Wall Drawings and installation projects
Tell Me Something Good installation at Santa Monica Museum
Tell Me Something Good installation at Santa Monica Museum
Tell Me Something Good installation at Santa Monica Museum
Tell Me Something Good installation at Santa Monica Museum
Tell Me Something Good
2009
photographs and drawing
installation variable
Inspired by the conceptual art exhibition Art By Telephone (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969), in which participants phoned in their specifications for their works of art, artists Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride will exchange instructions to create their respective artworks in their first two-person U.S. Museum exhibition. Tell Me Something Good: A collaboration between Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride opens at the Santa Monica Museum of Art on September 12 and will be on view through December 5, 2009.
The original 1969 Art By Telephone was curated by Jan van der Marck, and its basic premise was to invite international and out of state artists to phone instructions which would be executed by museum installers. Schoenstadt and McBride have created their ‘exchange’ as a variation of the 1969 project, with each phoning the other with instructions for a work. At SMMoA, Schoenstadt will create McBride’s work according to the instructions - photographs of all the gas stations along California Highway 1 between LAX and Point Dume - while McBride similarly executed Schoenstadt’s work at Alexander and Bonin in New York (May 9-June 13, 2009). McBride was asked to choose a discarded drawing from her studio and load it into a fax machine, then ask the Gallery to fax the floor plans of their proposed exhibition space. The combination of the drawing and architecture provided the final composition.
The project takes up the "telephone game" idea of transforming visual information into language and back to visual, and also embraces the conceptual promise that 'anyone' can make a work based on the idea of the systemic production of art according to instruction. In the current era of instant messaging and social media, Schoenstadt and McBride reverted to use the telephone as a means of communication to initiate their conceptual works that explore the ramifications of what happens when an artist gives up complete control over his or her project.
