Lucky Number Seven (Off-Site)

[Continued from below.]

Story Line, multiple installations by Morse, Morse, and Simpson. I found this one at the Institute for American Indian Arts in downtown Santa Fe.

The sculptural "umbilical cord" above, Story Line, is made primarily of reclaimed junk. A continuous clay shell surrounds an inner core of rice, nylon, batting thread, and waddle. The three artists remark:

We are scavengers, exploring the aisles of Wal-Mart for batting material and stopping on the side of the road to inspect erosion blockers.

It's a very loose visual metaphor. Community is based on stories, and stories are connections - a thread of anecdotes told and retold in a mash-up of existing cultural materials. Notice the effort in matching the texture and color of Santa Fe architecture, a somewhat self-conscious throwback to the adobe structures of the Pueblo Indians.

Flashy technique is sacrificed for a kind of simplicity of message. The point is to create dialog – although an awkward and admittedly synthetic one – between existing local cultures and the various national and international institutions that the word "biennial" necessarily implies.


Here, Story Line silently invades downtown Santa Fe like some B-movie parasite. The "host" building is the Institute for American Indian Arts, a fine arts college and museum dedicated to Native American artists.

The sculpture encroaches on a promotional banner for the museum's Fritz Scholder collection. Though Scholder's work recalls the abstraction of Francis Bacon or perhaps Willem de Kooning, his subjects and his colors capture the flavor of the Southwest.



Erick Beltrán (Mexico), installations inside the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors museum. The pedestrians here are checking out the local "Portal Market," where Native Americans sell turquoise jewelry and other handmade tourist trinkets.

Beltrán's pieces are designed to evoke a cemetery marker. Although I'm not familiar with his model, he invites us to consider themes of generational heritage, mathematical diagrams and maps, and statistical trends in population and immigration. Even more so than Story Line, his "mosaics" are downplayed to the level of near-stealth.

There are 20 or more off-site installations, referred to as "Hot Spots," located at 14 partner institutions in the greater Santa Fe area. Sometimes the only clear indication is


a simple metallic plaque, as if to confirm that ghostly feeling:

Yes... You are in the presence of Art.

The biennial piece above was installed at a sculpture garden populated with things like "Mr. Dog-Man" and this serene "Mistress of the Desert":

The effect is seamless; it really looks like it always belonged there. I like to think of it as a simulated ambiance.

A full integration with the everyday, attempted at the risk of misinterpretation or, worse, accidental negligence. The placement causes occasional moments of "conversation" with objects of the established visual order, especially those we tend to take for granted.

Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria), also located at the Palace of the Governors.

Details.

Art as Democracy: as with most elections in this country, the problem is participation. Luchezar Boyadjiev invites passersby to write a response to Lucky Number Seven using seven words or less.

The boards appear throughout town, but the most prominent contributions are naïve little drawings, photos of artistic process, and words by biennial participants "pumping each other up."

Luchezar, another "Hot Spot" at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, juxtaposed with...

...one of the museum's sculptures. We'll call it "Serpent of the Eternal Return."

The idea wasn't a failure; I thought these messages were a lot of fun. But I found the SITE installation at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, for example, precisely because I was looking for it.

It was behind a closed gate, and although the museum guard encouraged me to enter, no one else had entered the courtyard that afternoon. The pen provided, an expense account purchase from Office Depot, was nearly illegible due the rains of Santa Fe's "monsoon season."

The staff at SITE Santa Fe was extremely helpful. Southerners have high standards of hospitality. I wasn't disappointed.

Of course, these pitfalls are natural to a project of this scale. SITE is basically Santa Fe's equivalent of Eyedrum Gallery or perhaps the Atlanta Contemporary. But while the intimidation factor remains admirably low, the range of city-wide partnerships and transnational collaboration is impressive for a town of this size.

Over the course of seven years, the SITE team has cultivated the resources necessary to increase the scale.

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