work initially exciting and if an artist needs to recreate a happening or performance, it may create a bridge between the first iteration and its urgency now. As Mark Twain reportedly said, history doesnt repeat itself, but it does rhyme. MT: An example of this would be Marina Abramovics reenactment of VALIE EXPORTs Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) as part of Abramovics Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (November 915, 2005). I wasnt there, but I believe Abramovic reenacted this performance in the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wrights museum. Relocating the performance changes it in several ways, the most obvious of which is the legitimating effect of the museums cultural authority. One might read into your question an implicit ethical challenge based on the notion that, because we value authenticity in relation to history, infidelity to history is a bad thing. In response to such a hypothetical challenge, I would argue that Abramovics displacement of Action Pants from art cinema to museum is actually subversivenot of the museums cultural authority, but of the sexist exclusion of womens performance art particularly overtly sexual workfrom the art historical cannon. SS: Do you think that reenactments provide a realistic opportunity for physically and psychically entering into history or a version of history? When does the reenactment surpasses its status as a performance and become an authentic or original experience? JCM: Yes, reenactments are a trope through which you can erase, cut, paste, re-introduce, and re-imagine history according to personal resolution. If successful, they can transform a specific history into an experience which is capable of a deeper significance. Its a stretch, but The Cures cover of Jimi Hendrixs most popular song, Purple Haze, completely makes the original disappear, wiping the slate clean for a new experience. MA: Approaching a reenactment from a realistic viewpoint does not work, as there will always be an awareness that it is just a copy. However, if the performance is thought of as a copy and if it dwells in this reality, then every time it is

Julio Cesar Morales, Interrupted Passage, 2008 Production shot. Courtesy of the artist

viewed one can observe how by relating differently to the here and now it becomes an original experience. MT: Im not sure what you mean by realistic. I do think reenactments can produce powerful emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic experiences. And I would argue that reenactment does not need to surpass its status as performance in order to provide authentic, original experiences for audiences. All experience is, almost by definition, original and authentic. Whether or not reenactments themselves can be authentic or original is another question. And to that question, I would answer: yes, but who cares? Originality and authenticity are overrated.

1 Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, (New York: Verso, 2008) 1. 2 Potter delivered this speech on April 17, 1965 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tribe staged a reenactment of this speech in July, 2007.

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Zhang Qing in conversation with Xiaoyu Weng

hang Qing is one of the preeminent curators working in China today. As Deputy Director of Shanghai Art Museum and Director of the Shanghai Biennale Office, Zhang has participated in the organization of every Shanghai Biennale since 2008. His other important exhibitions projects include: Infantization (200708), the 10th Venice Sculpture Exhibition (2007), the 7th San Paulo International Architecture Biennial (2007), and Interpreting the Modern: The Exhibition of Paintings from the Amsterdam Art Museums Collection (2003). This conversation took place in the Biennale office two weeks before the opening of Translocalmotion and during an intensive installation period. Everyone in the museum worked late into the night. The interview was scheduled for 10pm. Although tired, Zhang Qing conducted a very exciting conversation.

problems relate to a lot of aspects, such as grammar, language, and cultural context. In this case we needed to consider an international audience that doesnt really have a deep knowledge or understanding of Chinese language or culture. Chinese is a narrative language and thus different from any alphabet-based language. The English title of the third Shanghai Biennale was Spirit of Shanghai. A literal translation would have been Shanghai, At Sea which doesnt make any sense. In Chinese the term itself is Shanghai, Haishang ( ). On one hand the term is formally like a palindrome. On the other it perfectly expresses how Shanghai got its name: a town where fishermen gathered after fishing at sea. The phrase Spirit of Shanghai and the process of translation also indicate the complexity of the city. Shanghai is somehow like a sandwich. It is a hybrid of diverse culture that is very difficult to articulate with a single word. The difficulties of translation serve to underline the variances in aesthetic and value systems. For this Biennale, there are two aspects in the Chinese title KuaiCheng Kuai-Ke. Kuai-cheng (city in motion) signifies Shanghais remarkable vitality and velocity. Fuelling the citys growth are kuai-ke (people in motion) who are swiftly transforming the cityscape. The English version Translocalmotion conveys a sense of transition in trying to connect these two aspects. XYW: Could you give a brief overview of the structure of this Biennale? ZQ: Generally speaking the exhibition is composed of three parts. For Project, the first part of the exhibition (located on the ground floor as well as outside the museum), the curatorial team invited 25 emerging and established artists to use the Peoples Square as a starting point for their research and artistic practice. This part introduces visitors to the theme of the Peoples Square as a metaphor for the complex dynamics of social mobility in contemporary China by providing them with a striking visual experience. On the second floor is Key-Notes, three solo exhibitions of prominent artists Mike Kelly and Yue Minjun, and the artist group Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren De Haan. The last part of the main exhibition consists of work by 33 artists and groups that addresses similar themes not necessarily related to Shanghai. They explore issues such as migration and integration in South Asia, Europe, and America, for example. We also have a special documentary exhibition in the museum, which is about the history of the Peoples Square.

Translocalmotion 7th Shanghai Biennale, 2008 Publicity material Courtesy of the 7th Shanghai Biennale Committee

Xiaoyu Weng: Lets start our conversation around translation issues. I realize that the English title of this Biennale is different from the Chinese version. What do you think about the translation in this case? And how might it potentially affect the reception of the exhibition? Zhang Qing: When we situate an international exhibition in a global context there are always translation issues. Usually it takes a long time to figure out a proper translation for the titles from Chinese to English. The 28
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XYW: What do you think is the highlight of this Biennale? ZQ: I would say the solo exhibitions and the documentary exhibition. XYW: Yes, I think the idea of inserting solo exhibitions into the Biennale structure is very interesting. How many works will be displayed from each artist? ZQ: It varies. Some artists will show a site-specific installation, others will have more than one work. This rather unusual proposal was conceived in reaction to a tendency among many biennales to present a vast number of hardly distinguishable artistic positions. We are always looking forward to innovations, but how to break through conventional structures is a challenge. XYW: Why the Peoples Square? ZQ: The Peoples Square remains the most important landmark in Shanghai. Its meaning has multiple layers. It constitutes a microcosm of Chinese history and society. Before Shanghais liberation the Peoples Square was a famous racecourseThe Jockey Clubwhere colonialists spent their leisure time. Today it is a transport hub and a prime location for social and economic exchange. Most importantly every person living in Shanghai is familiar with the Peoples Square. They either transfer here during their weekday commute, or they visit for weekend activities, such as shopping and eating. But they might not be familiar with the Squares history. Thus for the documentary exhibition we want to focus on its unknown past through historic architectural blueprints, literary works, as well as many types of archives. The documentary exhibition is the theoretical basis for this Biennale. I am very satisfied with it. XYW: I realize that another big change for this Biennale is the reduction in curators. There were six curators for the last BiennaleHyper Designbut this time there are only three, including yourself. What do you think about this change? What are the difficulties of collaborative curating in the context of a biennale structure? ZQ: Despite the reduction we had a big discussion about how to feature each curators concept to a maximized extent and at the same time keep them relating to each other. I want to make an analogy of curating

the Shanghai Biennale to cooking, since gastronomic culture is so important in Chinese life. Curators are chefs and the biennale is a large meal. Every chef has his/her own favorite spice, but if they all put something different into the dish then the flavor will be hard to discern or comprehend. It might get weird. To invite Shanghai people out for dinner, we first need to find out about their tastes. I hope the curators can cook a meal that caters for Shanghai. The point is not how many different flavors they add, but whether Shanghai people like them or not. XYW: How did you get to know the other two curators Henk Slager and Julian Heynen? And how do you think that their ideas in terms of academic research and curatorial practice are being linked to this Biennale? ZQ: These two curators are excellent. Julian, whom I met on a trip to Germany, has curated many brilliant exhibitions. Henk is more of a scholar/theorist than a curator. He writes a lot of impressive critiques. I met him at an international curators forum. And then I read some of his essays that relate to urban and immigration theory. I think their practices can be considered as something between classic and avant-garde. This also matches Shanghai peoples characteristics perfectly. Shanghai people are not that provocative but at same time they always want something unique. I have tried my best to discover global curators and scholars and I now want to bring them to Shanghai and let the local audience get to know them. XYW: The theme of the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition is better city, better life. It tries to underline the importance of urbanization in Chinas rise in the 21st century. 2010 is also the year of the 8th Shanghai Biennale. How do you see the relationship between the Biennale and the Expo? ZQ: As better life implies, city dwellers are the subject of rapid urbanization. This is encompassed by Kuai-ke (people in motion) in this exhibition. The curatorial team has focused on people and their conditions in the dynamic urban space. We aim to investigate the spatial and social boundaries between the rural and urban populations, migrants and citizens, guests and hosts. Is fruitful interaction between them possible? Can cities make our lives better? Shanghai is the biggest migrant city in China. The concept of migration

is very complicated. There are different types of migrations, such as peasants leaving rural areas to work in urban construction, and refugees from the Three Gorges Area as well as from the recent Sichuan earthquake. There are many excellent works that reflect on the life of these migrants in this Biennale, such as Jia Zhangkes film Still Life. Meanwhile, we have organized many public education programs, which will take place in the public sphere instead of the museum context. I think the city itself is a much bigger exhibition space, and citizens are artworks in it. For the next Biennale, we will continue the city and urban theme. Because the concept of city has specific meanings in the context of Shanghais history and future, it is our lasting focus whether in the past or in the future. I hope the Shanghai Biennale can grow together with the city itself. XYW: You mentioned Jia Zhangke just now. He is one of the many established artists in this Biennale. At the same time, there are a lot of new faces in this exhibition. They are all very young artists who were born after 1980. Some of them also participated in the exhibition Infantization1 that you curated last year. What do you think about these young Chinese artists? What kind of freshness do they offer us? ZQ: If you want to know what the future of Chinese contemporary art will look like, you should refer to Infantization. These young people will soon emerge on the global stage and replace some of the older generation. I wanted to inject some fresh blood into the Biennale by juxtaposing these young artists with very established ones. This strategy not only activates the exhibition but also promotes innovation. I dont think the Biennale should only focus on established artists. That would be too conservative and unimaginative. I hope I can intuitively face challenges from different aspects. I am confident that these young people will create more possibilities. We should all look to the future.

1 Infantization showed at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2007 and traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in 2008. The exhibition focused on 41 artists who were born in the 1980s, which Zhang Qing described as Gelatin Generation . . . a generation of transparency and lightness, vibrant and free, sometimes blindly brave. Through the works of these artists, Infantization tried to explore the lifestyles, creative tendencies, and creative characteristics of Chinas new generation. C U R AT I N G N O W 0 8

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Bruce Altshuler The Challenge of Installation Art

ew forms of artistic production have generated new kinds of objects that present challenges for museums, and for the people who deal with the preservation, presentation, and reinstallation of works in our institutions. Installation and time-based art in particular raise significant questions for conservators, curators, collection managers, and technicians. For museum collecting of contemporary art involves not only decisions regarding the artworks to be acquired, but it also demands a reconsideration of how the object of art is conceived. I tend to think about this problem in terms of the issue of identity, taking as central the philosopher W.V.O. Quines maxim, no entity without identity. Quines view is that we really do not understand our conception of a certain kind of object without knowing the conditions under which we would say that it is the same object at a later time, especially after it has suffered some significant change. In the case of a wooden boat that has been damaged, we generally would take it to be the same boat after some, or perhaps all, of its planks were replaced. But we might not believe that a given installation by Nam June Paik was the same work after, say, the projectors were replaced by equipment of a very different kind after the originals could no longer be repaireda change that altered the look and ambiance of the piece. As this last example indicates, considering how an object retains its identity through time, and what kind of 30
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changes admit our saying that it is the same object after alteration, is critical for establishing criteria for the preservationincluding the reinstallationof artworks. When objects are acquired by a museum, it is the responsibility of the collections department and the conservators to maintain them. The traditional mandate that has guided conservation practice is to preserve the object as closely as possible to the way that it was when completed by the artist. This is the sense in which conservators have viewed their primary role of maintaining the integrity of the artwork, and it naturally issues in the principle of minimizing physical intervention. But new art forms have changed what is demanded of conservators and collection managers. With works that are technologically-dependant, or are composed of living or ephemeral materials, or that invite the public to take away their constituent parts, it seems that more change must be permitted than with traditional pieces of painting and sculpture. Such artworks, it seems to me, might be better viewed as something like ongoing processes than as objects completed at a given time. The challenge here is to develop a conception of the art object that allows a work to remain the same work despite significant change of constituent elements and physical condition, and even radical alteration of its visual appearance. I think that viewing art objects as entities that are never truly completed helps us to make sense of, and to deal with, installations and other new kinds of art objects.

ABOVE, RIGHT:

Mario Garcia Torres What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (in 36 Slides), 20046 Mixed media installation Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels, Image: Courtesy of the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco

In his essay The Work Itself, sociologist and jazz pianist Howard Becker compares the art object to a jazz score, which allows for improvisation in different conditions but remains essentially the same work over time.1 An analogous view seems applicable to the new art forms that we are discussing. Yet one might argue that this also applies to more traditional artworks. Becker gives the example of classical Greek sculptures, which at the time of their creation were usually painted in bright colors. Here I think that we are disposed to say that the white marble statues in our museums are the same sculptures that once stood in ancient Greece, despite their being at some visual and conceptual remove from their creators intentions. The question of which changes are acceptable, of which parameters we adopt in order to maintain the integrity of the art object, is critical, especially for museums. And it is especially important for curators interested in displaying or re-presenting contemporary artworks. Installations raise this problem in an extreme way, and this is due not only to the need to reconfigure their elements in future presentations. For with many installations there is the critical problem of technological obsolescence. The production of slide projectors, for example, has been discontinued and as of this year slide projector bulbs are being phased out. In order to provide for works using this technology, museums have been stockpiling slide projectors and their parts. But in the long run they will be gone. What kind of provisions should be put in place to ensure the long-term existence of such works? In her paper Authenticity, Change and Loss, Pip Laurenson, the Head of Timebased Media Conservation at Tate, London cites an interview she conducted with Bruce Nauman around his Art Makeup, 196768.2 When this 16mm film projection was transferred to DVD, at the suggestion of the artist it incorporated the whirring noise of the original projector, which Nauman considered essential to the piece. On can imagine a similar thing done with works of slide projection. Indeed, one of the benefits we have now in dealing with these issues in contemporary art is that more often than not the artist is available for consultation. Museum acquisition protocols increasingly involve conducting interviews with artists to discuss the options for replacing degraded or non-functioning components, for example. Of course this is not to say that it is possible to extend the life of all artworks. Many works by Eva Hesse, for instance, are made of materials whose inherent vice leads to disintegration that cannot be repaired, and these pieces, it seems, must be allowed to die.

But perhaps the artist is not the last word on how his or her work should be treated, reinstalled, or modified. This question intersects with a major curatorial issue, namely the respective roles of curators and artists. Curators and institutions carry a great deal of authority in the re-staging, and hence conservation through reactivation, of some installation-based work. In this connection, curators play an important role in the construction of aesthetic meaning, knowledge, and ultimately value. The artists authority is occasionally challenged in the process of negotiating between artistic and institutional considerations. There are many cases of curators using artists in exhibitions and for exhibitionary purposes with which they might not agree. For example, a number of artists refused to be included in Harald Szeemans Documenta 5 (1972), despite initially consenting, because they were unhappy with his organization of the exhibition around themes they felt were inappropriate to their work. A more recent, and more dramatic case, is that of Christoph Bchels grandiose installation at Mass MOCA, in which the artist sued the museum to prevent it exhibiting an installation that was incomplete.3 The rights of the artist over the control of his/her work continue to be of critical concern. In thinking about such matters, a central question is: Who has the authority to decide what is the authentic work of art? A vandal can put some paint on a Jackson Pollock in a museum and it would count as defacement, but a museum conservator can make the same mark as in-fill and it counts as maintenance of that work, due to the institutional authority of the conservation profession and of the museum. Authority endows authenticity. In considering whether and how to reinstall or even re-create installation artworks, or whether and how to realize planned works unrealized during the lifetime of an artist, we tend to think that these decisions as to whether something is an authentic work are made according to principled argument. And of course there are debates among staff members and various other institutional stakeholders. But in the end I think that such decisions are heavily influenced, if not determined, by the market, and by institutional interests in keeping objects of value and prestige alive. So while some might argue that a given media installation should not be shown or be considered the artwork that it once was after its initial technology is gone, absent directions by the artist, the museums financial investment, and interest in having that work in its collection will generally outweigh factors of high principle. Such market and institutional pressures often

settle the outcome, either directly or by influencing norms and standards over time. I used to take a rather traditional view of such issues, reluctant to admit radical alteration of an installation artwork, or of an artwork of non-standard constitution, when such changes are not explicitly licensed by the artist. But I am increasingly inclined to view these changes as part of the ongoing life of works of art. And while I am disposed to argue against institutional forces that oppose my somewhat conservative sense of what is necessary for a given artwork to remain authentic through alteration, re-installation, or re-creation, I recognize that institutional pressures probably will prevail. But this also is part of the life of artworks. As Duchamp recognized, artworks are what they are and have the significance that they do because of much more than the intentions of their creators, and in their long histories their natures and meanings will change.4 And no matter how counterintuitive the view, it seems to me that it is useful to see works of art as more processlike than object-like, and that viewing them in this way is quite helpful in dealing with some of the many challenges of contemporary art.

Bruce Altshuler is the Director of the Museum Studies program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. His book Salon to Biennial Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 18631959 was published earlier this year by Phaidon Press. He is the author of The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994), and Isamu Noguchi (1994); editor of Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (2005); and coeditor of Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (1954). This text is an excerpted and edited version of Bruce Altshulers presentation in a fall 2008 Curatorial Critique seminar. Bruce Altshulers participation in the Curatorial Practice MA Program was made possible by a grant from the Getty Foundation.

1 Howard S. Becker, The Work Itself, in Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner, and Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, eds., Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2130. 2 http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/ 06autumn/laurenson.htm. Accessed November 3, 2008. 3 Roberta Smith, Is It Art Yet? And Who Decides?, New York Times, September 16, 2007. 4 Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act, in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., Salt Seller, The Writings of Marchel Duchamp (NY: Oxford University Press, 1973), 140. C U R AT I N G N O W 0 8

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Robin Carlson Labor Pains of an Institution

AP corporation founder Don Fisher has plans to build a museum of contemporary art in the heart of San Franciscos Presidio. The Presidio is a national historic landmark district, an archaeological site, and a hub of San Franciscos cultural history. The proposal has incited outrage from many local residents who feel that the addition of a contemporary art center on the parks central Main Post parade ground is incongruous with the historic value of the site. The Main Post is where the original Spanish garrison was established in 1776. It is the birthplace of San Francisco, and has endured many periods of development and use since then. In recent history the Presidio is most famous for its use as a military outpost that was decommissioned in 1989. Its iconic architecture makes both its Second World War lineage and its Spanish history evident. There are consequently those who believe not only that the site should be preserved as is, but also that new development should match extant or historic architecture and land use. These somewhat aesthetically biased opponents tend to overlook 20th-century developments that include the addition of the modernist Herbst Pavilion and the Presidio Bowl, both a stones throw from the parking lot that covers the parade ground. There are yet other critics who oppose the plan on ethical grounds. Fisher has been accused of employing socially irresponsible business practices. Opponents allege that he and his wife, Doris Fisher, see the founding of a contemporary art center as an opportunity to ensure that their legacy exceeds the use of sweatshops to produce their clothing lines and clearcutting old growth redwoods. However, in modifying their business practices in response to pressure from labor and environmental activists, the Fishers have proven that they are not inflexible. In
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this case they are being called upon to demonstrate a similar willingness to compromise. The original design was found to be obtrusive, and detrimental to the Presidios status as a national landmark. Accordingly, in November of 2008, the Presidio Trust extended the planning process in an effort to persuade developers to cite alternative locations or re-draft the architectural plans. The Presidio Trust, a federal agency that shepherds the public space, is devoted to its avowed mission to preserve and enhance the Presidio as an enduring resource for the American public. The Trust is a unique model; it is a governmental organization that acts in the public interest but operates like a private company. The trust develops and markets the Presidio, but all its undertakings ultimately serve to enhance the park, educate the public, and ensure that the Presidio remains available to the community. Rather than merely advocating the preservation of the site, the organization is dedicated to furthering its evolution. This implies fostering growth in a way that interprets and conveys its history while maintaining its availability to the public, and consequently the Trust is meticulous about privileging projects that engage progressive cultural and civic mores. While proponents and critics debate ethical issues of corrupting versus enriching a historic site, the addition of another geostratigraphic layer seems imminent. Narratives of each cultural era are rooted in similar shifts and developments. The inception of an institution, especially one on a rich cultural site, offers an opportunity for its developers to lay a foundation for their own historic narrative. Aside from housing an unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary art, the proposed institution will provide this generation of architects, designers, artists, and curators with an opportunity to inscribe their ethos on the tableau of

San Franciscos history. Rather than eroding historic value, the Fishers museum will enrich the Presidio with another interpretive layer. In order to serve the public interest and fulfill the Presidio Trusts mission, the museum will have to maintain a high degree of curatorial autonomy. Although the new edifice would be part of a rich legacy of cultural philanthropy through private patronage, the current plan maintains that while the building will be donated to the city, the collection will not. It can be safely assumed that the Presidio Trust and the project leaders will take that crucial point into consideration before approving a venture of this magnitude. If the Fishers were to successfully solicit other local institutions and collectors to augment the permanent collection they would both create a more secure foundation for the collection and diffuse controversy around sole patronage by inviting participation from a broad faction of the arts community. The proposed project is as much an anthropological undertaking as a business endeavor. Aside from being the parks custodian, the Presidio Trust has been put in a position of mediating between the supposed private interest of the Fishers, and desires of various local interest groups. The belief that the museum is a self-serving business endeavor is conflated with the alternative proposal for the site, a Presidio history museum. A site-specific preservationist institution would fulfill the desires of a yet another interest group, but would close down interpretive potential with didactics. Furthermore, the nature of a historic center posits that we are at the end of a pedagogical trajectory looking backwards to define the past, whereas a contemporary art center places us within an ongoing lineage of cultural production. As long as it operates independently and retains the authority to cultivate a permanent collection and archive, the new institution will provide a stage for ongoing query and artistic investigation of shifting social currents. Aside from bringing revenue to the Presidio and to San Francisco, CAMP (the Contemporary Art Museum at the Presidio), can potentially enhance the citys cultural legacy by bolstering its status as a vital center of modern and contemporary art.

The fall 2008 Art and Politics class visited the GAP Collection as well as the proposed CAMP site.

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Curating Now 08 MA Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts

Providing an international perspective with professional development at its core, the two-year graduate program in contemporary curating encourages independent thinking and group collaboration, preparing students for careers in museums and galleries, public art commissioning and project management. For further information on the program visit www.cca.edu/curatorialpractice and the archive website at sites.cca.edu/curatingarchive, or email Allison Terbush, Program Manager, at aterbush@cca.edu.

visiting faculty 20078

Bruce Altshuler, Director of the Program in Museum Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University, New York Matthew Coolidge, Director, Center for Land use Interpretation, Los Angeles Kate Fowle, independent curator and writer, New York Mami Kataoka, International Curator, Hayward Galley, London and Senior Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Kitty Scott, Director, Walter Phillips Gallery and Visual Arts Program, Banff Centre, Canada Rochelle Steiner, Director, Public Art Fund, New York

Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick Prelinger, artists and Founders of the Prelinger Archives Lucy Raven, artist, New York Marcos Rios, artist, Los Angeles Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery, London Beatriz Santiago Munoz, artist, Puerto Rico Paola Santos Coy, curator and writer, San Francisco Karsten Schubert, Owner and director, Karsten Schubert Ltd., London Uli Sigg, Collector, Geneva, Switzerland Sean Snyder, researcher, archivist, witness, and narrator, Frankfurt and Berlin, Germany Peter L. Stein, Executive Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, San Francisco

guest lecturers 20078

Mark Allen, Founder and Director of Machine Project, Los Angeles Fia Backstrom, artist, New York Stuart Bailey, graphic designer and co-editor of Dot Dot Dot, New York Michelle Barger, Head of Objects Conservation, SFMOMA, San Francisco Lucinda Barnes, Chief Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Christopher Barnett, art framer, San Francisco Bill Berkson, poet, art critic and Professor of liberal arts at the San Francisco Art Institute Marnie Burke de Guzman, Director, Consumer & Media Affairs One Economy Jeffrey Cain, artist, Los Angeles Julie Deamer, Curator and Founding Director of Outpost for Contemporary Art, San Francisco Tessa De Carlo, arts writer, San Francisco Apsara DiQuinzio, Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA, San Francisco Aurlien Froment, artist, France Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts, SFMOMA, San Francisco Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts at Projects Arts Centre in Dublin, Ireland Bill Gilbert, Endowed Chair of Land Arts of the American West, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Fritz Haeg, artist, Los Angeles Bruce Hainley, Associate Director, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA Christian Jankowski, artist, New York and Berlin Evelyne Jouanno, independent art critic and curator, San Francisco David Larsen, performer, artist, scholar, poet, Berkeley Adam Lerner, Executive Director, The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, Lakewood, CO Gabriel Lester, Artist, Brussels, Belgium Maria Lind, Director of the Graduate Program at Bard Colleges Center for Curatorial Studies, New York Ken Lum, artist, Vancouver Sharon Maidenberg, Acting Director, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Maria Marcotulli, founder of Space 868, Marin, CA Yoshua Okon, artist, Mexico City and Los Angeles Trevor Paglen, artist, Berkeley David Perry, Principal of David Perry & Associates (strategic communications), San Francisco

Zefrey Throwell, artist, New York Julia White, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Our sincerest thanks to Jeff Dauber, The GAP Collection, Rich Niles and Lenore Pereira, and Robert Shimshak for providing students with access to their collections.

curatorial practice students 20078

Petrushka Bazin, Jessica Brier, Chia-Lin Chou, Courtenay Finn, Anna Gritz, Clare Haggarty, Kate Philimore, Sarah Robayo Sheridan Jaime Austin, Tanner Borskey, Robin Carlson, Chris Fitzpatrick, Tamara Loewenstein, Mirjana Blankenship, Matthew Post, Sally Swed, Xiaoyu Weng Jacqueline Clay, Lisa Cromartie, Courtney Dailey, Emily Gonzalez, Jacqueline Im, Kristin Korolowicz, Sharon Lerner, Katie Morgan, Maria Ortiz, Arden Sherman, Joanna Szupinska, Josephine Zarkovich

FACULTY chair
Leigh Markopoulos

core faculty 20078

Kevin Consey, art historian, independent curator, and arts-management consultant, Berkeley Jill Dawsey, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Kate Fowle, independent curator/writer, New York Anthony Grudin, art historian, San Francisco Jens Hoffmann, Director, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Steven Leiber, private art and art book dealer, San Francisco Raimundas Malasauskas, independent curator and writer, Vilnius, New York, and Paris Marina McDougall, independent curator and writer, San Francisco Julio Cesar Morales, artist and curator, San Francisco Julian Myers, Assistant professor, MA Program in Curatorial Practice. Art historian and critic, San Francisco Sandra Percival, Executive Director, New Langton Arts, San Francisco Renny Pritikin, Director, Nelson Gallery, Davis Gary Sangster, independent curator and writer, San Francisco Dominic Willsdon, Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Jan Van Woensel, independent curator, art critic, lecturer, and writer, New York Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

curating now
Editor: Leigh Markopoulos Design: John Borruso Printing: Solstice Press, Oakland, CA Special thanks to: Elisabeth Schneider, Allison Terbush, Michele Yu 2009 CCA MA Program in Curatorial Practice and the authors California College of the Arts MA Program in Curatorial Practice 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 http://sites.cca.edu/curatingarchive Reproduction Rights: You are free to copy, display and distribute the contents of this publication under the following conditions: You must attribute the work or any portion of the work reproduced as to the author, publication title and date; If you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. However, you must state that it has been altered and in what way; For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work; You must inform the copyright holder and editor of any reproduction, display or distribution of any part of this publication.