__ To experience the art in Pamela and Richard Kramlich's home, you have to plug it in. __
Perched in the Presidio Heights section of San Francisco, the house contains close to a dozen technology-driven installations that throb, fracture, coo, and harangue. Mounted over a stone fireplace in the living room, a 40-inch television flashes laserdisc images from Matthew Barney's Cremaster, a series about a transgendered never-never land, starring the artist as a ghostly, naked satyr. In the stairwell, four Sony Watchmans, an NEC color monitor, and eight AR speakers blast Dara Birnbaum's Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, a piece that orchestrates news broadcasts from the 1989 incident into a global media symphony. Rising from a tiny video screen built inside an aluminum tube in the master bedroom, Gary Hill's Cut Pipe whispers erotic demands: "Give your skin to me, I want my finger on it." And trapped in the family room like a mad uncle, Bruce Nauman's head bounces around on screens, yelling "OK, OK, OK, OK" endlessly, as if he's trying to start a fight.
The Kramlichs, exuberant members of the Silicon Valley elite, have used their fortune to create one of the world's leading private collections of media art, a catchall term for work incorporating moving images, sound, and a variety of high and low tech presentations. They own well over 200 pieces - with roughly 55 originals - in a collection studded with blue-chip names: Barney, Nauman, Hill, Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, Marcel Broodthaers, as well as less celebrated artists whom the Kramlichs spot ahead of the pack. The media formats put into play include slides projected on a screen, VHS tapes shown on a TV monitor, and computer-controlled films played in massive, complex installations - all of it embodying a flashing, shouting representation of our technological age.
"The Kramlichs' collection is not only the best, it's the only big private collection of moving-image video and sculpture," says Robert Riley, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "They've been very smart about building it up, and they've grown confident about buying innovative work that leads the field."
With millions invested in their holdings, the Kramlichs are poised for a center-stage moment. Starting this month and extending through mid-January, SFMOMA will turn over its entire fourth floor to Seeing Time, a major show of the Kramlichs' collection. And in Napa County, California, they are embarking on an even more audacious expression of their commitment to multimedia art. This fall, groundbreaking begins on their new house, a glassy jewel box that is being designed and wired as a sort of futuristic home museum. When completed in 2001, the house will be the most lavish private showcase that media art has ever seen.
Designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron (winners of the competition to rebuild the de Young Museum in San Francisco), the spread is planned as a techno-extravaganza. Video is as integral to its interior as the kitchen sink. Much of the technology has never been tested in a home setting, and some of it is fresh out of the lab. The ground floor's curving glass partition walls will have a wafer-thin film material sandwiched inside, creating huge video screens that blink on at the flip of a switch. Downstairs, subterranean galleries will be set up for state-of-the-art viewing. Powerful projectors will be placed outside for watching film under the stars, from the canopied rooftop or the pool. A giant projection screen in the garage will display images as visitors drive in.
Obviously, the house gives new meaning to the unusual nature of the Kramlichs' desire to unite art and life. Do they ever wonder if it will drive them crazy?
Yeah, but only a little. Dick Kramlich recalls that before he signed the papers to OK the design, he phoned his 89-year-old father, who once lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Arizona.
"I said, 'Dad, I need a reality check. We're building this house. It doesn't have any right angles, it will cost about a gazillion dollars, and we probably can't ever resell it for what we're putting into it.'
He asked me only one thing: 'Can you do it?'"
Kramlich smiles. "I said, 'Yeah, I can do it.'"
The Kramlichs might seem unlikely members of the avant-garde. Dick, now 64, is one of Silicon Valley's financial architects, first as a partner with Arthur Rock, the Valley's most legendary VC, and then as cofounder and general partner of New Enterprise Associates. The long résumé of companies he's helped fund includes 3Com and Silicon Graphics. This year, he worked on the Juniper Networks and Healtheon IPOs as well as the $25 billion merger of Ascend Communications with Lucent.
"That's how I'm able to afford this new house," he jokes. "I'm anything but retired."
Pam, eight years younger, grew up in the Philippines, graduated from UC Berkeley, and now sits on several cultural boards. Dick is ebullient, forceful, cut-to-the-chase; Pam is quiet and reflective - a pastel against his primary color. Collecting art is the accidental by-product of their whirlwind 1981 courtship. It wasn't the first time around for either of them, and when they married after a seven-week romance, they faced a terrifying question. "When the dust settled," recalls Dick, "we looked at each other and asked, 'What do we really have in common?'"
"Nothing," Pam chimes in.
"Nothing," he says happily. "Nada."
Pam proposed collecting art as a joint hobby. Dick agreed - it sounded like a fun new way to back risky but zealous talent. "I'm a sucker for passion," he says.
The Kramlichs hired Thea Westreich, an art adviser from Manhattan, to help shape their collection. The first big question was what to collect. Looking for an art form compatible with Dick's technology interests, Westreich and Pam turned to video, but Dick had his doubts. "I can tell you that it wasn't warmly and immediately embraced," says Westreich, who still works closely with the Kramlichs on all of their acquisitions. "Dick kept objecting, 'This isn't art; video can be infinitely replicated.'" After seeing Birnbaum's Tiananmen Square, however, he warmed up.
"I like real things," he says. "And what Dara had done with this event, that everyone around the globe had seen on television, was just fantastic. I could relate. It was new and creative. Video is one of those things that you don't get until you see it."
A plan was drawn up for a two-part collection: a library of tapes including works by important figures from the '60s and '70s like Richard Serra, Martha Rosler, and others; and works and installations produced as unique or limited editions.
The SFMOMA show arrives as interest in multimedia has reached an all-time high. This year's Venice Biennale was awash in video; and Bill Viola's retrospective, touring the nation's major museums this year and last, has drawn critical acclaim and enormous crowds. Seeing Time showcases 35 of the Kramlichs' pieces, ranging from early low tech efforts to recent digital creations. One of the older offerings is Marcel Broodthaers' Bateau Tableau, a 1973 conceptual masterwork that consists of a Kodak projector and 80 slides, each devoted to a different, often minute area of an otherwise banal maritime painting.
One of the largest pieces in the show - and one that highlights digital technology's now-pervasive influence on video art - is Keith Tyson's AMCHII-XLII: Angelmaker Part II Quadraped, created in 1995. To see this one, viewers walk through four rooms where they see scenes of mayhem - a submarine in red-alert mode, auto-asphyxiation, a bacterial infection, an earthquake. Outside the installation, a computerized device generates the scenes, assembling them from a composite of sounds and images fed in by Tyson. The setup allows Tyson to add new elements, tweaking the parameters for how quickly and loudly they are played. This multimedia installation, which fills a 37-by-37-foot gallery space, is so enormous that it has been assembled only once before.
Physically impermanent and of uncertain long-term value, media art requires serious commitment. Unlike paintings, installations can't be rehung easily when you redecorate, and the art can become outmoded. It's an open question whether the laserdisc players and video monitors needed to show Matthew Barney's work will even be around in 25 years. Film projectors and VCRs are already dying breeds. With moderate use, VHS tapes last only about 10 years, and older DVDs can falter in as little as 5. Artists and conservationists also struggle with how vital the original playing equipment is to the authenticity of a piece. Does it change the meaning of, say, Dan Graham's 1970-72 Body Press if it's seen on digital video rather than 16-mm film?
No one can answer any of this definitively, but the Kramlichs are taking measures to make their collection permanent. Working with media specialists, they are transferring some of their pieces to DVD-ROM and MPEG-2 file formats. When these technologies start to become extinct, the Kramlichs anticipate migrating to new ones. They are also consulting with artists on how to best preserve their work.
The final uncertainty is how to put a price on work that can be easily and flawlessly copied. Pirating of art videos may not be as rampant as it is with Hollywood films, but the principle for making unauthorized copies is the same. For collectors, it's way too early to know whether to go long or sell short on video.
The Kramlichs are well aware of these dangers, and don't seem too worried about them. Dick recalls that a friend on the board of the Dallas Museum asked him, "How do you buy this stuff?" Dick told him, "Be prepared to spend between $50,000 and $250,000 on each piece. And then be prepared to write it all off." He laughs. "No one knows the value of these things."
To hear Pam tell it, the alternating currents of intense peace and stimulation she gets from their challenging collection has already been a great investment.
"When you plug it in, it lives," she says. "And then when you flip the switch, it goes back to being architecture. It's very dynamic that way. You have the purity of these two things existing together."
To many people, the video lifestyle that the Kramlichs have chosen seems a living hell. Even Bill Viola - who at their invitation installed The Greeting, his slow-mo version of a Renaissance painting, in their Presidio Heights house - admits it would be difficult to fill his own home with such media art.
"The remarkable thing about Pam and Dick is that they live with this stuff," he says. "I've been making pieces for 25 years. But I don't have any in my house."
Dara Birnbaum agrees. "I'd go crazy if I lived with my own work all the time," she says. She couldn't believe it when the Kramlichs gave her free reign to design the home installation of Tiananmen Square.
The Herzog & de Meuron house is a supreme expression of the Kramlichs' faith that they can cohabitate with their edgy art. The home, on a secluded wooded slope, will be a dazzler. The roof will jut like a spaceship's prow over the expansive terrace. The single-story structure's 10-foot-high exterior walls will be made entirely of laminated glass. On the ground floor, videos projected on curved, wavelike partitions will mingle with spectacular views of the Napa Valley. A softly glowing scale model of the home's design was featured this past summer in New York MoMA's showcase of cutting-edge architecture, The Unprivate House.
"There are no precedents for a private home like this," says Jacques Herzog. "The main difficulty was designing spaces where they could live with their art and also enjoy their lives.
"The two," he insists, "are not exclusive."
As stunning as the surface aesthetics is the technical plumbing hidden inside. The architects and technical consultants are still puzzling over how to set up the main floor's jumbo video screens. Several rooms throughout the house will contain Digital Light Processing projectors, a high-end commercial machine that is just starting to creep onto the consumer market. The image quality of the $50,000 to $120,000 projectors rivals that of HDTV.
The entire collection will eventually be controlled from a massive server via remotes in each room. The Kramlichs also plan to install a high-speed network, either DSL or broadband cable, so that works they acquire in the future can be delivered to them with the click of a mouse.
