Another year, another impressive show by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at CCA, currently on view in the Wattis Institute. As a jumping-off point they start with La Mamelle / ART COM, a San Francisco institution that during the twenty years from 1975 to 1995 promoted cutting-edge performance, video, and conceptual art. You can see covers of the organization's publications on the first floor along with a full representation of art practices, and different eras are also boldly juxtaposed. Paul and Marlene Kos's mesmerizing 1976 video Lightning (pictured here) shares a gallery with other videos old and new, among them Noah Krell's similarly engrossing 2010 work To Move a Body (Hill). In another room documentation from Whitney Lynn's 2010 project Doug references How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys, except in Lynn's case the rabbit was very much alive and wriggling as she cradled it to her chest. At the opening Ricardo Rivera stood near Lynn's photographs with his nose tucked into the wall, reenacting Terry Fox's famous 1970 act Corner Push, a suitably ephemeral moment in an exhibition that raises questions about what happens once the performance is over.
Upstairs the curators focus exclusively on the intersection of performance art and video and television, using La Mamelle's transition to ART COM in the '80s as inspiration, and they have arranged the gallery into individual oases of comfy chairs set in front of TVs as if in your living room. Olaf Breuning's madcap 2007 video Home II was an instant favorite of mine, though I also enjoyed the simplicity of the concept in Jaime Davidovich's 1974 Red, Blue, Yellow in which three static-filled television screens are slowly covered over in colored tape by a pair of disembodied hands. However, for me the whole exhibition rotates around Bill Viola's Reverse Television -- Portraits of Viewers, a piece that turns the camera on the watchers themselves, brilliantly elucidating ideas about spectatorship and documentation. Above all this show feels so incredibly fresh at a moment I am particularly excited about Bay Area performance art, and it pays homage to the innovators of the past at the same time that it looks to the next generation of those willing to push the boundaries of what art can be.
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