[THEME MUSIC]
We are at the Exploratorium today
in San Francisco, a fantastic museum of science,
art, and human perception.
They have an Artist-in-Residence program
that brings in all sorts of creative minds
to develop projects for the broad public that visits here.
One of those residents is Zarouhie Abdalian,
who's originally from New Orleans,
but who now lives not too far from here in Oakland.
Her work is minimal, almost invisible, in many cases.
But even so, she's remarkably good at altering
one's experience of a space.
Her subtle interventions have involved
a window lined with mylar that quivers at varying frequencies,
a vacuum-sealed cube with a ringing bell inside,
an installation of mirrored surfaces
and the sound of voices at the New Orleans African American
Museum, and an installation of brass bells on rooftops
in downtown Oakland, programmed to ring
simultaneously and bring awareness to the city's center.
Zarouhie's work thinks about what happens between a given
space and the people who interact
with it, making subtle shifts to what is already there.
We're here at the museum before it opens,
and we've got to hurry and talk to Zarouhie
before it fills with people.
I'm Zarouhie Abdalian, and this is your art assignment.
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The Exploratorium is a place where, as a visitor,
you're invited to engage in processes as a way of learning.
And it's a place for processes to take place.
These two things were, you know, really exciting
and also kind of new for me.
I wanted to, uh, try and-- and make
a work that would respond to that type of context.
I mean, I purposely choose, like,
unremarkable features of sites to work with, um,
and unremarkable materials, uh, so that the work isn't so far
out of the every day experiences of the viewer
that it's only-- only art is in a way.
You start in this building.
It's in, uh, Kunst Werke, which is a museum.
And you can kind of hear the sound component
when you enter the museum in the staircase.
But it's all the way at the top of the staircase,
so you faintly hear it and you're moving
through about three floors, um.
and using that stairwell.
And when you reach the top of the staircase,
you're presented with an open window, a decoy owl
like the kind you use in your garden to keep away the birds,
ostensibly, and the recording, which
is a German lied by Schubert.
And it's very beautiful, a soprano singing
about longing for the night.
And then you have this owl that, of course, also flies at night.
It's a little funny because it's a plastic decoy, um,
you know, sitting in this window.
The window's open to the panorama,
to the outdoor space, um, to this Berlin view.
So you have this view, um, with the owl sort of guarding it,
keeping certain elements of the outside out.
Your assignment is to first find two spaces that
share some sort of boundary.
And then do something to highlight or alter
their relationship between those two spaces
by reconfiguring or activating that place where they meet.
Then document it in some way, and send it in.
There are so many interesting directions to take this one.
But I really like the first idea you
had, John, about the horizon line.
Yeah, I think the horizon line is
like the ultimate boundary between, you know,
land or sea and sky, and like the ultimate human boundary.
Right.
And it's represented in so much art.
Yeah.
But Zarouhie's work is really firmly rooted
in minimal and conceptual art in the '60s and '70s.
And I mean, I immediately thought
of artists like Jo Baer, whose hard-edged abstract paintings
sort of think about the edge, the boundary of the canvas,
or Eva Hesse's masterpiece Hang Up" which
can be seen as a meditation on the boundary between painting
and sculpture.
Yeah.
If we're not going to talk about 19th century landscape
painting, which I would really enjoy,
but I understand maybe not your thing,
I was wondering maybe about, like, Francis Alys--
that piece, "The Green Line," where he went on a walk
and spray-painted the old armistice
line between Israel and Jordan.
That's true.
But I'm going to stick to my direction here.
I want to talk about Michael Asher
because he was really brilliant in sort of bringing out
the invisible boundaries that art institutions, like museums
and galleries, create that really heavily inform
our experience of art.
In 1970, Michael Asher created a work at Pomona College
where he reconfigured the galleries
into two triangular spaces, joined
by a narrow pass-through.
And he also removed the doors to the space,
leaving it open 24 hours a day.
Technically, there was nothing in the gallery.
But your experience was altered dramatically
by his intervention which created
a stimulating environment of shifting light, air
pressure, and the sound of the street outside.
In 1974, he had another show at Claire Copley Gallery
in LA, for which he removed the partition wall that
separated the exhibition space from the office space,
exposing the usually hidden day-to-day transactions
of the gallery, which is, of course, a commercial business.
While in both cases, the galleries
might have looked empty, they were, in fact,
full of questioning thoughts and prompts.
Asher was associated with an approach called
institutional critique, which asks
us to question the forces that shape the production
and consumption of art.
His critical act was the removal of boundaries,
prompting visitors to think about the borders
visible and invisible that instruct
and inform our experience of art.
Something I've used a lot is just
window space of any building, is this shared boundary
between it and the outside.
So any type of threshold like that, um,
is a good place to work.
It could be your front door.
Or it could be, you know, some private business
and, you know, just outside their door.
It could be a boundary that's a little bit less
visible-- for instance, like a city plaza, you know,
space within a city, or space within a park.
But maybe one piece of it, you know,
it has a different use or different people going to it,
or, uh, you know, something interesting
that happens there that doesn't happen just right outside.
But I think it can also occur, um, within an object itself,
like, um, you know, a box has boundaries, you know.
And something different might happen inside of a box
than what's happening outside of it.
I think when you're thinking about this space,
it might be interesting to think about two spaces that maybe
have some sort of contested relationship,
or there's some tension between the space-- however
you want to define tension.
[THEME MUSIC]
Um, anyway, I think that's all that I have, but-- so--
INTERVIEWER: Good.
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