Monthly Archives: October 2006

A Frame and 240 Volts: Living with "Difficult" Art [Financial Times]

Financial Times, May 27, 2006

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From sharks to video installations, some
work is harder to own than others.
Tracey Taylor finds out how to
display “difficult” art

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Four years ago a story about a melting human blood sculpture surfaced in the media. The slightly sniggering undertone was hard to miss. It was reported that a work owned by Charles Saatchi – a cast of a head made of nine pints of frozen, congealed blood – had been accidentally destroyed when the freezer in which it was being stored was disconnected by builders refitting the art collector’s kitchen.

The rumour was denied by Saatchi who, one could argue, had the last laugh last year, when he sold the piece – “Self” by Marc Quinn – for $1.5m, a tidy return on the $13,000 investment he had reputedly made to acquire it in 1991.

Still, the melting story raises a serious question about the challenges of displaying contemporary art, much of which does not come conveniently framed or in sizes appropriate to the average domestic interior. Even Jay Jopling, the dealer who sold Saatchi the Quinn piece – and who is presumably unfazed by works involving pickled sharks (Damien Hirst) and rumpled beds (Tracey Emin) – acknowledged that “Self” requires “a bit of commitment on the part of the collector”.

Sometimes just the effort required to accommodate a piece – because it is unwieldy or just plain enormous (say a Louise Bourgeois bronze spider or a work by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren whose signature painted stripes might take over several walls) testifies to the purchaser’s devotion.

As an international art consultant based in Brussels, Oliver Toegemann has seen his fair share of art works that require commitment. His company Slegten & Toegemann has helped many private clients integrate unconventional pieces into their homes by reinforcing floors for heavy items or removing balustrades and railings to facilitate installation.

Toegemann also knows about bringing controversial subjects out of the gallery and into the domestic realm. “With contemporary art, the feeling quite often is the more provocative the better. Take Jeff Koons’ pornographic series ‘Made in Heaven’, or Christian Boltanski’s installations with their images of Holocaust victims. These are aesthetically difficult, yet they are iconic pieces that find their way into collectors’ homes,” he says.

Anyone who hangs them in a living room or foyer must be brazen enough to withstand criticism and even expressions of disgust. This advice comes from personal experience. Toegemann himself lives with “The Healing of St Thomas” by Anish Kapoor, which consists of a deep cut in a wall filled with red pigment. “It looks like an open wound and we get many comments [since it] has a very strong presence,” he says.

He also owns a piece by Carl Andre, the American artist best known for his controversial “pile of bricks” work, “Equivalent VIII”, owned by the Tate Modern. Toegemann’s Andre piece “Valver” is made up of a number of thin, flat metal tiles, which he initially chose to display on the floor in front an ornate marble fireplace. “The piece always provokes the same reaction – ‘This is art?’ – and then nobody dares to step on it, although Andre’s whole idea was to liberate sculpture from its pedestal and to encourage people to walk on it.”

If someone did damage the work by stepping on it, there would be no gnashing of teeth. The work comes with a signed artist’s certificate, Toegemann explains, and, as long as replacement tiles are made according to the specifications on it, the art work remains authentic.

The idea that an artist’s input is not always necessary to the work raises interesting issues when it comes to the ownership and display of works. Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium is language, first settled on the idea that the original construction of a piece was not critical to its existence in 1968 after one of his outdoor installations was damaged. He concluded that a work such as his “A Stake Set”, which in one variation might be those three words spelled out in capital letters on a wall, could equally well be read in a book or even uttered aloud.

Other art works that might pose challenges – but at the very least will make for stimulating dinner conversation – are those made from perishable materials. German artist Dieter Roth relished working with materials such as rabbit excrement, salami and chocolate. He liked to make time visible by allowing organic objects to decompose. Similarly one can literally watch an artwork vanish with a canvas created with disappearing paint by the American Richard Prince.

Richard and Pamela Kramlich understand well the demands contemporary art can make on owners. The San Francisco couple, beneficiaries of Silicon Valley’s gold-rush years, have what is widely agreed to be the world’s pre-eminent private collection of new-media and electronic art. The pieces by artists such as Matthew Barney, Bruce Nauman, Doug Aitken and Bill Viola they’ve collected since the early 1990s all require varying amounts of technological equipment – DVD monitors, computers, projectors, as well as intricate webs of electronic cables.

The Kramlichs have chosen to live with this jabbering, noisy, visually stimulating, sometimes jarring ensemble in what their curator, Christopher Eamon, describes as their “1929 Tudor neo-neo-Gothic” home in the desirable neighbourhood of Presidio Heights. As Eamon describes it, a guest at the Kramlich residence might wake up to a partial projection of Rheinhard Mucha’s “Auto-Reverse” on the wall behind his bed. Sitting in one of the living areas, he might find Gilbert and George chattering away in their “Portrait of the Artists as Young Men” on a television next to the sofa.

One of the first works the Kramlichs acquired, and one that set the tone for future acquisitions, is Dara Birnbaum’s “Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990)”, which examines the role of the media in the Chinese student uprising and which the artist installed herself in the couple’s grand stairwell. Physically, the piece consists of a cascade of four laser displayers, four sets of directional speakers, four monitors and one large monitor.

The Kramlichs have said they enjoy sharing home with what amounts to around 12 installations and 30 media works, depending on what is out on loan to museums at any one time. It’s rather remarkable considering the fact that even some new-media artists admit they can’t spend prolonged time with their difficult-to-ignore art. As Birnbaum told Wired magazine in 1999: “I’d go crazy if I lived with my own work all the time.”

Apart from the difficulty of going about one’s daily business surrounded by such serious distractions, the Kramlichs must also address issues particular to electronic art. There is the impermanence of the technology, for instance, which raises questions about future value. And there is the fact that, unlike a painting or sculpture, their art can be “switched off”.

For some, the solution to accommodating challenging art is to reject the very notion and come up with a new idea altogether. Tired of what he saw as the trend to treat art as a commodity in the mid 1980s, Steven Oliver, a prominent West Coast businessman and board chair at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, decided to commission artists to create site- specific sculptures at his ranch in Alexander Valley, California. He now has a series of exceptional, outsize pieces by artists including Richard Serra, Nauman, Martin Puryear and Ann Hamilton spread out over the wild, open landscape. Not for him the worries of integration, disintegration or valuation. As he says: “This is art in its process form – I can’t sell it. I can’t give it away. I can only enjoy the experience of its creation and existence.”

Artist Deborah Oropallo's Home [Financial Times]

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Financial Times, May 27, 2006

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There’s nothing understated
about the home this California
artist shares with her children
and architect husband,
says Tracey Taylor

When artist Deborah Oropallo used to drive past the austere building she now calls home, she saw in her mind’s eye a huge, inviting studio with maybe a bed at the back, but nothing more.

Sixteen years later, the 4,000 sq ft former machine shop in a light- industrial area of West Berkeley, California, is not only a workspace but also a family residence accommodating Oropallo, her architect husband Michael Goldin and their two children, Leo and Gina.

With its vast spaces, eclectic art works and outsize fixtures, it is hardly a typical living space. But closer scrutiny reveals that much thought has been given to the routines and rituals of daily life. And it is not a home masquerading as an exhibition space. Every painting, every photograph has been created by friends or relatives and each one tells a story. Memory and family play a significant role in Oropallo’s work and it’s no surprise that the same themes echo through her house.

I visit on an overcast day in April. Built in the 1960s, the grey building is distinctive for wraparound glass-brick windows that follow its curved contours. It is one of many former factories and warehouses in this part of Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. Walk one block west and you reach the choppy waters. Hugging it are the tracks on which giant Pacific Union freight trains make their ponderous way upstate emitting their characteristic mournful whistle.

Step into the house and the first thing you see is the tail wing of a “Shooting Star” T33 aeroplane hung on the hallway’s back wall. Attached to it are dog tags that belonged to Oropallo’s father who was a pilot in the second world war. Through a doorway to the right is a long study, which leads into the artist’s beautiful, light-filled studio. The rest of the house is living space: a huge, open-plan kitchen and eating area, a bathroom, and bedrooms, two of which, on an upper mezzanine, make use of the building’s 15ft ceilings.

Oropallo points to the advantage of starting with a great big box. “One of the beauties of having a space like this is that it is easy to create new rooms or add elements on a whim,” she says. Thus, after several years of her using the shop only for work, when she and Goldin realised the house where they had been living was too small for their growing family, they simply went to the studio, got out sledgehammer and broke through a dividing wall.

Form followed function. They carved out a slender gap in the wall between their bedroom and the children’s sleeping area on the upstairs level so they could reach them easily at night when they were younger. Similarly, a tall window was inserted between the kitchen and Oropallo’s studio so that the children could see her at work while staying protected from the toxic fumes of her paints.

Many of the images in Oropallo’s work, which is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, use doll furniture and miniature toys as their starting point; she says they prompt her to contemplate her own childhood. Thus, she paid careful attention to her own children’s bedrooms. “I thought, this is going to be their memory,” she says.

For each, she chose a work of art. Leo’s, a large image of a cowboy by Jason Byers, wasn’t an immediate hit; the children found the stark, imposing figure towering over them frightening so it was put away. But a trip to the rodeo piqued their interest in the wild west and it was reinstalled.

Much of the furniture in the house – including storage units, gym lockers and shelves – have been sourced from commercial catalogues and many are fitted with wheels and casters. “I like the versatility of being able to use something to store paints and then put it in a bedroom when it’s needed there,” Oropallo says. Some pieces, such as the sleek desk in the study and the large tables in the studio are designed by Goldin and manufactured by his furniture design company Swerve.

Other areas of the house have his stamp on them, too. “Michael . . . had worked as a cook and [his] family has always been passionate about cooking . . . [so] when he moved in . . . [he] asked me where the pastry counter was,” Oropallo says. “I told him I never made pastries. I just don’t cook. He said we had to have one – and a freezer for all the home-made stocks and Bolognese sauces he would make.”

So the kitchen became Goldin’s domain. You only have to look at the scale of the space and its components to understand why Oropallo teases him for having a “size disorder”. The double catering range, bought at a culinary institute, is so vast they had to move Leo’s bedroom into another part of the house to make room for it. A pair of vintage laundry sinks equipped with medical-style, foot-pedal-operated taps (a nod to Goldin’s father, a retired doctor) abuts a hulking, poured-concrete countertop. A massive baking table reminds Oropallo of her father’s second career as a baker, while a robust butcher’s block was found at a French kitchen antiques dealer in San Francisco.

The dining table, which easily and often sits 12, was also Goldin’s idea. “For him life is an enormous table with people coming and staying, and sharing food,” Oropallo says. The light fixture over the table is by Amsterdam’s Droog Design. On the wall behind it is “Yellow Liner”, a Richard Misrach photograph of the Bonneville salt flats in Utah. Across the room are pair of photographs by Goldin’s mother Joann, one featuring a decapitated chicken’s head.

It is not just Oropallo’s home that has undergone change with the arrival of children. Her art has evolved. After 20 years of painting she began, six years ago, to focus on photography-based pieces. A current exhibition of her work at the Boise Art Museum in Idaho (which runs until June 18) includes enlarged computer montages of manipulated images – including figurines, glossy leaves and pillows – mounted on to canvas and coated with layers of matte acrylic. “Painting involves long stretches of time, whereas with my current art I can work in increments – such as when the children are at school or asleep,” she explains. She also admits to hitting something of a wall with painting and thinks the new medium has opened up new possibilities and a fresh perspective.

The next progression may be into a new home. Oropallo and Goldin are planning to build it on a plot of land across the road, adjacent to his architectural practice and design studio. And this one will be designed for the next stage in the family’s life, with space for parents and teenagers to keep their distance, for instance, and an autonomous apartment to welcome relatives. Goldin, a keen hunter, also wants a walk-in refrigerator so he can hang the meat he brings home from their ranch in Mendocino. And he is even designing a customised living space for the the family’s pet birds, two cockatoos and a parakeet – a long interior room with an integrated drain and hose, a tree and enough space for them to take flight.

San Francisco: Braced for the Big One [Financial Times]

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Financial Times, June 24 2006

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Tracey Taylor talks to San Franciscans
about day to day living on two
earthquake fault lines

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Scanning the newspaper on Friday to find out how your weekend plans will be affected by the weather is a common ritual wherever you live. If your home is in certain parts of California, you will also learn how many earthquakes occurred around you in the previous seven days. In the San Francisco Bay Area, in the week ending June 9, there were 69, the largest being one with a magnitude of 3.3 located near Talmage in Mendocino county. Any relatively strong one (above 3) would have caused residents to feel a sudden sharp jolt to their houses or an intense shudder in the ground beneath their feet.

Unfortunately, unlike forecasting the weather, predicting earthquakes is an inexact science, so your Friday paper will have no useful information about how many quakes to expect in the coming week. There will be many, but where, how large or how they may affect you is anyone’s guess. Welcome to life on the fault line.

San Francisco and its suburbs are situated on the San Andreas fault and its tributary the Hayward fault, which geological maps helpfully show running within half a mile of my home. My neighbours and I are literally living life on the edge and lately it’s been hard to forget it.

April 18 marked the 100th anniversary of the “Big One”, the 1906 earthquake that, combined with the fire that raged in its wake, all but destroyed San Francisco and left at least 3,000 dead. In the run-up to the centennial, the media ran stories for weeks. There were numerous commemorative exhibitions and events and, on the day itself, a reported 10,000 people, many dressed up in bonnets and breeches, converged in the city centre at 5.12am to remember the moment the earthquake struck.

Considered one of the US’s worst natural disasters, the 1906 quake had a magnitude of 7.9. Its epicentre was two miles offshore but its impact was much more far-ranging as it ripped the earth’s surface for 300 miles along the San Andreas fault at speeds of up to 13,000mph. In that year’s May 5 edition of Collier’s, Jack London wrote: “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone.”

Response to the ”big one” was swift, however. Reconstruction was largely completed by 1915, in time for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which celebrated the city’s “rise from the ashes”.

The next big quake in the Bay Area was in 1989. The 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta killed 66 people, injured more than 3,700 and caused extensive destruction. Forty-two of the deaths occurred when a double-decker portion of a freeway “pancaked” and crushed several cars on the lower deck. A section of the Bay Bridge, the main artery between the East Bay and San Francisco, also collapsed.

As for the next one, the US Geological Survey says there is a 62 per cent chance of a damaging earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or higher striking the Bay Area within the next 30 years. The Hayward fault is most likely to snap. Severe quakes have happened on this fault every 151 years, give or take 23 years, meaning it is now into the danger zone. As USGS seismologist Tom Brocher has said: “It is locked and loaded and ready to fire at any time.”

So how prepared is the Bay Area and the people who live in it? Officially the region is as ready as it ever has been. Billions of dollars have been spent over the past decade to upgrade water, transportation, communications and emergency response systems. But there are still deficiencies. Since Loma Prieta, all the Bay Area’s freeway overpasses have been seismically hardened and all but two of its eight major bridges have been sufficiently upgraded, including the Golden Gate. Yet the Bay Bridge, the most crucial span of all, has not been protected, nor have parts of the area’s main public transit system, the BART Transbay system.

Guidance on “earthquake preparedness” for the local population is readily available, if not always adhered to. Most homes, unless they were built in the past 20 years or so, need to be seismically retrofitted, a three-step process which has the effect of “tying the house together”: you bolt the house to the foundation, add plywood to brace the walls, then use special hardware to attach those walls to the floor framing above them. Retrofitting costs range from $3,000 to $30,000 according to the vulnerability of the home.

People are urged to have a disaster plan that includes agreeing where to meet family members after an earthquake. And everyone is advised to be ready to survive on their own without power, water and food for three days. This means keeping full emergency supplies in your home: water, food, first-aid kit, tools, blankets and important family documents. Yet a poll in March this year showed that, although seven out of 10 Californians believed a big earthquake would strike the state and affect them, only 22 per cent felt they were well prepared for an such an event.

People’s attitudes to living in earthquake country vary widely. Some, such as Oakland Hills resident Preston Parsons, live in a permanent state of mild anxiety. “I think about the possibility several times a day,” she says. But, like many of the area’s residents, she doesn’t have earthquake insurance because it’s too expensive. She was given a quote of $5,000 a year. Others, such as Berkeley resident Steve Lomprey, say they don’t give earthquakes a second thought; he cheerfully admits to being “in total denial”.

Mark Burget, whose job as the director a large charity brought him from Colorado to San Francisco a year ago, is less sanguine: “You are more aware than the average person of the possibility of dying unexpectedly at any given moment,” he says. Burget thinks about an earthquake striking when he’s sitting in traffic under a big bridge span or when his family is split up in different parts of the area. He also has a theory that the underlying threat explains the reputation San Franciscans have for being so fun-loving. “It’s why San Francisco is such a vibrant city,” he says. “People are more inclined to live life with abandon.”

Ralph Keyes, author of Chancing It: Why We Take Risks , goes as far as to say that some people positively enjoy living with risk: “There is definitely a thrill to living in earthquake country – as well as hurricane country, flood country, brushfire country and tornado country,” he says

As for me, I’m following in the footsteps of a friend, Mike Wilson, who, after more than 20 years of feeling anxious about how much better prepared he and his family should be for an earthquake, finally took a four-hour window of opportunity from work last month to go to a discount store and buy every disaster supply he could get his hands on. “It’s a huge weight of my mind. Like buying life insurance. I feel better every day,” he says. This month my sons’ school held a silent auction and I had my eye on just one prize: the fully stocked emergency supplies kit. I was prepared to bid high, as high as it took, to buy this potential peace of mind. And, I’m pleased to say, I won it.