January 7, 2003

By Glen Helfand

SHOCK RIPPLED THROUGH the Bay Area art scene when the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts, the region's major independent art schools, issued a carefully worded joint press release Nov. 25 stating "their intention to explore the possibility of joining together to create a new institution of higher education in the visual arts." It hasn't been a secret that the SFAI has lately been having a hard time financially: the school's president of the past seven years, Ella King Torrey, resigned in early April, with the school facing millions in long-term debt and a major operating-budget deficit. CCAC, on the other hand, has been on an upswing, luring students to its San Francisco and Oakland campuses with a mixture of cross-disciplinary courses while intriguing the public with its buzz-generating exhibitions and lecture series. But the move is not only a major business development, it's also a major shift in paradigms: aren't art schools supposed to be bastions of fierce individualism and creativity?

It may just be 2002 in a nutshell: Political parties have lost their distinguishing identities, as have the voices of the press. So many major metropolises have become one-newspaper towns; this one may soon be a single-art school city.

It's hard to imagine what this would really look like. Both schools have cultivated their own distinct identities. The SFAI is known as a fine arts leader with a pictureseque North Beach campus where aesthetic adventurousness, most recently audacious performance and video works, has taken place since 1871. CCAC, on the other hand, was founded in 1907 as a school focused on design, architecture, ceramics, glassmaking, and other media placed in the controversial realm of "craft" – a demonized word in the art world and one that the school is seriously trying to remove to create a new name and identity for the 21st century. With the addition of a large modernist building in San Francisco, CCAC has been successfully broadening its profile and becoming known in the realm of hybrid practices.

Would the two schools complement each other better by being a single entity that would add up to one of the largest art schools in the country? Or will it have the "Euro" effect – creating economic benefits with a very real threat of homogenization? Art insiders suggest that the combined institution might have the resources and clout to lure bigger-name artists and thinkers as faculty – a sort of buy-in-bulk Walmart-ization. (This spring I'll be teaching graduate courses at both schools, as well as at Mills College.) CCAC, which has been seriously trying to find ways to house its expanding student body in new space, may be able to use this as an opportunity to remake the organization, while the SFAI, with an experimental ethos that never exactly had the craft problem, would benefit from additional cash reserves.

They're not the only art institution doing some thinking. In the past few weeks the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that, due to the economic downturn, it was putting on hold its visionary redesign project by architect Rem Koolhaas, while the New York Times declared that the Guggenheim Museum's era of 1990s expansionism was officially over. (This bit of editorializing was followed up by the closure, indefinitely, of the Guggenheim Las Vegas – which has only been open for a bit over a year.) Museums everywhere are trying to figure out how to survive in this climate; watch how the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be hosting a rather stately Marc Chagall exhibit in 2003.

CCAC and the SFAI were already running on some parallel tracks. Both have been cooking up a curatorial studies program (though CCAC, whose program launches in fall 2003, is first to the gate) and adding an international flair to their exhibitions, which brings us to consider some actual artwork. This fall, both schools had shows with related themes: "To Whom It May Concern," recently appointed staff curator Matthew Higgs's debut exhibition at CCAC's Wattis Institute, and "Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now," a show illustrating ideas expounded by French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud. The shows, which closed not long ago, included humble, conceptually based works, most of them on ordinary letter-size paper, which related, presciently enough, to ideas about people coming together and communicating. Each suggested a sense of narrowing boundaries between artist and viewer as they concentrated on a no-tech form of interactivity. The exhibitions were not organized collaboratively, but their analogous themes perhaps reflect a zeitgeist condition. They felt more like a dialogue instead of being simply redundant.

"To Whom" was a rollicking, sometimes repetitive show filled with correspondence, a fair amount being elaborate jokes, process-oriented pieces in which the artist created a missive to send to a distant but familiar celebrity, political official, art dealer, or bureaucrat. The show had something to do with belief, of constructing relationships. Higgs selected works such as Jeffrey Vallance's faux-fan ode to Connie Chung, a framed series of correspondence and signed 8-by-10-inch glossies of the TV anchor. And Christian Jankowski's hilarious three-channel video piece that deals with business litigation interactions in commercial real estate.

Higgs comes to CCAC from London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, so when Bourriaud's Gallic-flavored SFAI exhibition mined related territory, which he terms "relational aesthetics," one did have to wonder if this really was a continental thing. "Touch" was both less and more gracious in its tone. Where the CCAC show had a bit of a cynical edge, Bourriaud favored earnest, sincere gestures of togetherness and sharing. The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres's pile of hard candies, which were there for the taking, offered visitors a sweet aftertaste to evoke the sense of loss the artist felt when his lover died. Young artist Laurent Moriceau contributed little giveaway cards with images of phone booths in his native France, with the applicable phone numbers, which he urged visitors to call (a gesture that would have been more effective if he could have taken care of the long distance charges). If conceptual art is in its initial stages about the dematerialization of the art object, these works are about invisible interactions between people and institutions, and sometimes between practices.

The art-and-design crossover is a hot contemporary topic, and it was expressed in "Touch" with Andrea Zittel's conversation pit, a piece of student-customized furniture intended to promote dialogue. Zittel's piece is a quasi-comfortable zone that frames discussion, literally. What happens inside this object is perhaps just as important as the structure itself. Interestingly, the current exhibition at CCAC (through Jan. 10), a large-scale sculpture by L.A.-based, Hong Kong-born artist Shirley Tse, takes on similar properties. The sprawling white Styrofoam sculpture, commissioned as part of the school's Capp Street Project residency program, is like packing material on steroids. Titled Shelf Life, it looks like a hot tub and is large enough for visitors to walk on and to rest inside depressions made of fiberglass or plastic and lined with memory foam. It's an industrial lounge environment that exists between lifestyle, design, art, and social commentary. Tse's piece makes us feel comfortable being uncomfortable with the ecological horror and psychological blankness of plastic that exists the world over while simultaneously tapping into a notion of public leisure. To hang out there and socialize feels like being inside an iMac box, something that's constructed to take a beating as it crosses borders.

It seemed like that kind of year – art crossed over, merged, until it became almost multipurpose. One can't look back at visual art in 2002 without nodding to Christian Marclay's marvelous Video Quartet, perhaps the best work to appear here. For the SFMOMA-commissioned piece, Marclay deftly choreographed a collage of diverse movie clips, weaving them into a multiscreen audio and visual composition that can appeal to an incredibly broad audience without ever losing an ounce of integrity. Marclay, whose more abrasive Guitar Drag was included in the unexpectedly dour "Rock My World" show at CCAC earlier this year, managed to captivate nearly everyone with his SFMOMA piece. He transfixed young video makers; DJs and turntablists could thrill to Marclay's reconfigured snippets of Hollywood movies and footage of avant-garde musicians; grandma could smile in recognition of Ann Miller tap dancing and Rita Hayworth lip-synching. It was a media savvy, we-can-all-just-get-along kind of project that was truly joyful. In this case, one size did fit all.