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_________________ 11 40 pm pdt [ full days III ] On Saturday, Matthew and I drove down to Sunnyvale to look at our potential new apartment. It wasn't perfect, but it had a lot of what we were both looking for, so we're going to try to get it. I'll spare you the details of our long hashed out discussion about whether or not we should live together. Needless to say, we gave the topic several hours of our time. After Sunnyvale, we headed to the city to go to SFMOMA; several exhibits had been specifically recommended to us. Let me pause here and say that if you are in the Bay Area you should stop reading right now and just hop on the BART and go there. You should start with Janet Cardiff's Video Walk in the Atrium, then see Custom Built: A Twenty-Year Survey of Work by Allan Wexler on the second floor. Next hit the rest of 010101: Art in Technological Times on the forth floor, and finish with Points of Departure on the fifth floor by getting an iPAQ and headphones to watch little movies about the pieces. For everyone else, here are my experiences: Janet Cardiff's Video Walk On 02 October 1997 I mentioned going to SFMOMA for a lecture in conjunction with the Virtual Worlds lecture series at UC Berkeley. The lecture was given by media artist Michael Naimark and among the work he showed was a single piece which had everyone gasping out loud. This stunning work involved a room in which he film 360 degrees of footage, then painted everything white and projected the footage on top of the now-white room. Only ephemeral projections remained of the people who had interacted with the objects in the room. At the time, I was so captivated as to declare it my absolute favorite work of art. It has remained as such until Saturday. The Video Walk actually involves the same principals of interacting with images and sounds in a space where they no longer exist. But the piece involved so much more. She was conveying some story of her own, with a haunting past that chased you up the stairs. She was capturing the museum at a moment in time, unwitting spectators becoming actors. You become a spectacle walking around the museum with your headphones and video camera. The whole experience was wonderful and entertaining, but I had a special affinity to two moments -- one in which I felt I was breaking the rules, and one in which the drama of the story became so real for me that I had a full adrenaline rush. I experienced true fear and discomfort, and I was exhilarated. I have no doubt my absolute love of the Video Walk colored the rest of my museum experience, since I was on a natural high for the rest of the day and I enjoyed most everything we saw and experienced. Custom Built: A Twenty-Year Survey of Work by Allan Wexler We had been urged to see 010101 on the fourth floor and Points of Departure on the fifth floor, so while I was still glowing with delight, I asked Matthew if we should just go straight there. We were on the second floor when I asked, and we agreed to poke around there a bit. It was just by accident that we stumbled upon Allan Wexler's hilarious semi-practical art. I had no problem giggling out loud over his inventions. He he a water theme running from his play with buckets, gutters, and coffee cups that was fascinating. I like art that is functional, but Wexler's art explored functionality in the common realms of architecture and furniture. Just happening upon his work was a real treat. 010101: Art in Technological Times The Video Walk was part of this exhibit. Many of the pieces here did not strike me. I wanted Floating Time and Scream, Therefore I Am (which I've seen before somewhere) to be interactive or to have some other component. They felt lacking, as did Softscape and the helicopter searchlight piece. Media art is my thing, so I've seen quite a bit and it has to grab me to keep my interest. Scumak was wonderful -- a computer-controlled machine that produced blobby sculptures. Matthew and I got absorbed by a maze featuring floor to ceiling printouts of 1999-2000 screen captures from both the web and television. Matthew commented on the time capsule effect. I first felt that I was getting a fully realized glimpse of Japanese media, but then the piece struck me in a different way. The television was all local, but the web was universal. I even noticed a shot of someone's online diary. Points of Departure: Connecting with Contemporary Art When we hurried off to Points of Departure, we had little time left before the museum closed. I had been requested to check out the educational media interspersed throughout the gallery. There were "smart tables" where you could access Making Sense of Modern Art, which is also available on the web and since I had checked it out on the web, I ignored them. The other gadgetry was handheld iPAQs with curatorial and artist videos. I wouldn't have known they were there if I hadn't been forewarned, but I quickly located the kiosk where Matthew and I each checked one out along with a pair of headphones. Seeing artists discuss their work gave fantastic insight into the pieces on display and the people behind them. I would recommend getting an iPAQ just to watch Jenny Holzer avoid answering the interviewer's questions about I Am a Man. I would have strongly disliked some of the pieces without the video to give me a new context in which to view them; I still didn't like some of the work. I did find though, that the iPAQs changed how I viewed the work. I wanted to see all of the pieces on which there was a video, often ignoring the surrounding work. Matthew and I became two strangers, moving in different directions at different paces. We only reunited when we told the museum was closing. |
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