A group of students from California Institute of the Arts are working up a sweat at Vasquez Rocks, a nature reserve close to the Valencia campus and about 70 clicks north of the Geffen Contemporary. MOCA’s exhibition space is showing Art as Life, the partially posthumous retrospective for Allan Kaprow. Almost forty years before, Kaprow—at the behest of CalArts’ administrators—staged Publicity, a seminal happening.
The MOCA show displays Kaprow’s original score on yellow legal paper. The score included instructions for crews with Sony Portapaks to videotape the event, led by Nam June Paik. A note in the margin reads, “File tapes in library under carpentry?”
It’s easy to imagine Kaprow having mixed feelings about Publicity. So much so, he called it for what it was: an event promoted by the institution to publicize itself to the larger art world. In the early years, CalArts brought in big name faculty and visiting artists, attempting to situate the school as heir to multi-disciplinary schools like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain. By the early 70’s Kaprow’s practice had been broadcast on television and was co-opted into advertising: “I dreamed I was at a happening in my Maidenform bra.” Publicity was a way for the school to pigyback on that notoriety. One can see his practice at that time as moving away from large-scale works, just as Kaprow moved away from the then-center of the art world, New York. Eventually he would shun the term “Happening” for the more intimate “Activity.”
An integral part of Kaprow’s happenings was to put the audience into the mix, and to have them talk about it afterwards. For 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, audience members were given instructions to follow over the course of the event. There was no place in the room for a disinterested observer. Out near Agua Dulce in the California high desert, the same would hold true. In Publicity, participants would play the part of the media or be mediated.
For the reinvention of the work, students and faculty attempted to update the event with current technologies. Wood two-by-fours used at the original event would be accompanied by metal studs at the reinvention. The part of the score that called for videotaping and playback would be updated with current consumer technologies for capturing images and viewing them. As people entered Vasquez Rocks, they were given an address to send pictures and videos taken with their mobile phones. The stills and video would post instantly to a web log created for “Kaprow’s Publicity 2008.” On site, a high-speed Internet connection was established, and a laptop allowed participants to view the mediated depiction on-line and in real time.
These updates in technologies were fairly well in keeping with Kaprow’s own practice of mixing things up. His seminal work Yard—originally created in the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery—had been radically transformed when reinvented by Kaprow himself. Rather than appearing like a three-dimensional Jackson Pollock made of tires, an iteration of Yard in Italy left the tires on their racks and the floor bare.
For a reinvention of 18 Happening in 6 parts after Kaprow’s death, carpenters scored the MDF flooring used to recreate the look of the original loft space, matching it to the photographic documentation. For the faculty, students, and alumni of CalArts involved in Publicity, they more concerned about the potential risks of a too-faithful reproduction. In Valencia, there was little interest in creating a Happening that seemed more like a Civil War reenactment. Kaprow biographer Jeff Kelley held a similar view. At an informal discussion after the event, he told participants that the term reinvention was a curatorial conceit, one that Kaprow wasn’t particularly fond of. Like the score for a string quartet, the focus should be on the reading and playing of the score, not the outfits or superfluous elements from the original production.
Looking back at the historical record, there were tempting events to recreate that weren’t part of the score. As Tom Mcdonough tells the story, "Publicity was to involve groups of students in competing building activities out in the California desert, but this plan was sabotaged by the intervention of a renegade group of students in ski masks who drove up and threatened to set the whole scene ablaze. Only the concerted opposition of some of Kaprow's pupils thwarted their plan, with the progressive teacher now forced into the uncomfortable role of enforcer of law and order. The limits of the genre had become all too clear." It could very well be that these hijinks were the impetus to transition to his more intimate scale works.
If no renegades showed their faces in 2008, the same can’t be said of their nemesis, the blameless administrator. Filming permits were acquired; a park ranger and fire marshal kept watch, and a MOCA representative was present, scurrying about to have releases signed. Meanwhile, participants focused on the tasks at hand, improvising structures amid the sandstone boulders.
The last line of Publicity’s score says that the day’s activities continue until sunset or, “Until everyone gets tired,” which coincidentally happed as the park rangers were locking the park at six in the evening. The group headed over to an Agua Dulce Mexican diner for drinks and discussion. Jeff Kelley—who also participated in the original version—talked about the notable differences. In 1970 the Portapaks were a novel technology. So much so, those students were probably seeing themselves depicted on video for the first time. Folks became incredibly self-conscious, which was Kaprow’s intent.
Thirty-eight years later, the video camera (or cell-phone camera for that matter) has become so ubiquitous that the current crop of students has become inured to their effect. Released from the fluorescent lights and marathon doses of critical inquiry, the CalArts students took to the fresh air and sunlight and enjoyed a day of supervised play—a comfortable and familiar context for American children raised in the 90’s. For them, the mediated image taking became less of an intrusion into their psychic space, than an opportunity to foist the duties of documentation onto someone else. Publicity indeed.
June 12, 2008
Allan Kaprow: Publicity as Life
June 11, 2008
Andrea Fraser on the Art of Michael Asher
Writings 1973-1983 on works 1969-1979 / Michael Asher
Written in collaboration with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and MOCA Los Angeles, [1983] ISDN 0919616275
In the Summer 2008 Artforum, Andrea Fraser makes the case that Michael Asher's practice could be seen as one of service provision, rather than the conventional art labor of object making. To be sure--other than a handful of instances--little exists in the way of viewable permanent installations of Asher's work.
While it may be impossible to completely remove one's self from this capitalist world we live in (and still participate in the world of art) through his mode of production, Asher has at least managed to dis-implicate himself from the secondary art market--the one that thrives on speculation and withholds a lion's share of the dollar value of art from the maker--and instead puts it in the hands of the investor.
Towards the end of her article, Fraser laments one aspect of this strategy: by not making objects that appreciate, Asher leaves us with little that is appreciable. What we are left with is documentation and ephemera. She refers to the archive as the "Potter's Field" of the art world.
Taking a big step back in the art history timeline, I'd like to look at an earlier object, for comparison:
Venus of Willendorf, 24,000–22,000 BCE
So besides the formal reading, the historical reading, the Marxist reading, etc., it becomes necessary to examine the art object as something that is both coveted and collected. In fact, Fraser begins and ends the essay with the description of her own prized (and lost) possession, Michael Asher's Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979. Also the blocks for Michael's show at Le Consortium in Dijon (meant to be distributed to working-class households in the neighborhood) have been coveted and collected by people who prize such things.
Last year's auction of a 1968 Asher sculpture at Bonhams and Butterfields for $27,500 shows that the art world is most comfortable conversing and trading in objects. Recent survey shows like MOCA's "A Minimalist Future? Art as Object 1958-1968" and the Kunstverein Braunschweig's "Kunst aus Los Angeles der 60er bis 90er Jahre" (Art from Los Angeles from the 60s to the 90s) show that Michael's fate may be that he becomes misrepresented to future generations through his early object-based work.
Another important aspect of Fraser's article is her shifting of the conversation about Asher from the institutional critique to his mode of production. Still, one must recognize that Asher's mode of production becomes impossible without an institution to hang it on (be it a gallery like Claire Copley, a museum like the MCA in Chicago, or a Kunsthalle like SMMoA). So in some sense it can be seen as an institute-dependent mode of production.
In my own artistic production I wonder if it possible to create work outside the conventional institutions and still participate (in a significant way) in the art world's conversations. Through the blog form and the creation of Improvised Artistic Devices, perhaps objects can trigger ideas in the beholder, like Proust's madeleine or Fraiser's remembrance of lost books.
June 6, 2008
Guns in Art Museums: Worst-Case Scenarios
I'm gallery sitting here at Peres Projects, and just read an Artforum post about a security guard at the Carnegie International who destroyed a Vija Celmins painting:
The piece—from Vija Celmins's "Night Sky" series—was on display as part of the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition, according to a police affidavit. It was damaged beyond repair on May 16; a "large vertical gouge" runs down its middle. A surveillance tape caught Timur Serebrykov in the act of defacing the work, the affidavit said. "I didn't like the painting," Serebrykov told police when they arrested him at the museum on May 20.
For some reason, this made me think of Christopher Knight's critique of BCAM at LACMA's use of gun-toting guards. Perhaps the museum is concerned about the potential for a toxic formaldehyde spill made by some dead-sheep loving animal rights activist. Either way, the worry about potential problems seems to come from the same logic that makes some countries engage in preemptive wars, or why some countries stockpile hundreds or thousands (instead of say, dozens) of atomic bombs: if a guard is good, a guard with a gun is better.When entering LACMA, there are no metal detectors, and only large items like backpacks are searched or have to be left at the coat check. Someone could easily stick a hammer up their sleeve, and give Hirst's sheep a fatal whack. To stop such an event, (with or without a gun) requires the guards to be vigilant. A guard with a gun could shoot the vandal from across the room, rather than have to run up and wrestle the perpetrator to the floor. No need to break into a sweat, and only moderate risk of nicking some baby in a stroller.
But what about the guard who defaces a work of art? Are the guards with guns willing to take out one of their own for the sake of the art? Would a Celmins with a bullet hole be worth more than the Celmins with a tear?
What these protective measures fail to take into account is the headline-making that gunfire in a museum would almost guarantee. Like a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, suicide by museum guard could have the potential to attract as much violence as it's designed to prevent.
June 4, 2008
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