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SAN FRANCISCO — The new S.F. Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now turns the typically quiet gallery walk into a hands-on interactive experience. The pieces in the retrospective exhibit show how artists have dabbled in two-way communication with viewers over the past 60 years. The refreshingly self-reflexive exhibition draws on a rich history and examines the relationships among museums, artists and the public. The show explores "how the public relates to the museum and vice versa," says Rudolf Frieling, the museum’s curator of media arts. "Art frames you as a participant and art is framed by the museum." Click though the slideshow to sample the historic and contemporary work in the show, along with visitors’ interactive reactions to the exhibition or interactive art. http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/306/ The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now runs through Feb. 8 at SFMOMA. Left: Museum visitors examine a contemporary version of German artist Hans Haacke’s News, first shown in 1969. Haacke’s original used a telex machine to print a news stream from German press agency DPA. In the updated work, a printer in the gallery spews out news reports obtained from RSS feeds of several online news sources, bringing events of the outside world into the gallery in real time. The printed news spills onto the gallery floor, creating a sculptural representation of virtual information — a tangible material archive of global news — throughout the duration of the exhibition.
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Amber Isbilen and Kevin Johnson, both of San Francisco, use their breath to create abstract, colorful images on a television set in this 1998 version of Nam June Paik’s Participation TV. Known as the "founding father of video art," Paik designed a series of these manipulated televisions in the 1960s to be "played like instruments." "It’s like bringing a microorganism to life," Isbilen said.
This image is a video still of American composer John Cage surrounded by onlookers in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he performs what became his most famous and controversial conceptual composition, 4’33". The piece consists of four minutes and 33 seconds during which no notes are played. With the absence of music coming from the perceived performer, the ambient sound created by audience members and the environment becomes the music. First performed in 1952 by pianist David Tudor at the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund concert in Woodstock, New York, the piece initially angered audience members who expected a conventional concert. "They haven’t forgotten it 30 years later," Cage said. "They’re still angry." You can catch a http://www.sfmoma.org/events/1258 live performance of this seminal work live at SFMOMA as part of the Art of Participation exhibition. Bring your sense of humor. Image: Video still from Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage (1973, 1976)/Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Camille W. and William S. Broadbent Fund
Another example of re-creating a historically innovative work, American artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s black-and-white video projection Hole-in-Space uses documentary footage of their 1980 "public communication sculpture." The original, unannounced public event utilized satellite technology to connect pedestrians at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City with pedestrians at Century City Shopping Center in Los Angeles for two hours each day from Nov. 11 to 14, 1980. People at each location could see and converse with pedestrians on the other side of the country in real time. Once word got out, friends and family members from the two cities were able to arrange meetings with loved ones on the opposite coast. In the museum installation, footage from the two locations is projected on two separate, parallel walls that face one another — "a formal reference to the windows at the original sites" that displayed the projections, according to the artists. Photo courtesy Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz
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Californians Diana Meehan (left) of Napa and Jann Nunn of Oakland eyeball each other in a re-creation of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s Diálogo: Oculos, or "Dialogue: Goggles," originally created in 1968. One of Clark’s "propositions," the piece invites viewers to try on goggles that have been modified with mirrors to alter perception. Meant to be shared with a partner, the goal is to rediscover the meaning of a routine gesture. Other "propositions" by Clark featured in The Art of Participation include: Diálogo de Mãos or "Hand Dialogue," Rede de Elástico or "Elastic Net," and Máscaras Sensoriais or "Sensorial Masks."
For Life2 (2006), San Francisco Bay Area artist Lynn Hershman Leeson worked with the Stanford Humanities Lab to create a virtual archive of her historic project The Dante Hotel that can be explored and altered by avatars in Second Life. Hershman Leeson’s historic project, which Life2 revisits, existed in a residence hotel room in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. For a period of nine months from 1973 to1974, visitors could get a key from the front desk any time and check in on the fictional occupants. The hotel room is re-created in Life2, along with artifacts from the original installation. Life2 can be viewed in the museum using pre-existing avatars on two different computers, and from your http://slurl.com/secondlife/NEWare/128/128/0 own computer. Screenshot courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
In Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), a 1972 Chevy C-10 displays video and collects a digital archive of random media from visitors who share images, videos and music files from their personal electronic devices. The viewers’ files, uploaded through a console called the media hookah, will become part of a digital time capsule available for access in 2030. Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier of historic multimedia-art collective Ant Farm teamed up with Bruce Tomb to create the piece, which was commissioned by the museum. The piece is based on a 1971 journey that Ant Farm took across the United States in a van customized with media equipment, interacting with the public along the way. The video displayed in Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule) is documentation from the 1971 Media Van project. Photo: Ian Reeves/Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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Pauline Andrie of Boston tries out Edwin Wurm’s Keep a Cool Head, modeling her pose on the artist’s instructional drawing. Wurm’s One-Minute Sculptures, several of which are featured in The Art of Participation, invite the viewer to "perform" a temporary sculpture by following the artist’s often-absurd instructions on how to use everyday objects — in this case, a modified refrigerator. For Andrie, this piece was "all in the name of fun." Of the overall show, she said: "I’ve never seen anything like this before."
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Tomo Saito of Japan and Adrien Segal from Oakland, California, attempt large-scale origami using two sheets from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ mass-produced, poster-size prints stacked on the gallery floor (Untitled 1992-1993). The stack of prints is replenished by the museum as often as necessary, and visitors are welcome to take them home. In the background is John Baldessari’s painting Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art (1966-68). Commenting on the unconventional dynamics of The Art of Participation, Saito said the "audience has more power than the artist."
Like Edwin Wurm, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer also asks museum visitors to perform. His interactive installation Microphones (2008) uses modified 1930s Shure microphones that contain hidden speakers and circuit boards connected to a network of computers invisible to the participant. A participant who speaks into the microphone is illuminated and audio-recorded. Immediately afterward, the microphone plays a recording of a previous participant. Photo: Ian Reeves/Courtesy SFMOMA
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Gallery attendant Francisco Montero rocks the mike in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Microphones. An artist himself, Montero said he likes to encourage visitors who are timid to participate with show’s interactive pieces.
Set up on a computer in the gallery and accessible from anywhere you can get online, http://www.communimage.ch/ Communimage is a web-based piece by c a l c (the pan-European collective casquiero atlantico labortorio cultural). The work encourages participants to upload an image of their choice along with basic meta-information to a grid system to create a "virtual, collective sculpture." Communimage was created in 1999, before the explosion of sites like Flickr and YouTube that thrive on user-generated content. Screenshot courtesy c a l c and Johannes Gees
Recognize your picture in this detail from http://www.communimage.ch/ Communimage? Communimage and Life2 aren’t the only internet-based works featured in the show: SFMOMA’s website has a http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/exhibitions/306/aop_online_artworks full list of online artwork from The Art of Participation. If you are artistically inclined and itching to exhibit at SFMOMA, you can bid on eBay for the chance to exhibit in a designated room in the museum as a part of the http://publicwhitecube.com/pwc/ 1st Public White Cube, conceived by artists Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke. Reflecting the collaborative spirit of The Art of Participation, you must contend with an artist’s work that is already set up in the gallery. The next auction starts Jan. 1. Screenshot courtesy c a l c and Johannes Gees
In his piece The Gift, German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz utilizes the museum as both exhibition space and production studio. His work invites the public to sit, with an open expression, for a digital photographic portrait taken by a young artist. The portraits are then printed and framed in the museum and displayed in rotation along a wall in the gallery. The whole creative process is on view: the subjects, the production (including the printing and framing), the exhibition and finally the http://prod-preview.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_participation?slide=15 distribution of the work. The portraits can also be http://www.examiner.com/sfmoma viewed online at The Examiner. The studio is open Mondays, and Thursday through Saturday. Screenshot: The Examiner
On the last day of the show, the artist will randomly redistribute portraits from http://archive.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/12/ previous slide URL TK The Gift to participants. The expectation is that the portrait each participant receives, most likely of a stranger, will be exhibited as a work of art "on permanent loan" from the museum. This image is from the end of a previous installation of the piece at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporain in Tourcoing, France. "http://www.examiner.com/x-623-SF-Cultural-Events-Examiner~y2008m11d2-Jochen-Gerz-gives-The-Gift-to-SFMOMA Reality is a great teacher," artist Jochen Gerz said in an interview. "Art should distribute itself.... The artist should disappear." Photo courtesy Gerz Studio — For more information on the show, check out the excellent book http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/exhibitions/306/aop_publications The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now that accompanies the SFMOMA show. The exhibit runs through Feb. 8, 2009.
