Catalogue Text: Phoning It In by Lisa Melandri

In 1969, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago planned the exhibition Art by Telephone. Thirty-six artists were asked to instruct, by telephone, the MCA’s staff on what they would contribute. The recorded phone calls, featuring the likes of Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, James Lee Byars, and Mel Bochner, among others, allow us to witness the process by which each artist described to curator and museum director Jan van der Marck what his piece should be. Each work was then realized on site without the presence of the artist—either physically or in the form of written or drawn instructions or plans. The catalog was issued in the form of a vinyl LP featuring the artists’ original phone calls. Van der Marck’s curatorial statement clearly presents not only an explanation and raison d’etre for the show but describes a late 1960s artistic zeitgeist:

“Conceptual art as documented, recorded, manufactured or performed in Art by Telephone is a further step toward the syncretism of the literary, plastic and performing arts which characterizes the 1960s. The term generally applies to those new forms of art which seem to favor intellectual premises over visual result. Those artists who have responded to the challenge of this exhibition share certain basic premises despite divergence in expression. They want to get away from the interpretation of art as specific, handcrafted, precious object. They value process over product and experience over possession. They are more concerned about time and place than about space and form. They are fascinated with the object quality of words and the literary connotation of images. They reject illusion, subjectivity, formalist treatment and a hierarchy of values in art.”

Tell Me Something Good: A Collaboration between Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride at the Santa Monica Museum of Art takes Art by Telephone as its inspiration and its starting point. For the project room at SMMoA, Schoenstadt conceived of an exhibition in which both artists would literally phone it in: each would tell the other what to produce. Schoenstadt will make and install a body of work to McBride’s specifications; McBride’s work, in turn will be made in accord with Schoenstadt’s instruction. Like its MCA predecessor, Tell Me Something Good features a catalog in LP form, which will play throughout the duration of the show—allowing visitors to hear the primary source material from which the exhibition has sprung.

Tell Me Something Good, the song title of the 1974 hit by the funk band Rufus, refers to Schoenstadt’s and McBride’s voice-only exchange. It slyly asks each artist to be kind to the other, to communicate a project that can be produced successfully, or perhaps even to suggest something up the other’s alley.

What links the work of Schoenstadt and McBride is a concern with the intersections between architecture and art. McBride’s practice often features large-scale 3D constructions—from the semicircular seating structure of Arena to the dropped aluminum ceiling grid of National Chain(Alu natur)—and sculptures—from casts of video game consoles to a Toyota Celica made from rattan. Her installations are sometimes functional, but sometimes impediments to audience movement. Her sculptures are often based on found objects, though always remade, not readymade.

Schoenstadt’s interest in architecture is most often transferred to two dimensions, and, most of the time, transmuted through chance operations—such as the merging of an architectural drawing with a fax transmission. Certainly, Schoenstadt’s practice has long involved giving up complete power in authorship. In a recent project, Can Control at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, she created a large mural work by drawing, with tape, plans of the museum’s design and examples from modernist architecture. Visitors and friends of the museum then suggested and overpainted a series of shapes, colors, and symbols on the tape. The final product involved the removal of the tape to reveal a series of physical and conceptual layers. In this way, her aesthetic choices are mediated by whoever else might be invited to participate.

In Art by Telephone, it was the curator and his staff who had to convert words to actions and objects; Tell Me Something Good leaves the relationship and responsibility for art-making to the artists. Also unlike its predecessor, this new exhibition is an intimate collaboration between artists, and even though it is housed within the walls of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, it has to do with artists’ vision, rather than institutional interpretation.

So in the end, what is there to see? What has the process wrought in terms of formal works of art? Listening to the messages of the two women, it becomes clear that there is a great deal of choice for both artists—that Schoenstadt and McBride can each make her mark on the other’s concept.

McBride instructs: “Never leaving your car, photograph every service station along Highway 1 from LAX to Point Dume.” How many cameras, what kind of camera, which route to take, how many gas stations to display in the installation, how many prints, and of what size are all left to Schoenstadt’s devices.

Schoenstadt asks McBride: “Randomly choose a discarded drawing; load that drawing into a fax machine facing the wrong way. Ask the exhibition space to fax you the floor plan where the work will be exhibited. The combination of the discarded drawing and architecture will provide the composition. Choose location, scale, materials, and color. Please include all information regarding the fax transmission.” McBride chooses the drawing and the way it gets loaded into the fax machine, as well as all of the details of the final installation.

Both artists will balance being told what to do with what is arguably the most important part of the project—how it will finally appear. In this way, both Schoenstadt and McBride prove that they favor “visual result” as much as “intellectual premises.” Forty years after Art by Telephone, it is clear that these two priorities are not mutually exclusive.

July 2009

Press

Art 21 Magazine

Artforum

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