by Jerome du Bois
By the time we're done excoriating Glen Lineberry, Lisa Greve, and Bentley Projects, I'm sure our other pending proposal, with Brady Roberts and the Phoenix Art Museum, will be toast. Can you see Brady Roberts, or even the perennial Jim Ballinger, risking Lineberry's repressed but real wrath? Lineberry, after all, fashions himself a kind of Gagocolagelo for this town. I don't see it happening -- I don't see Brady Roberts coming through for us -- but it doesn't matter anyway. (Roberts has had plenty of time to respond, by the way. This is the kind of idea that doesn't take more than a day to decide about.) Bentley Projects was supposed to be the acme of professionalism and respectability. Well, the scales fell from our eyes, and we're done proposing projects in this provincial town. So I'm going to give the idea away to the whole world. It was an idea that would have opened a big colorful window for the creativity of every Arizona citizen, artist and not, visible on a giant video screen or right here on one's computer.
(What's that music?
Everything is free now, that's what they say;
everything I ever done, they gonna give it away . . .
Someone hit the big score, they figured it out:
That we're gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay.)
Fifteen years ago I had an interview with Bruce Kurtz, Director of Contemporary Art at the Phoenix Art Museum. Famously gay and quirky -- he was a founding member of Phoenix ACT-UP, who stuffed condoms in Arizona Republics one memorable Sunday -- I thought he might be open to my idea, and take it to Ballinger or the Contemporary Forum.
It wasn't my idea, exactly, but I had a nice twist on it. I wanted to put a Spectacolor Lightboard, similar to the one in Times Square in New York City, on an outside wall of the Phoenix Art Museum. The twist was this: all the content would be solicited from the public, artists and non-artists alike.
This was 1990, remember, when the internet was nascent and full-motion outdoor video screens were nonexistent. Contributors would be restricted to the LED grid. Still, I thought it offered a lot of potential.
Kurtz thought it was a good idea, but its prospects in Phoenix were nil. "Good luck," he said. This is a guy, after all, who always left town ("with a shudder of relief") during the Cowboy Art Show every October.
Now here I am again standing before Brady Roberts, who is part of a crucial museum expansion, and I'm basically doing his job: Once again I want to move the museum forward into the 21st Century. I handed him what you will read below: a way to boost us all a little forward into the future, to see what's on our minds, to see what we're dreaming here. But I'm tired of carrying it around. It's yours.
The Collective I
A Preliminary Proposal For A Feasibility Study For Two Public Outdoor Video Screens for the Phoenix Art Museum
presented by King & du Bois
Catherine King
Jerome du Bois
January 10, 2005
It was found that people wanted to engage with museums at deeper levels beyond visiting physical exhibitions, being included through consultation, involvement, engagement and respect. Coupled with this was the desire to see themselves reflected in both the products and services provided by museums.
-- Lynda Kelly, Head of the Audience Research Centre of the Australian Museum, 2002. (Emphasis added.)
Summary
These pages sketch out our proposal to conduct a feasibility study to install two fixed outdoor silent video screens at two locations on the PAM grounds: a 15’ x 20’ one at Central and McDowell, and a 6’ x 10’ one in the new Plaza, running the same program, facing public seating areas such as the cafe. We call the project The Collective I.
The screens will show a carousel of 5- to 30-second strictly noncommercial video and word art 24/7, with a minimum of eight hours of nonrepeated material. There will be a website with complete, playable archives and updated contributions, plus a permanent list of contributors and instructions on how to submit a candidate artwork.
Contributions will be solicited from all qualified Arizona residents -- and only Arizona residents, making this public art project distinct in two ways from previous ones: widening the invitation to non-artists, and restricting it to Arizona residents. The contributions are donations, though the contributor retains all rights.
One exception to the Arizona-only rule: a yearly worldwide invitational, for one weekend. That would draw a lot of famous video artists, and a lot of attention. (There could also be a yearly Arizona-only Top 100 “exhibition,” complete with a banquet.)
Evaluations will be done by a 5- or 7-member Group of current museum staff, using several filters: common sense and decency; an explicit No List; explicit FCC standards; and a preference for the positive, beautiful, and thoughtful.
Not many meetings will be necessary. Initial evaluations will be done individually and remotely by accessing a common online cache. Each Group member’s name, accompanied by a Yes/No switch, accompanies each candidate video. If everyone marks the No box, the candidate is set aside for deletion. (Each rejected candidate gets a personal explanation for the refusal.) The others are filtered to the next step.
Note what this process accomplishes: efficient and flexible use of staff time; automatic distributed culling; automatically-updated agenda for any full-Group face-to-face meeting. More dynamically, it sets the stage for side discussions, email debates, and other informal processes which could accept or reject candidates on a continuing instead of fixed basis.
The stream of images and words is a nonhierarchical, nonthematic carousel, and contains only the artworks -- no credits, no names -- with brief black screens between the artworks. (The website handles the names and credits.) New works are added to the end of the carousel, up to the 24-hour limit, then the oldest works go into the website archive.
Cost: $5 million the first year; then around $500,000 py after.
[That was the executive summary.]
The Collective I
Main Features
-- An 15 x 20-foot silent public video screen -- full-color, full-motion, running a carousel of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30-second spots up to 24 hours per day, but with a minimum of eight hours.
-- A smaller, secondary screen, with simultaneous feed, mounted in the new plaza, either freestanding or attached to the side of a building, facing a public seating area, such as the cafe. (Another extension, of course, would be plasma televisions running in sync in selected areas inside the museum.)
-- A public website, accessible through PAM’s or on its own, with current feed, full-motion archives, frequent updating, full contributor information, standards information, and submission requirement forms. (Also a plug-in for museums worldwide to project the feed on their walls for free, except for the yearly worldwide invitational {see below}, for which there will be a hefty registration fee.)
-- Contributions restricted to Arizona residents (with one yearly exception), and not just artists. Any Arizonan who fulfills the requirements may submit a piece. (Collectives, such as school classes, may also contribute.)
-- Once a year, for one weekend, non-Arizona contributors are featured in a worldwide invitational. The same standards and rules apply. Contributions will be solicited three months in advance, selections made on an ongoing basis, with a strict deadline or whenever the 24-hour limit is reached. This should encourage timely contributions.
Some Questions and Answers
Where will they be installed? How much will it cost to install? How much electricity do these things use in a year, and where does the money for that come from? Where will the website be set up? Who maintains the project? Will new staff or training be required?
We don’t know the answers to these questions yet, but some quick research indicates that a 15 x 20 foot full color screen will cost about $4,240,000 to construct; about a third of that for the smaller screen; $200,000 for computer equipment; and $200,000 to $500, 000 for the first year’s operation.
Where will the money come from?
We don’t know. That’s what part of the feasibility study is for. But likely sources include:
The Museum Expansion Budget
A Special Projects Fund
Arizona Commission on the Arts
Phoenix Public Arts Commission
Private donors
The project will need a carousel of at least 200 regular contributions to maintain its freshness. Bluntly, is there enough talent out there to support such a project? Yes, because we don’t restrict contributions to just artists, or just Phoenix, but all citizens, and the whole state.
How does PAM benefit?
No, we’ve skipped over a prior question:
Is the Phoenix Art Museum willing to change its culture?
These video screens dismantle the elitist barriers between artist and non-artist and create a field that respects everyone with talent. They and the website imply a commitment to the public which the staff will have to adopt, there’s no two ways about it. Hermetic isolation and remoteness is premillennial thinking and behavior. And that means revamping the website, too, for example, and opening the staff up to email as well. [That's right, readers; Brady Roberts doesn't have email.] It’s time to throw the doors of the museum open to the public. They might teach the rest of us something.
Now, how does the Phoenix Art Museum benefit?
1. The smaller screen will draw both contributors and regulars who work in the area to the cafe. Since the carousel changes dynamically, and the spots are so short, viewers will miss a lot; people could congregate every day for coffee or lunch and never be bored by repetition, and yet may still see a particular piece again that interested them. The cafe, which should open a walk-up window, would make more money, and more visitors will decide to actually visit the museum proper. (After all, if this is what they’ve got outside, what goodies must be inside? And here’s where the follow-through comes in again.)
2. The cachet is reverberant. This thing is unique, as far as I know. It’s the ultimate outreach. The Collective I blows away the Millennium Park face video wall in Chicago, which is inane, static, and narcissistic. The Collective I is not about vanity, it’s about talent, about having the chops. We haven’t found another museum doing this kind of thing.
It shows PAM entering the 21 Century. No more floppy banners on the corner of Central and McDowell. The citizens will see a big video screen, of, by and for public consumption, and big lightboxes flanking it for advertising upcoming exhibitions. That’s the way it should be, anyway.
3. The project should drive membership up. Imagine one of the genome techs, for example, just moving into town. She finds out about the public screen and decides to try something out -- molecular animation, microphotography, illustrating a poem, whatever -- and submits it. Now, whether she’s accepted or not, she’s hooked. She’ll visit the website, then the museum. And she might join. Now multiply her by the hundreds.
Or imagine a man driving by on his way to his job at Bowne, or Phelps Dodge, or the City, for example. He’s a hang-glider on weekends, and has a helmet or chest cam. He decides to edit some of this footage for his fellow citizens. So now half a million people who will never swoop down over gorgeous fruited plains, or shimmering rivers, or Canyon de Chelly, will be transfixed by this man’s experience. He might join. Then multiply him by the hundreds.
Think of the new regulars who will frequent the cafe at lunch breaks. Some of them may eventually join. Think of the contributors who will drag their friends and family down to show off their handiwork (the website will indicate when each contributor’s piece is scheduled to appear).
4. The yearly worldwide invitational will elevate Phoenix’s profile and draw international attention.
Okay, that was the body of the proposal. I have lots of notes on the submission process and the other benefits that would fall out from a project like this, but I'm done, except for this coda, which I might as well give away, too:
The inspiration for the original lightboard piece came from a note written by the poet John Ciardi, commenting on part of his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. I don't have the exact quotes right now, but trust my paraphrase.
Ciardi said that Dante anachronistically invented the electric billboard. In Canto 33 of Paradiso Dante is floating, suspended in the Seventh Heaven, I think, waiting for more lessons and revelations. Thousands of sparkling stars festoon the space before him. But these stars are souls, famous and holy. As he floats there in wonder, the stars, the brilliant points of light, begin to move, to line up, to form curves of dots, until Dante beholds before him an immense outline of an eagle, its gigantic head dwarfed by its endlessly outstretched wings, scintillating at every point.
Then the eye turns to pin Dante, and the beak opens, and Dante hears the eagle speak across the immensity of space:
Judge righteously, ye judges of the Earth.
These words appear below the eagle as more stars. And then the whole scene, like spun sugar, blows away.
I was going to reproduce that on the lightboard.
Later, at the end of his journey, Dante sees the Source of it all, and this is what he says about it:
I saw within Its Depths how It conceives
All things in a single Volume bound by Love
Of which the Universe is the Scattered Leaves.
Would that it were so, but it's a lie. There's no pie in the sky when you die. Happy New Year. More to come, including "My emails with Glen."
Posted by Jerome at January 14, 2005 03:00 PM | TrackBack