We live to serve
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' "Bay Area Now 4" finds itself in community service.

By Glen Helfand

What would the community think? Forty students opened care packages sent by their parents and loved ones in Helena Keeffe's 2003 project, My Mom Sent Extra Underwear for You.
THERE'S AN IRONY to the term art community. Artists, in myth and in truth, are of maverick, individualistic stock. To make art means to think differently, to face misunderstanding, and most likely, a reduced income. Art may shape the look of the world we live in, but artists rank low on the pop-culture radar screen. Photographer Cindy Sherman, as an art-world adage has it, may be a superstar in certain New York City zip codes, but she's nobody when she crosses into more general terrain.

Artists are still outsiders who frequently work alone and in isolation yet occasionally come together to participate in social rituals such as the art opening, and to become part of a system of self-interest that makes careers move forward. Contradictions and hard decisions abound.

Yet there's an increasingly popular artistic trajectory in which artists use the community at large – as well as fellow artists – as their material. Relying on public input and interaction to make their work, the intention may be to shape culture itself, at least in small ways. And if there is any unifying curatorial thread to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' "Bay Area Now 4," it's a focus on notions of community. Curators René de Guzman and Berin Golonu include a notable number of collaborative teams, publishers, and artists who work in the genre of Social Sculpture, the Joseph Beuys-coined idea that holds human interaction as a form of artwork. Conceptualist Tom Marioni gave the construct a Bay Area spin with his The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970), a classic that continues to the present day in the artist's studio. The piece, like many projects of its ilk, relies on a complex relationship between an artist giving something to an audience yet taking a certain ownership and control of the situation.

Younger present and former Bay Area artists such as Jon Rubin, Harrell Fletcher, and Josh Greene have involved the local public in their work. Greene, for example, created the Bay Area Leisure Foundation, in which he offered a grant composed of his honorarium for an exhibition. Such a project offers a winky critique as much as it does genuine goodwill.

Schools of thought

"Bay Area Now 4" comprises projects such as Ted Purves's Momentary Academy, an educational program with quirky classes – how-to's on making pot stickers, creating T-shirt slogans, and falling into a trance – that will be taught by the exhibit's artists. Local art Web site Stretcher (of which I am a founding and former member) will hold art- and culture-related public interviews and events in the ground floor's Education Resource Room (another code term for community access), while Gestalt Collective present a collaborative wall painting and Margaret Tedesco offers in-gallery storytelling and translations of feature films unseen by audience members. With Mundane Journeys, Kate Pocrass gives walking tours of the peculiar places in the Yerba Buena neighborhood, as well as a daylong bus tour of eccentric corners of San Francisco.

Other projects unfold in more traditional forms, such as portraiture, yet foray into various art and nonart public spaces for material. Emily Prince is engaged in the formidable project of drawing wallet-size images of all the US casualties of the current war in Iraq. Christine Shields paints conventional portraits of friends, many of whom are local poets and musicians. John Hattori shows short video portraits of people who form the community at 16th Street's funky art/lit crib Adobe Books. Helena Keeffe addresses extended family with an audio tour featuring the opining voices of the "Bay Area Now" artists' friends and families in a role, or voice, usually reserved for art critics and curators. Similarly, Edie Tsong's piece allows visitors to make drawings of the artist and vice versa (via Webcam and fax machine).

Such projects could either come off as clubby or heartwarming, depending on one's proximity to the subjects. If you know the artist, it obviously means a lot more than if you don't. Other pieces, like Purves's university, also demand a far greater commitment from the viewer. As one friend puts it, projects that purport to be generous are usually the opposite: That is, participants usually have to spend more time, effort, and sometimes money than they ordinarily might. Active viewers have to trust that it will be worth the effort and that the art will take them somewhere new.

Lost horizons

There's a utopian quality in the attempt to generate dialogue, to give to others, and to truly forge a community, and San Francisco has a history of fostering groups – freethinkers who hit the gold rush, who became beats, and who extended lifestyle and gender definitions in the hippie and queer communities, not to mention tech circles.

At the moment, however, San Francisco appears to be simply clinging to its position as a liberal haven in a chilly conservative climate. Community-based art, however experimental it may seem, is now codified in local art schools. The San Francisco Art Institute's curriculum includes an emphasis on "public practice," while California College of the Arts adds "social practices" to a list of usual genres such as painting and sculpture. Southern Exposure gallery has forged a cohesive program of projects that require viewer interaction to complete. Perhaps it's a reflection of the tumultuous world we live in, or the Bay Area's marginal status when it comes to the international art market, but community-based projects still seem to generate some vital force and support here, be it among artists who work together or attempt to interface with the population. It's perhaps the closest we'll come these days to a cultural zeitgeist.

All this may reflect the DIY ethos that was fed by the dot-com boom, in which anyone could create their own version of a corporation or service, imbuing it with fantasy and design features. (Corporations, we've often been told by managers and human resource departments, are forms of community as well.) It relates to open-source software, as de Guzman suggested in a recent phone interview: "Technology has affected artistic models in a horizontal way," he said. Golonu offers that this year's show is meant to posit that the art gallery is not disconnected from the real world – it's another space where exciting interaction can happen. Both curators point to the excitement of seeing their ordinarily modest attendance spike when SF art musicians Matmos worked daily in the gallery, or a skate bowl-sculpture drew kids with boards. Community, in these cases, is equated with institutional success.

Like most places where people gather these days – shopping malls, sports stadiums – galleries and museums are public places with private ownership. While all offer the trappings of democratic freedoms, they're all subject to institutional overlays. Yerba Buena is just such a place, though one that's always rested in a confusing position between museum and alternative venue, poised amid the tensions between warmth of public access and formal gallery walls. "Bay Area Now 4" seems designed to bring visitors back for repeat visits, to create community, and to put the Center back into Yerba Buena's identity. For the sake of our art scene, let's hope it can do just that.

'Bay Area Now 4' runs July 16-Nov. 6 (downstairs) and July 16- Sept. 25 (upstairs), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. Hours are Thurs.-Sat., noon-8 p.m.; Sun. and Tues.-Wed., noon-5 p.m. $3-$6 (free first Tuesdays). (415) 978-ARTS. The opening-night party includes performances by Deerhoof, Jolie Holland, Numbers, and Warbler and premieres of new video works by Ellen Bruno, Bill Daniel, Sam Green, and Caveh Zahedi Fri/15, 8 p.m. $12-$15.