While I was in San Diego last weekend I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown (1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd - right next to the train station). My in-laws had gone to the branch of the museum in La Jolla earlier in the week (700 Prospect St). Downtown there was a special exhibit called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. It showcased works created by artists who had participated in residencies at world heritage sites around the world.
From MCASD's website:
Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet is a pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project that, for the first time on this scale, uses contemporary art to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. This collaborative multi-year exhibition project sent eight leading artists to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.
If I had to pick a favorite it would be Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's film of the Mistubishi saltworks. The movement of the camera, the stillness of the landscape, and the invasion of the trucks stunned. He also made a montage of MacBeth card shots, which help in color correcting film, which is something that I'm currently a little obsessed with. It wasn't the biggest message of the collection, but the films certainly stood on their own as art.
I would probably have dug the performance of Ann Hamilton's piece, but the installation of ephemera from the performance combined with audio and video both used in and of the performance didn't have the impact that I imagine the performance itself had. Trying to recreate the urgency of performance in an installation is tricky. There was an exhibit as part of New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch at the Austin Museum of Art - Downtown during SxSW 2008 that was basically a karaoke machine of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speech in Washington, D.C. When visitors picked up the microphone and performed the speech, it was really quite moving. I wonder if something to that effect couldn't have helped this piece. There was a script of the performance on a stand. How many steps is it from a script on a stand to a karaoke machine?
Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera were definitely the most compelling pieces in the show. Particularly a piece which was basically a glass curio cabinet filled with frames containing typed stories about specific Lazarus species. If you think about museum signage like I think about museum signage this piece was particularly interesting in that it was a display of museum signage - these framed cards could easily be attached to a wall next to a photo or display or, apropos San Diego, a zoo enclosure. But in this piece the labels are the objects on display. Makes me want to collect museum labels.
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