Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather (1993-1994), sculpture | chocolate and soap, 24 in. x 16 in. x 13 in. each (60.96 cm x 40.64 cm x 33.02 cm each) Acquired 2007 Collection SFMOMA Collection of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (John Caldwell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture, 1989-93, Fund for Contemporary Art purchase) © Janine Antoni

Last fall I taught a course called “Queer Modernism” at California College of the Arts. As a class project, my students traced a queer itinerary through the permanent collection at SFMOMA, culminating in a queer audio tour of the museum’s holdings. Each student first wrote an introduction to queer art at SFMOMA, explaining the interest of our queer intervention: How does looking at art through a queer lens show familiar works in a new light and, more generally, change our understanding of modernism and its canons?

We used the term “queer” loosely. It could apply to any work that lends itself to queer interpretation, contributes to a critique of sexual/social/artistic norms, celebrates homoeroticism, refuses a fixed identity, participates in the establishment of a dissident cultural lineage, and/or subverts gendered power structures.

Tracy Piper

Based on focused research, each student ultimately produced an audio stop illuminating one work of art from a queer angle. Tracy Piper discusses Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993-1994).

[See post to listen to audio]

Posts in the “Queer Tour of the Permanent Collection” series address other works in SFMOMA’s holdings, such as Agnes Martin’s Falling Blue (1963),  Claude Cahun’s Untitled (1929), Jess’s The Mouses Tail (1951/1954), and Robert Gober’s Untitled (1990).

Just released online, a few of Anthony Discenza’s older video works.

Back in the days when the NEA was a tad wealthier than it is today, there was a wonderful program that sent practitioners around the country to do site visits at peer organizations. The ostensible reason was due diligence to assure that federal money was being spent according to the rules, but the true purpose was to seed the field, to have leaders and activists meet and share ideas and perhaps spawn collaboration. It was a magnificent success, and in my case, as a frequent site visitor for artist-run organizations all over the U.S., it added to my education about how the arts are manifested and maintained in particular communities. One of the many insights I came away with on these visits was [alert: sincerity ahead] that art workers are incredibly altruistic, innovative, hardworking, and smart, and are almost always underpaid, overworked and under-appreciated. One got on the plane to go home wishing that everyone could get every penny and more that they requested in their grant applications.

This memory–most NEA site visiting was ended twenty years ago–was with me as I drove from my home in Oakland, some four hours north to Redding. I’d been asked to give a lecture about my career, and to sort through 500 entries to find a couple of dozen to constitute the exhibition. I hoped for the best but feared the worst; I’ve been in situations in which I could not find enough even vaguely interesting work to make a show. It’s hard for me to turn down these kind of gigs–it’s extra cash that I feel compelled to squirrel away in what’s left of my “prime earning years,” a phrase I think I heard on the radio once and have never been able to expunge from my conscience. And there’s a paranoia, a feeling that if you ever once turn down the chance to be a visiting speaker/juror, you will never be asked again. Of course, there is a certain pleasure in the honor, of out of the blue being asked to share your knowledge. There’s something incredibly touching about the tacit contract at hand with these young or emerging artists: “I will show you, a perfect stranger, my first efforts, for which in exchange you will be neither patronizing nor unkind but rather, generous and encouraging.”

Redding apparently is a glimpse of rust belt America in California. Mining and timber industries are played out, replaced by drug dealing, poverty and homelessness, and the 7th ranking crime rate in the US. As the California educational system is being dismantled by billions of dollars in budget cuts, Junior Colleges are hit the hardest. Shasta–located on a lovely, large, grassy campus suggesting happier days, has seen the ranks of its full time art teachers reduced from eight to two. I had dinner my first night in a nice restaurant in a strip mall with three faculty members: David Gentry, my host, a youngish artist; John Harper, recently retired chair of the department, and his wife Mary; and a long-serving theater professor, Robert Soffian. What could be a greater terror for a shy person like me, than to have dinner with four strangers to whom one might not have a thing to say? I was greatly relieved that all four could not have been nicer: informal, funny, smart and very passionate about the arts. I got back to my hotel room with that familiar NEA site visitor quiver in my bones: yet another lesson, a reminder, of the punishment inflicted by our society on people who choose to teach, make and present arts as a career. Of course in many ways it’s a privileged life, but honestly, who wants to be asked to do more with less year after year after year….for almost thirty years, as have Harper and Soffian. I also met Susan Schimke the next day, the other tenured teacher along with Gentry, who is the painting teacher. More on that soon.

My talk went well the next morning–I don’t think I’d ever given a lecture at 9am before. One consistent truth I’ve learned is that you can’t tell how your presentation is going by the vibe you pick up in the room. It’s usually deadly. It’s the question and answer session afterward where you find out if you’ve touched people, and this one was quite lively, with good questions. I had prepared about 75 minutes but had to stop after about 40 so that was odd, but the first question was, “Can we see the rest of your slides?” So that was great. Afterwards I began to look at the submitted art. It literally filled four classrooms. The largest group was drawings and prints, and that took the most time. I asked if there would be a problem with a large, very precise and very successful charcoal drawing of a cock and balls; they assured me it would be okay. I found around a dozen strong pieces to show, no problem. Then ceramics and glass: not much there. I picked three. Sculpture: literally nothing. And then the miracle occurred. I walked into a large room filled with around 50 paintings. I could’ve shown half of them with no problem. Either Schimke’s teaching (and others) is very special, or there is a population of born painters in the area (or both), but it was as much fun as I’ve ever had jurying an open call show, moving through that space. So, you just never know; I thought these isolated JuCo artists the equal of any anywhere I’ve taught or judged, and better than many. Here are four of my favorites:

March Hare by Madison Walls

Untitled by Jacob Pospychalia

Illinois by Rose Ponting

Vanity by Diana Bunney

Here’s Charlie Dubbe standing next to his poster.  I believe that’s Open Space‘s Suzanne Stein in the background.  The “Enough” poster, one of my favorites, is by Paul Kos.

Charlie Dubbe

In the background is Kevin Killian’s poster, comprised of quotes by poet Jack Spicer, with Jordan Kantor’s poster in the foreground.

Posters by Jordan Kantor and Kevin Killian, 2012

Here’s Rigo 23′s poster, with a few others in the background.

Rigo 23 poster, 2012

And here’s someone taking a photo of the poster I wrote.

Dodie Bellamy poster, 2012

My poster reads:  “The monstrous and formless have as much right as anybody else.  Smash the conveyor belt of U.S. graduate writing programs.”  The top half is a quote from my novel The Letters of Mina Harker.  The bottom half is me acting out.  When I finished it I felt rather silly.  All the terrible things in the world that deserve to be protested against, and this is all I could come up with?  When confronted with the task of writing a protest poster, I felt inadequate.  I felt like I had to be pithy and artless and forceful.  I really wanted to come up with something angry, like something the civilians would shout on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.  The intimidating brevity of the protest poster form reminded me of something I heard in the mid-80s when Kevin (Killian) and I were visiting some friends of his from graduate school who were living in Los Angeles.  His one friend, Gail, after getting her Ph.D. in English, went into advertising, and wrote the then popular slogan, “Use your noodle,” for an ad for Top Ramen noodle soup.  Gail said that in her advertising agency, writers were looked at with suspicion if they wrote more than one line a day.  I’ve always wondered, what if your one line came early in the morning, do you sit around and pretend you’re straining for inspiration the rest of the day?

As I look at the run of posters spread out in my living room now, I realize that there’s no one right way to make a protest poster.  There’s room for anger, there’s room for humor, there’s room for pathos.  Maybe there’s even a space for the monstrous and the formless after all.  In the last analysis, I’m glad not only to be included among these amazing artists and writers, but I’m also glad I did what I did.

Lynn Marie Kirby; photo: Alexis Petty

Do you collect anything?

Collaborators.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your home, what would it be?

Must be Vermeer, judging from the picture that Alexis Petty just took of me for this blog. Alexis and I meet frequently in this café as we are collaborating on a project along 24th Street. The café window is straight out of Woman Holding a Balance, we didn’t realize it until we saw the photo. But I couldn’t live with one of Vermeer’s 34 paintings all for myself; it would be too precious. I often steal from dead artists across history, but I think of it as collaborating across time.

If you weren’t an artist, what would your gig be?

I have come to know the librarian Andrea Grimes in the Historical section of the San Francisco Public Library. She takes off on adventures following obscure leads she finds in books or articles, traveling around the country meeting people and looking at sites to unearth information. Her practice sounds similar to my art-making practice.

Who did you spend at least two hours with today?

I watched my 16-year-old son and the students at the Academy of Ballet rehearse Songs Without Words, a ballet by Richard Gibson, for their upcoming performance. They were discussing subtle details of gesture and movement, both in terms of emotion and technique. Amazing.

What’s your favorite tool?

Improvisation. Improvising requires being in the moment, working with what is on hand.

Anthony Discenza

Do you collect anything?

I maintain an extensive collection of beautiful, hand-blown anxieties, fears, and intimations of doom.

If you could spend an afternoon with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

Hmm, that’s a tough one. Maybe Philip K. Dick, he’s def in my top five. (Of course, I maintain different lists for morning, afternoon, and evening.)

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your home, what would it be?

The incredible, Juan Gris–meets–Francis Picabia painting of the meat rotisserie that’s been hanging in the back of the El Farolito on 24th and Mission since time immemorial.

If you weren’t an artist, what would your gig be?

Writing tag lines for movie posters and trailers, e.g., “In a world … where beauty … is the ultimate crime …”  or “The Exhibition: Everyone’s DYING to see it.”

What’s your favorite tool?

Either my inability to take things at face value, or my Panasonic 15.6-volt cordless drill.  Probably the drill—it causes less trouble and has more torque.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots_, 1971–73. Click on image for a larger view.

No sooner had Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971–73) come off the wall at the close of SFMOMA’s 1970s-focused installation of Picturing Modernity than the work appeared in the Berkeley Art Museum’s exhibition State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970. I like to think of the Boots shuffling across the Bay Bridge under cover of night, perhaps during the President’s Day weekend, when the upper deck was closed for construction. The reality of course is that multiple editions of this piece exist.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots on the Way to Church_, from the series _100 Boots, a set of 51 photo-postcards_, 1971

100 Boots originated as a work of mail art consisting of 51 postcards that Antin sent in succession to about a thousand people. Each card pictured a scene in an ongoing picaresque narrative that the artist staged and (with photographer Phel Steinmetz) shot on sites not far from her San Diego–area home. The protagonist was the eponymous bunch of boots, whose hero’s journey led out from an idyllic but soulless beachfront suburb (100 Boots on the Way to Church shows telltale palm trees), up hill and down dale and into an antiwar protest (100 Boots Trespass), the draft and the Vietnam War itself (100 Boots on Reconnaissance), and reentry in New York Harbor. Will 100 Boots make it in the Big Apple? Don’t know — almost immediately 100 Boots Go on Vacation, their piled-up soles showing out of the back of a van. In 1973 100 Boots, the work, entered the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and made art history.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots Trespass_, from the series _100 Boots, a set of 51 photo-postcards_, 1971

To say that I get a kick out of 100 Boots would be to make a bad pun, and besides, Antin’s photographic tale of unmanned footwear on the go, beyond being droll and endearing, is unsettling. When I first saw it, its antic clarity moved me almost to tears. I want to imagine why.

At SFMOMA the pictures were shown window framed, five across, 10 down (plus one), the effect being like a filmstrip or even a View-Master. I think this is what initially attracted me to the work. Being a displaced film person (DFP) — I cut my teeth in the arts as film notes writer for the Pacific Film Archive — I pathetically gravitate toward anything sequential on the museum walls.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots on Reconnaissance_, from the series _100 Boots, a set of 51 photo-postcards_, 1972

Moreover and most importantly, in both venues the pictures are shown without the identifying titles I’ve cited above, which evidently appeared on the back of each postcard (they are reprinted as such in the book 100 Boots that Antin published with Running Press in 1999). As a purely visual experience, the story in the gallery is vague, suggested rather than told, with the possibilities for both humor and menace to be supplied by the viewer.

Black-and-white lends the images a scrappy quality, but it might as easily have been a financial necessity for Antin (1,000 x 51 + postage …). To me, though, B&W immediately signaled period piece and, in this instance, a far and hollow distance from the present. I was reminded of the time my son earnestly asked my mother if the world was black and white when she was his age.

For a child of the sixties, as I was, the world was black and white in 1971. The war was an abomination that, thanks to the draft, threatened youth on the home front to a degree unimaginable today. Like the Boots, we sought refuge in the good — At the Pond, In the Wild Mustard, On the Road. But Antin’s pictures capture just how hapless this attempt at escape was, at least for some. For every meadow there is a barbed-wire fence.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots on Vacation_, from the series _100 Boots, a set of 51 photo-postcards_, 1971

A casually brilliant study in negative space rather than absence, 100 Boots is really about synecdoche, where the part represents the whole: The Invisible Man made visible by his boots. The emperor without his clothes, or in Bob Dylan’s version of that tale, the president standing naked, save his galoshes. Boots, specifically army-navy surplus boots, are made for marching, whether in war or for peace. “Let me die in my footsteps / before I go down under” (Dylan again). Soles make the man, as in Philip Guston’s autobiographical paintings. Shoes suggest man’s fate, the one he carelessly walks into.

Judy Bloch

For Steve, who Took the Hill.

Eleanor Antin, _100 Boots Taking The Hill (1)_, from the series _100 Boots, a set of 51 photo-postcards_, 1972

Judy Bloch is managing editor, publications, at SFMOMA. Previously she was publications director at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Eleanor Antin will read from her coming-of-age memoir, Conversations with Stalin, at BAM/PFA on Friday, May 11.