Max Neuhaus

By Andrea Grover

Max Neuhaus, Three to One, 1992, Colored pencil on paper, 35-1/4 x 29-1/8; 35-1/4 x 15-3/4 inches. Collection of the artist. Sound Work References:
Exhibition: Documenta 9, Collection: Documenta, Location: AOK Building, Kassel, Germany, Dimensions: 7 x 16 x 3 meters; 7 x 16 x 3 meters;
7 x 16 x 3 meters, Extant: 1992–Present.

Andrea Grover interviewed the artist Max Neuhaus on the occasion of the opening of his permanent sound installation Sound Figure, and his accompanying drawing exhibition Circumscription Drawings, on view through August 10, 2008, at The Menil Collection. Born in 1939 in Beaumont, Texas, Neuhaus was a prodigious interpreter of contemporary music by his twenties and simultaneously saw the limitations of understanding sound as purely a time-based medium. In the late 1960s, he began using sound as a sculptural medium and coined the term sound installation—a term that conceived of sound as both infinite and volumetric. His subsequent body of work realized sound as sculpture in public spaces, from swimming pools to Times Square. Many of his sound works are marked by extraordinary subtlety and are often undiscovered until, as he describes, one is ready to discover them. His installation, Sound Figure, begins approximately twenty feet north of the main entrance to the Menil Collection and forms an invisible sound space that can be passed through; once inside the sound, you hear it and when you step outside, it disappears. In addition to working in sound, Neuhaus has long been engaged with drawing. His Circumscription Drawings consist of two panels with image and text and act as contemplations after a sound work is complete. Now living in Capri, Italy, Neuhaus is considered a pioneer and primary influence among contemporary practitioners of sound art.

…might be good: You started your career as a percussion soloist. What was the shift that brought you to begin thinking about sound as a kind of plastic art, as spatial rather than time-based?

Max Neuhaus: This question is a little hard to answer because I have never functioned in a theoretical way. I follow my nose. I was very fortunate to be successful at a very young age, and that gave me perspective. I was 24, and I should have been 44 because it usually takes that long to get where I was. To be that young and energetic in the middle of that career, to have these other ideas about sound—and I didn’t question them, I just acted on them. At one point it became clear that I couldn’t be both a percussion soloist and a sound artist, so I just stopped being a solo percussionist and started doing what I do now.

…mbg: Did your work begin with sound works, drawings and texts as they are in this exhibition? Was it all simultaneous?

MN: No, I began doing the drawings much later. In the beginning, I just did the sound works, but at one point at the end of the 80s it became clear that I was functioning in the world of contemporary art, which is a world of exhibitions. It’s not just that these works are site specific—they are much more than that. They are made out of the site. The site itself is the physical part of the work, it’s the material. So when I made a work for an exhibition, once the exhibition was over, the work was destroyed. It took a while to get people to understand this idea because people assume that anything to do with sound is temporary—it’s an event. Our whole experience of sound, from the first sounds you hear in the womb, represents something that happened. Yet my idea was the opposite of that. It’s pulling sound out of time and putting it in place. It’s turning the whole idea upside down. I realized I had to find a way to talk about these works that had been destroyed and a way to publish them, because after the fact, they existed only through word of mouth. But then again, having witnessed a lot of murders of artworks [laughs], I didn’t want to kill them either.

…mbg: I get the sense that you are very precise, because you create drawings of the sound works, write prose about the work and design the equipment and the devices for playback. But ultimately your work is inserted into an existing sound context, and everything else is somewhat left to chance. Is your precision early on in the process because of your expectation that the site cannot be controlled?

MN: No, it’s just the nature of the realization of these ideas. The [Circumscription] drawings are always made after the sound work. When I finish a work, I don’t really know what it is. It takes me a little while to figure out what I’ve done, and only once I figure it out can I do one of these drawings. Not only are my drawings unusual in that they have a component which is verbal, which is not part of our Western tradition of drawing, but also, instead of being a plan for the sound, they are a stimulus for reflection on the sound after the fact. The precision? I was trained as a musician, of course, so I learned a certain amount of precision through that discipline.

…mbg: It seems like you were interested in networks very early on. One of your early projects, Public Supply (1966), combined a radio station with the telephone network: callers made sound into their telephones and you mixed their voices together. And today you have the web project, Auracle, described as a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice and played and heard over the Internet. Did you think of sound as a way to connect people, as transcultural—a term you’ve used—and of electronics as a way to connect hundreds of thousands of people?

MN: Well, electronics was just the means to produce these works. I wasn’t very good at science in school. In high school I never got calculus or algebra. But when computers came around, I knew I needed to learn how to program. I built interfaces for myself to build a piece. I don’t build the sounds of these works in my studio; I have to build them on site. I always say it’s the site that’s the physical part of the work. I have to apply sound to it and I can only apply it in place. So the sound for this new work at The Menil was built out on the site.

…mbg: Right, it’s not like they can send you a schematic for the sound of the area.

MN: Yes, but also, like you brought up before, it’s not that I take a chance with the ambient environment. I spend ten days in it, which means that, although it can change, I know it very well. I know what’s going to happen in it, what could happen in it, and what its acoustics are. It’s as variable as light would be on a physical sculpture, which changes all the time.

…mbg: So you always build the work on-site?

MN: Yes. I build the work out of the site. The sound works are really sculptures. They’re not formed of brick or steel, but they’re formed with sound. Instead of being perceived physically with the eye they’re perceived aurally. We perceive space just as much with ears as with eyes.

…mbg: I read in your biography that you lived on a boat in 1969 on the East Coast. Were you practicing as an artist when you moved onto the boat?

MN: Yes, I had made this record of my percussion repertoire for Columbia Masterworks. Instead of thinking of this as a career move, for me it was a way out because I didn’t have to throw all of that away, it was preserved in the best way possible. Columbia was rather surprised that I’d stopped performing.

…mbg: So your first sound works happened while you were still a percussionist?

MN: Yes, the first aural topography was 1967 and I made the record for Columbia in 1968. To me now, one year seems like so little time, but it is when you get close to seventy [laughs]. When you’re in your twenties in one year you can change the world, of course.

…mbg: Did living on the boat have anything to do with the way that you conceptualize sound?

MN: Well, a whole series of works came out of it. But my impetus was that I had left Houston for Manhattan in 1957 and I’d been living on Manhattan island for all that time and I wanted to escape. At first I rented a farm in Vermont, and worked there for a while. But then I realized that Vermont is not a very nice place to live. It’s very cold; the snow stays on the ground until May. Then I read somewhere that if you lived on a boat, you could put it anywhere. So it questions this whole idea of land and the idea of ownership of land. And so I decided to live on a boat.

…mbg: It was the 60s, after all [laughs].

MN: [laughs] Right! I drove to Florida and bought the first boat that I found, which turned out to be a terrible boat. It was a houseboat built by a plumber. I luckily sold it in Miami, and with the money came back to New York. At the Bronxonia Yacht Club, I found this classic 1932 motor cruiser. I didn’t look at her name until after I finished buying her. I looked at the back and it was Melody.

…mbg: How serendipitous! I just watched a documentary on the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader about his final performance [In Search of the Miraculous] and his subsequent disappearance crossing the Atlantic. His boat was called Ocean Wave. I think boat names are prophetic.

MN: Indeed! You’re not supposed to change them. But before I eventually took this boat down the East Coast and across the Gulf Stream and into the Bahamas, I stayed in Manhattan because it needed some repairs. I lived at the West 79th Street Boat Basin.

…mbg: I know it well—it's still there.

MN: Yes. I got a call from someone who was programming at New York University who asked me to think about doing a piece. When you’re in a boat on a river like the Hudson, you hear everything passing through the water. So I had begun thinking about sound in water already. I thought about making a work through water. I remember going to Columbia and talking to some acousticians who said, “you can’t do that, it won’t work, because water is compressed as much as it can be.” I went down to the boat, took a hose on the dock, and I stuck a police whistle on the end of it. I put it under water in the Hudson, and it made a sound. So in fact, I was blowing this whistle with water.

When this call came in from NYU, I said, “OK, but does NYU have a swimming pool?” He said, “Well yeah, but…” and I said, “You get the pool, and I’ll do the work.” This was the first work, called Water Whistle, in 1971. Then I began a series, again each one in a different pool. I would travel with a set of hoses and whistles, and I built a network in the pool for each one, because although pools all look the same from the top - rectangular, the cross sections are always complex. These works were also pushing this idea of installation. I was still tied to this idea that I was making sound, and therefore it had to be an event. I insisted we do the Water Whistle piece for twelve hours. I wanted the piece to be available for people to come and go. I wanted to get away from this idea that music—like a concert—started and ended, which sounds simple now. But in those days it had people in the avant-garde world saying, “well, he’s doing a twelve hour piece, we have to go for the whole thing” [laughs]. But I was trying to establish this idea of a sound installation.

…mbg: So it began in the pool at NYU, and then where else did it go? Were they all public pools?

MN: There were various pools. The next call came from a woman who was working in the performance section at the Walker Arts Center, who said that she wanted to do a piece on New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis, so she commandeered a pool. I needed to be able to heat up the pool to around body temperature. How does an audience listen to a piece that’s underwater? I found that if you lie on your back your ears automatically go under water, and your nose and mouth are out, so it was very simple in fact to listen. But if you start to listen you stop moving, and if the water is normal swimming temperature, you’d get hypothermia after about five minutes.

…mbg: What’s really beautiful about this work is that you were physically immersing your audience in water. There must have been all sorts of references to the womb, maybe not in the quality of the sound, but in the way that we hear our first sounds through fluid.

MN: Yes, but what the newspapers were more about, is how “He’s all wet” [laughs]. In the 60s, even contemporary music was still very formal and I’d performed, as a percussionist, in tails and a white tie. And then take this audience, and get them to take their clothes off and put on a bathing suit—I mean they’ve never seen each other before, and they get in the water together. And it was wonderful.

…mbg: Let’s talk about the work that you’ve developed for the Menil Collection, Sound Figure. How did your relationship with the museum begin?

MN: I visited the site before and after the museum was done. Just after the construction, I visited Dominique [de Menil]. She brought me to the museum, but it was still surrounded by a plywood fence and there was mud out front.

 …mbg: And there was mud out front just recently, thanks to Michael Heizer [and the completion of his installation Circumflex].

MN: Yes, I heard. Bad boy [laughs]. Anyway, I came back when Joseph [Helfenstein] was here and he asked me to think about a work. So I remembered that visit [with Dominique], and I remember that I had thought of these outdoor spaces, these pocket gardens, when I had walked through with her many years before. So that’s where I thought I should start: I looked around, thought of a number of ideas and then got really fascinated with the walkway itself.

…mbg: This is the walkway on the north end?

MN: Yes, the main entrance. It was more of a combination of the form, which I’d developed back in 1999 which I call Sound Volumes; they’re outdoor works that are very highly defined sound spaces. Literally, if you’re a few inches away from them you don’t hear anything, and if you walk into them they’re there, and if you walk out of them, they disappear. And I wanted to put something like this, in the main entrance of the museum, something which is unmarked, invisible and subtle to the point that you cannot hear it, but always there. And so we agreed to do it on the walkway. So, I selected the site in October 1976 and I came back and built the sound in October of 2007.

…mbg: So when you develop a site-specific piece like this one, is it in concert with the architecture and the use of the space?

MN: It’s everything about the space; I have to find a way of really embedding sound in the place both acoustically and psychologically. It’s very important that you don’t know where the sound is coming from. Otherwise, if you see a loudspeaker, then in the context of sculpture, the loud speaker becomes a sculptural element. But as I started to say, it’s everything about the space—how it’s used, its acoustics, the sounds that already exist there. That’s my point of departure; that’s my foundation. I try to arrive without the preconception even of the first sound. Then I put in a sound and I listen, then I put another sound and I listen, and then I compare that.

…mbg: Something that I found really interesting in reading about your work is that you originated new concepts of aural urban design. By utilizing all of your knowledge of sound technology and the psychology of sound you were able to design more humane and safe sounds for emergency vehicles. Do you think that these new concepts of aural urban design are outside of your artistic practice?

MN: Yes. There are people who believe that anything an artist does it art. But I’m not one of them. I’m acting as an engineer or an inventor and using my special experience and my special skills and my insight, too.

…mbg: Has this new technology or this new approach been utilized?

MN: I now realize that it’s about fifty years ahead of its time. Around 2050 keep your ears open [laughs].

…mbg: It makes sense because so much of your work seemed like it really predicted a movement that would come to much later.

MN: Yes. I tell the whole story, which is a wonderful kind of odyssey over twelve years, on my website. There’s a text called Siren. One of the most startling ideas for people was that I wanted to build an aural image for the [emergency vehicle] so that you could hear intuitively where it was, which direction it was going, and how fast it was going. The problem is that in open areas of highways, or in cities, there are so many sound reflectors, that you don’t know where [the siren] is coming from, and you don’t know what to do. This is a patented technique now; I mean I got the first patent for sound ever issued because sound is supposed to be copyrighted.

…mbg: Was that challenging?

MN: Very. But I wanted to implement it to make it financially viable in some way. So we went through the process of the patent, with forty-six claims from 1992, so it’s expired now, and anybody can steal it. That’s the first step.

…mbg: Oh, I won’t put that in print!

MN: [laughs] That’s OK. I want somebody to steal it! I’ve always been fascinated by sound. It’s my world. It’s to a point where I don’t recognize people’s faces. I recognize their voices. Once I know them, as a voice, I never forget the voice. Even people I haven’t seen in thirty years could call me up and I’d know exactly who they are. But if I were to see them on the street, I wouldn’t. And it goes as far as my wife. She once met me at the airport, and she was standing there as I came out with my bags, and I smiled at her, because she’s a very beautiful woman, but I kept walking. She didn’t believe it. And then she realized I thought I was smiling at another woman [laughs].

…mbg: You were cheating! I have one last thought before we wrap up: The Menil Collection seems like the perfect place for you because they really embrace the intangible.

MN: Yes, of course. It’s partly the legacy of Dominique. This is an exceptional institution in the world, especially as the art world has become more and more about commerce. This is one of the few places where we can say, “No. This is what a museum is.”

 Andrea Grover is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Aurora Picture Show, a microcinema housed in her home— a former church building in Houston's Sunset Heights.

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg

By Maaretta Jaukkuri

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg have worked together since 1993. Their first collaborative project Devotionalia (1994-2004) was a collaboration with street children in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, Dias and Reidweg have worked with a variety of marginalized groups, including immigrants, prisoners, juvenile delinquents, janitors, street vendors, male prostitutes and visually impaired people. The artists’ interest in the concept of “the other” and their wish to tell the stories of those considered to be “others” are the guiding forces in their work. At the time of this interview,Dias and Riedweg’s work was on view in same time else where at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.

Maaretta Jaukkuri: Where and when has your work been exhibited in the United States?

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg: In 1996, Mary Jane Jacob and Homi Bhabha included our work in Conversations at the Castle in Atlanta and our work was also included in inSitesite 2000, an exhibition that takes place every year at the border between San Diego and Tijuana in California. In 2008, The Frye Museum for the Arts in Seattle will show Funk Staden (a work we presented at Documenta 12 ). In April 2009, we will have a solo show at The Americas Society in New York, curated by Gabriela Rangel.

MJ: Your work has been shown in venues throughout Europe, Latin American, the United States and South America. Does the location of your exhibitions affect the reception of your work?

MD & WR: There are always differences in the reception of our work in different places. Reception of our work depends not only on the individual viewer, but also on the cultural and economic context in which the work is seen. In developing our work, we think about the context in which the work will be shown.

MJ: How is it to work in these different cultural contexts?

MD & WR: It is really stimulating for us to work in a variety of cultural contexts; we think it is important to work inter-territorially; for example, to produce a work in Egypt or Turkey and to then show it in Switzerland or in the US. Working in this way opens up new ways of thinking about existing situations. Misunderstandings and cultural clashes are vital to bringing about new ways of communicating and thinking.

MJ: Both ethical issues and aesthetic concerns are strongly present in your work. How do these issues and concerns effect your approach to art?

MD & WR: We believe art to be a tool to subvert culture, not just to serve it. People in the art world assume that the “intelligentsia” is restricted to those with money and appropriate education. Luckily, life has shown us that this is no more than a comfortable assumption of the bourgeoisie. There are many—we would say infinite—forms of intelligence among illiterate people, people in prison, people on the streets and in marginal contexts of society. Besides, in every institution, even in the worst ones, there’s always someone who still thinks and silently questions and these questions subvert the context or the system in which he or she operates. Luckily, we think we can still trust individualism and individual existence. Maybe we are just optimists, but why not? To be a pessimist does not make anybody more intelligent, only safer (at most).

MJ: A great deal of your artwork involves collaborative processes—not only between yourselves as artists but also with other people. How does collaboration shape your working process?

MD & WR: Negotiation is always present in any kind of collaboration—and these negotiations both interfere with and contribute to the process and to the final form of the work. These negotiations are part of the methodology.

When an artist is involved in a collaborative project, she or he has to abandon some of the modernist assumptions about what an artwork should be. For instance, it is necessary to abandon the idea of the artwork being the final container to explain everything, to include everything in itself. In collaborative practices the artwork shall, above all else, serve as a platform to expand and reflect diverse points of view. Rather than resolve anything, the artwork shall evoke questions.

MJ: Your most recent work reveals a change in your approach. It seems that you have moved from working collaboratively with groups of people to staging groups of people in particular situations or events, as you have done recently in Suitcases for Marcel (2006-08) and Funk Staden (2007). Could you tell me what led you to this change in the focus of the work?

MD & WR: Perhaps the trend that you suggest in our work is, to a certain degree, verifiable, but it does not reflect a rule we have intended to maintain What might now be different in our work is that we have found a particular way to use our cameras so that we can locate our work between documentary and fiction. We are storytellers, not documentary filmmakers. We have not changed the way we work, but there is more maturity in the way we tell stories now.

MJ: What are some issues you’d like to investigate through your work in the future?

MD &WR: We’re interested in the idea that the concept of the other might be just a poetical/political assumption like all labels that we invent in order to live in any society. Our next project, Little Stories of Modesty and Doubt, will address this idea.

Maaretta Jaukkuri is a Finnish curator working as the artistic director at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.

Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker & Lawrence Rinder on Kiki

By Mary Katherine Matalon & Claire Ruud

Cliff Hengst and Rex Ray performing in front of Kiki, 1994.

Last week, …might be good had the opportunity to sit down with Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker and Larry Rinder. All three were in Austin for …might be good’s sister project testsite; Larry and Cliff were the most recent round of collaborators with their project testsite 08.3~The Window of Art. During their time in Austin, …might be good learned—as Claire describes in this issue's "From the Editor"—that all three were involved with Kiki, the wildly unconventional gallery run by Rick Jacobsen. As artists who work both collaboratively and independently, both Cliff and Scott presented work at Kiki. Larry—who recently accepted the position of the Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive—was the Curator for Twentieth Century Art at BAM when he began attending Kiki’s openings and performances. Fascinated by the vitality of art community focused around Kiki, …might be good asked Cliff, Scott and Larry to recount this moment in their shared history.

…might be good: Cliff, when did you move to San Francisco?

Cliff Hengst: I moved to San Francisco in 1987 from L.A. Ostensibly, I came to San Francisco to go art school, but really I was coming out. I went to San Francisco Art Institute for three years and at first, it was not what I wanted it to be. There were a lot of grateful dead poets sitting around drinking coffee and playing their guitars and I was like, this is just not the scene I want to be in. But eventually I found there were others like me at the school who I bonded with and started doing art. After I graduated, there was this kind of queer world opening up in the city. Lesbians and gays in San Francisco were asserting and empowering themselves. Queer Nation was active in the early 1990s and ACT UP in the late 80s and early 90s. Around that time, Rick [Jacobsen] founded Kiki, a gallery in the Mission district with which Scott and I were heavily involved.

…mbg: How was the establishment of Kiki related to the gay and lesbian activism that was going on at the time in San Francisco?

CH: It wasn’t really. Rick had his own agenda—art—in opening the gallery. But there was crossover because a lot of people who were involved in activism also happened to be artists. Rick did stuff in ACT UP and Queer Nation, but that was never really his thing. At Kiki, there was never an overt political program going on. I always felt that it was art first, and if there was a blurry line between art and politics in some cases, then so be it.

…mbg: Why did Rick name the gallery Kiki?

CH: Kiki was, I think, a French term of endearment, but was also a reference to shit. Sexuality figured very prominently in Rick’s life. The gallery’s inaugural show was called Caca @ Kiki in 1992, and all the artists in the show created work that referenced shit either directly or indirectly.

…mbg: Cliff and Scott, what kind of work did you contribute to the shit show?

Scott Hewicker: I was doing these sock puppets at the time. And I made this sort of brown chain of sock puppets eating each other. They weren’t stuffed or anything, but they had google-eyes. But they were ugly, ugly, worn out, holey, dirty socks. There was nothing pretty about it. There was a chain of them and they were eating each other kind of like a snake eating its tail. It was called Food Chain.

CH: I had done these two sheets of slides that were just pinned up to the window and they were all the reaction shots of the audience on Oprah. I taped a show and stopped it to take a picture of every audience reaction. The piece was called Cataract.

Larry Rinder: In addition to exhibitions, Rick also held performances at Kiki. There was this really old, rickety balcony that could hold maybe three or four people and during performances there would be all these people that were crammed dangerously into this small space.

...mbg: What kinds of perfomance?

SH: I remember that Aaron Noble did a performance there before he became known as a painter. He did this weird confrontational piece where he really engaged the audience. He brought people up from the audience to sit on the chair on stage then he would question their sensibilities about certain things. It was such a small space to have such a powerful performance. And I remember it was the only performance he ever did like that.

CH: And there was this show that he [Rick] did there, with this drag queen Joan Jett Black. It was like a talk show. Joan Jett Black and his sidekick Babette. And she would have these guests, it was like a real variety show—they would have interviews with guests and musical acts. As part of this variety show, Scott and I did a performance called Matthew & Rejoice where we played ex-gays turned Christians. We acted very caustic and very straight. We wore ties and passed out Jack Chick tracts and we sang kids’ Christian songs.

SH: like super syrupy and weird songs…

CH: And we played it super straight. People didn’t really know what to make of it. Some thought it was real.

…mbg: So the people at Kiki didn’t know you from everyday life and understand this was just a performance?

SH: Yeah people didn’t know us, or at least they didn’t know me at the time. It kind of touched a weird nerve—I remember looking out at the audience at Kiki and everyone was frowning.

…mbg: From what you are describing it sounds like at Kiki, there wasn’t a core community in the same way there was at, say, the WOW Café in New York. According to the stories about the WOW Café, there was a core group of lesbians that all knew each other—so if for example a butch lesbian played it femme in a performance the audience knew it was an act.

SH: I think Rick was a catalyst for everyone meeting and hanging out.

LR: People also go to know each other at Kiki through the plays that Kevin [Killian] created and presented there. These plays usually had at least a dozen people in them—and none were professional actors. Kevin always just chose people he knew, like Scott and Cliff. He often would cast people in parts that vaguely resembled themselves in not very flattering ways and it would come out as the person read the part.

SH: The first one was about Prince.

…mbg: The musician?

SH: Yeah. It was a pop life show all about Prince. I believe this play might have been related to a show called Pop Life, curated by Glenn Helfland at New Langton Arts in 1992.

CH: I remember wanting to be in those plays for so long. Finally, Kevin gave me the part of a straight guy who was a detective in a scene with Tanya Harding.

…mbg: So were there rehearsals for these plays or were the performances improvised?

LR: The performers would rehearse once. During the actual performance they’d hold their scripts.

…mbg: And were there costumes?

SH: It depends. Some people get really into it and have costumes, others don’t. Other people don’t even try to act, they just play it really straight, and it’s really funny that way too.

LR: And there have been dozens of these plays, there’s always one in production.

CH: Yes, actually there’s one coming up in September. Now the plays take place at California College of the Arts.

…mbg: Has the effect of these plays changed over time? Do you think the plays are received differently now that they’re no longer presented at Kiki?

SH: They’ve gotten better. He’s perfected the form a little. They’re faster, they’re funnier. And you know, I wrote one with him and he’s such a machine, he can type so fast and the lines just pour out of him.

…mbg: So Larry, did you know Rick when he started Kiki?

LR: No, I met him there and I never knew him well. At the time, I was the curator of The Berkeley Art Museum’s Matrix Program. I had come to Berkeley in 1988 from the New York City where I had been very involved in the East Village art scene. I didn’t really know the San Francisco art scene at all and Kiki was really my first introduction to a kind of core San Francisco energy. During my initial visits to Kiki, I sensed that there were things going on in San Francisco that were as interesting as what was going on in the East Village.

…mbg: It sounds like there was a really interesting scene happening at Kiki. Did the gallery get a lot of art world coverage?

CH: Towards the end, Kiki did get some coverage because of the Yoko Ono show. You know, she [Yoko] did call.

SH: The subtitle of the show that Colter[Jacobson, a San Francisco based artist] and Kevin are curating about Kiki is “the proof is in the pudding” and that comes from something she said in the phone message she left for Rick.

CH: Rick was walking on cloud nine. He would say “sit down,” and then he would just play the recording and look at you. Listening to the recording, at first, you’d be like, “it kind of sounds like Yoko Ono,” and she said something like “It is her. The proof is in the pudding,” and then she went “wah wah wah wah.” And you were like, “oh my god, it is her.” Rick did the show really before the curve of Yoko Ono adoration. She still had that stigma of breaking up the Beatles. And so when the show came up, it was a big moment for her.

…mbg: Larry, did your experience at Kiki influence In a Different Light, the exhibition you curated with Nayland Blake in 1995 about queer sensibility in relationship to contemporary art.

LR: Well, In a Different Light grew directly out of my experience at Kiki. Originally, I wanted to do a show of the Kiki community at the Berkeley Art Museum while the gallery was still there. It felt like there were a lot of people at Kiki because the space was so small—30 people felt like a crowd. But in reality, no one knew what was happening at Kiki outside of the small community associated with it—and so I thought doing a show at BAM would expose this great work to a lot more people.

I contacted the artist Nayland Blake and asked him what he thought of the idea. He was a smart guy but he didn’t mince words. He said “It’s already happening there, so why recreate it? It’s artificial. You should consider what potential you have uniquely in this context. You’re a curator at a big fancy museum with relatively huge resources—you should think about how you could do something different that would benefit this community that hasn’t been done yet.” So Nayland and I talked and talked and talked. Ultimately we arrived at the idea that the purpose of the exhibition at BAM would be to intercept or contribute to what was happening at Kiki and to put this work in a historical context. We decided to do a show looking at 20th century American art and visual culture and the resonance of gay and lesbian sensibilities. Structurally, the show was based on the structure of Kevin’s plays. The show was divided into nine different groups that functioned as nine separate conversations.

…mbg: How did you define “gay and lesbian sensibility” for the purposes of curating the exhibition?

LR: Well… loosely. My initial impulse was to say “what is gay and lesbian sensibility? And who can we put in the show to prove it?” And Nayland strategically intervened and said, “Well that’s a bad idea. Let’s just choose art we like.” He wanted to do it much more intuitively. Nayland talked about it [the process of curating the show] as a surrealist game; we would intuitively come up with specific works or specific images that needed to talk to each other—for instance, a Zoe Leonard photo and a Richard Hell album cover. Then we would build on those groupings until they became clusters. Those clusters included not just people who identify as a gay or lesbian, but straight people or people of undetermined sexuality or no sexuality.

…mbg: What kind of reactions did In a Different Light provoke in the San Francisco scene?

SH: I was incredibly proud to be in In a Different Light. And at the time, I remember thinking, “this show’s not too risqué;” I thought that I could take my parents to it. Of course when I did take my parents to the show, all the sudden I noticed all the phallic imagery and all the vaginal imagery—and my dad was very shocked. I didn’t realize that we had been in this bubble in San Francisco where we could see all this queer imagery and it didn’t feel so shocking to us. But then when outsiders came into the exhibition, they were really floored. So in that sense the exhibition did introduce our work to a larger public. I wonder what it would have been like if the show had traveled.

LR: We tried to send it around and no one would touch that show.

…mbg: What was the press reaction like?

LR: The press reaction was very positive. There was a full page review in The New York Times. The only complaint we got was from this very reactionary Catholic group called The Catholic League. They sent a letter of complaint. The visitor book was this priceless, wonderful document that had a lot of extremely positive stuff in it. But I also remember this comment that said, “I’m a young gay man that’s just about to come out of the closet and your show has made me decide to stay in. If this is what it means to be gay, then I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” So that was pretty bad.

Our whole experience organizing the show, getting loans, was so positive. When I would call people and tell them about the show and ask for valuable things, say a Charles Demuth watercolor, auction houses and collectors who had never heard of Berkeley Art Museum would say, “Oh, this is great. We want to help you with this; we’ll pay the shipping.” But on the other hand, we couldn’t get any funders. I think our largest funder was Steamworks which was a gay bathhouse. And Jim Hormel, God bless him. So every time you eat SPAM…

…mbg: What do you think has changed about the San Francisco art scene since the closing of Kiki and In a Different Light?

CH: I don’t know—the queer thing is definitely not what it used to be. The scene is kind of integrated.

SH: And it really shows how people are over the gay scene now—it’s considered trite. And it seems like the scene is really now a music, band scene.

LR: One of the things I love about the San Francisco art scene is the integration between visual art, and music and performance and writing. It’s very integrated—straight, gay and young and old. There are 20 year olds and 75 year olds at the same events—I think it’s a mature community in the best sense. There’s a lot of well informed people, a lot of energetic people and there’s a lot of tremendously great art and music and writing being made in the Bay Area right now.

*To see Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker's latest collaboration, a blog project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, please click here.

Mary Katherine Matalon is Coordinator of testsite. Claire Ruud is the Managing Editor of ...might be good.