Proposal for The Something at the Berkeley Art Museum

Proposal for The Something at the The Berkeley Art Museum

SFAI Contemporary Practice Class

Collaborative Installation

April 2014

Working Title: The Mothership

This collaborative project focuses on concepts of place, particularly the Bay Area as a generative conduit for culture, music, technology, artistic process and exploration.  We are inspired by the materiality of The Something and its focus on experimentation, viewer participation, music, moving imagery, and shiny things.  At the same time, we are interested in culling inspiration from the Funk Art movement whose moniker was coined by Peter Selz at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1967.  Funk artists too were interested in found and everyday objects, a transgressive sense of humor, experimentation, and audience participation.  Funk as “an assault on one’s senses”[1] speaks to how we collectively might consider place and our experiences with dis/placement and re/placement as we come together in our first semester at SFAI. Participants come from different places, cultures, and backgrounds and are coming together and contributing to the collaboration with various interests, experiences and skill sets.

We have two different threads of exploration.  One thread will culminate with a book created through an exchange system amongst class members (hopefully printed through Hexagon Press).  Through various strategies including some Fluxus ideas of chance and game-playing, participants will ask each other questions regarding a sense of place and interrogating the process of collaboration itself.  The book and perhaps an accompanying diaristic blog and/or website will take form through this call and response. The other thread finds form in a sculptural installation that will incorporate the materials that already exist within The Something’s installation as well as a number of found objects supplied by SFAI participants.  We will also incorporate videos related to the ideas of  process and of journey, the journey of getting from the San Francisco Art Institute to the Berkeley Art Museum, of getting from each participant's current home to SFAI and even the path that brought participants from their former homes to SFAI and the Bay Area.  The journey and progression of making the installation itself will also be documented and incorporated in some way.  Both projects will exist within the space that has been allotted to us by The Something and the book will be available for viewers to take.

It is important for participants to communicate their deepening understandings of a sense of place from their experiences before arriving in the Bay Area to their shifting understandings of place within their first semester of artistic exploration at the San Francisco Art Institute. Participant's  sense of place also responds and reflects the expansive ideas generated by The Something  as well as the institutional frame and legacy of the Berkeley Art Museum and the Bay Area itself.