“Love in a Cemetery,” Robert Sain
- photo by Consuelo Velasco
ABOUT | STATEMENT | ESSAY | PROJECT ARTISTS | ANDREA BOWERS + OTIS MFA PUBLIC PRACTICE
Inspired by Allan Kaprow’s words of wisdom: “Life in the museum is like making love in a cemetery,” Robert Sain’s project investigates the opportunity and obligation for arts organizations to be socially responsible and responsive in an age of diminished resources and uncertainty. Titled Love in a Cemetery, up to 100 people in the Los Angeles arts and culture community are invited to respond to 4 questions about the life of cultural organizations. Respondents to the survey will include artists, curators, educators, and art school faculty. Sain will set up visual presences in the main gallery to create a community-wide dialogue about the role, function, and fundamental purpose of LA’s arts organizations. The objective of Love in a Cemetery is to examine an expanded dimension for cultural organizations to take an active approach in civic life.
Robert L. Sain organizes major exhibitions with a particular focus on artist’s commissions and public engagement.
As founding director of LACMALab, the former experimental arm of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sain pioneered programs that were both participatory and intergenerational. He invited and challenged artists to produce new work that was “age-free,” and he broke new ground in activating permanent collection objects through artist’s interventions, re-installations and studio activity. By inviting artists, architects, and designers into the life of the institution, every major museum trope was explored in new ways from exhibition design, to signage, to marketing. LACMALab made its mark doing the unknown: bringing together LA’s art schools in a first time collaboration; addressing nanotechnology and aesthetics; conducting a critical examination of museum practice through high school students; asking artists to consider the future.
As director of the Children’s Museum / Museo de los Ninos in San Diego, Sain carved out a unique niche by launching the first major organization dedicated to contemporary art for kids and their families with a special emphasis on bi-national projects with Mexico. Sain opened The Museum School, the first charter school in California to use museum exhibitions and contemporary art as the basis for curriculum.
Most recently, as director of Montalvo Arts Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Sain implemented a new vision of engaging people in contemporary concerns through art. He shifted the organization’s international artists’ residency to a purposed program with artists addressing compelling issues of our time as seen in the unprecedented initiative: RAQ: REFRAME.
During the past 15 years, Sain has commissioned over 50 artists from the internationally distinguished to important mid-career to promising emerging artists to create new work based on the quest of engagement and in the process transformed the possibilities of what arts organizations can be.
For the first installment of Status Report: the Creative Economy, the gallery at 18th Street Arts Center will be dedicated to an unprecedented investigation of the future of LA’s arts organizations with a particular focus on the visual arts and museums. Long time Los Angeleno arts curator and organizer Robert Sain has framed a series of questions designed to open a public dialogue about the purpose and status of the cultural institutions which have been at the center of the visual arts ‘creative’ economy. These questions are live on our site as a survey, to be filled in and returned as part Robert’s project, Love in a Cemetery.
For years now museums have been attempting to reinvent themselves to find relevance in a fickle, market-driven, edifice obsessed arts world. In this quest, many museums have indeed moved from the deadly halls of the mausoleum to the mind-numbing ritual of the mall. Or at best, enormous resources are marshaled to create tasteful, blue chip more-of-the-same.
What does it mean for our arts organizations to be truly ALIVE? How can they be socially responsive and responsible and function as a vital resource and asset to the compelling issues of our time? How can cultural organizations serve as a convener and catalyst for social action? What are the implications for permanent collections and special exhibitions? Should cultural organizations take an active approach to civic life? Since LA has more art schools than any place in the country, what is the relationship between the producers of cultural production, the presenters, and the community? As LA has become one of the true global epicenters for working artists, what should the role of artists be in the LIFE of our cultural organizations?
Love in a Cemetery, the title of our project for the overall Creative Economy 2010 theme at 18th Street, will assemble a core group of LA-based artists who will frame questions and invite critical thinking from a range of constituencies. Love in a Cemetery will question what is an exhibition, who is the curator, what is the art, and who is the audience. The installation may take the form of a design charette or cultural skunkworks/lab that is both participatory and addictive in nature. Part of the glue of the disparate elements will be a series of on-going conversations. This project aspires to serve as a springboard for a broader dialogue that may in turn generate additional projects among an expanded roster of participants.
Love in a Cemetery: Some Personal Background Thoughts
In the early mists of art museum time, 1977, the fates presented me with the dare of starting Walker Art Center’s first development office. I say dare because I had never raised a nickel in my life but somehow landed the job. Today, I realize this formative experience was not about asking for the order but rather engaging people in ideas. …ideas generated by art, artists, and the museum. This notion of engagement and ideas has stuck with me over the years.
When asked, in the early 80’s to launch the first development department for MOCA before there was a there there, ideas were all we had…that and letterhead designed by Ivan Chermayeff. I remember Bob Irwin’s now nearly famous declaration that museums should be about the power of ideas rather than bricks and mortar and what better time and place to test this belief than in a temporary warehouse before the Isozaki building was open. Well, the rest is history and as Talleyrand said, nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Now in the next century, viewing contemporary art in a warehouse has become a standard trope but the initial experience of Frank Gehry’s raw “T.C.”gave startling permission for the visitors to create their own experience. I shall never forget watching an office worker at lunch break taking a buddy through a massive cardboard installation by Michael Heizer; he was exclaiming to his friend with seeming delight, “This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen” and then turned to me with an explanatory, “ I love to bring my friends here to show them stuff I hate”. Wow…talk about visitor friendly environment where the visitor could actually disagree (out loud) with the institution. A new level of museum engagement and life was being glimpsed.
In the 90’s I experienced a fundamental shift in my experience of cultural organizations when I wound up running the children’s museum in San Diego. It caused a stir in some quarters to change the mission from cookie-cutter play land to a bi-national program commissioning artists to do work for kids and their families. The new mission was unique: learning through art rather than about art. This approach opened the way to unlikely community collaborations. When Chris Burden’s Tale of Two Cities was installed in the lobby, there was concern about the aspect of violence so we brought in the Chief of Police who developed ideas for visitor feedback. In an unprecedented partnership with UCSD’s Community Pediatrics Department, the museum worked with teens to address public health issues ranging from violence to drugs. I saw firsthand how a cultural organization could serve as convener to engage community in concerns of our time.
Many years later at a LACMA reception, I had the occasion to meet the late John Szarkowski, MoMA’s legendary curator of photography. In the course of the introduction, a colleague tried to describe that I was the founding director of LACMALab and ran the children’s gallery whereupon Szarkowski leaned back, wine glass in hand, and snapped, “So, you are the dictator of education!” I said we never use that word, he said “dictator?”, I said no “education”. He then smiled and said he was old enough to remember when art was not supposed to be good for you…”it was filled with sex and violence, and what did we do, we cleaned it up, homogenized it and put it on a pedestal.” Ah, Allan Kaprow was on to something, “Life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery”. Yet through the LACMALab experiment, it was beyond clear that there is a hunger for a new kind of social intersection space where all ages, incomes, and ethnicities could come together through creativity.
I guess over the years I have had a love/hate thing with museums. Astonished at the treasures they hold, seduced by the possibility of time travel.. the original “where do you want to go today’…yet exasperated at what museums don’t do but could. The week the U.S. started the shock and awe bombardment of Bagdad, LACMA opened a major exhibition entitled, “The Treasures of Mesopotamia”. At the entrance to the show, the large tasteful beige-on-beige didactic map looked like bombing targets; there was Mosul, Fallujah, the very cities we were decimating and yet never would the museum acknowledge this was Iraq. As a result, everyone from school kids to the general public was cheated. The museum could clearly have used this as a springboard to create greater public understanding of the most traumatic issue of the day. But this would require risk. And risk is increasingly in short supply within the museum domain.
One of the great lessons of LACMALab was changing the fundamental purpose and approach of conventional museuology from providing answers to asking questions. The shift from the sterile voice of authority to a rambunctious environment of curiosity for all brought a new life that was waiting to happen. More to follow….
[...] ABOUT | ARTIST STATEMENT | PROJECT of ARTISTS | LINKS | ABOUT THE CURATOR [...]