LOS ANGELES — Now in its second year at Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Public, a collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, revamps Collins Park into an outdoor art venue packed with site-specific installations, sculptures and other works, as well as a series of performances. Christine Y. Kim, 39, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and co-founder of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), has returned as curator of the exhibition, and sat down to talk with ARTINFO to discuss the upcoming event.
You were the inaugural curator for Art Public Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011. How is this year different?
Because of the success of Art Public last year, we started with a lot of momentum and support this year. From a mechanical and administrative perspective, it’s helpful knowing the nuances of the Collins Park site, everything from the lumps in the grass and the sprinklers to city zoning and permitting. Curatorially, there’s less of a clear discourse that runs through the projects this year.
How many art works are in the exhibition?
22 works of art including performances.
What are you most excited about seeing?
After speaking with artists, doing studio visits, drawing the space and mocking it up, it will be exciting to see how all those things come together and work formally.
Are there any overarching themes or through lines?
How we approach notions of the monument in urban landscape. Miguel Andrade Valdez [Monumento Lima translation – Collins Park, 2012] is projecting a series of images of monoliths in and around Peru, like a concrete roadblock, a graffiti wall and a public monument. The three videos are projected and looped, with the sound and cacophony of Lima, on the cylinder in the middle of the park, making it a 360-degree experience. The cylinder reads like a late 1960s edifice or outdoor sculpture, which is now used as art storage. Mark Hagen [To be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Miami Screen), 2012] made a sculpture, related to his body of work from “Made in L.A.” [the 2012 Los Angeles biennial at the Hammer Museum], of poured concrete in cheap beverage containers. He culled different containers from the Miami Beach area to create the screen sculpture. In a way, it’s thinking about public monuments versus monuments made by happenstance. To that end, the third work to discuss in this context is a very large piece, [Untitled (The Space Beneath Us), 2012] by Jose Dávila, I would say it measures about 50x50 feet, that is sunken into the lawn in the center of Collins Park. Creating a square in mustard yellow colors is his homage to Joseph Albers. The piece is created with traditional Mexican tiles made by Cerámica Suro from Tlaquepaque, Jalisco in Mexico. Fabulous performers [mezzo-soprano] Alicia Hall Moran and [jazz pianist and composer] Jason Moran, who is a MacArthur fellow, will do an instrumental performance inside the piece inspired by the lounge-y life of leisure in Miami.
Last year’s pieces were performance-driven and political, can we expect the same this year?
There are very individual nuanced, poetic, ironic and literal ideas, images and objects that have been put into the mix very consciously. It’s about taking advantage of the access this event and art fair enables in bringing in discursive spaces. The performances certainly are very closely tied to political considerations of voice, volume and demographic. Dave McKenzie [Declaration, 2012] is having a plane flown above Collins Park carrying messages – like the ad banners people are used to seeing over the beach advertising a DJ at a club or Corona. His own text is going up, which are intimate personal messages in the form of marriage proposals with gender neutral names, so it’s not just ‘will you marry me?’ it’s ‘can you marry me?’
You have included a few L.A. artists – notably Mark Hagen, Alex Israel, Ruben Ochoa and Ry Rocklen – in the exhibition. Do you find that, working and living in L.A., you gravitate towards the city’s artists?
Of the studio visits I do, half of the artists are here, but of the work I reviewed and sought out not in the form of studio visits but by phone and Internet, or artists whose work I was seeing at Documenta and various exhibitions, 70-80% of the work I was looking at was outside of LA. Artist selection in Art Public is very international.
Are there any specific works in Art Public which resulted from your curatorial activities in L.A.?
Teresa Margolles’s gorgeous benches [Untitled, 2010] that were at LACMA will be in Collins Park. When creating these concrete benches, she mixed the concrete with water from morgues that was used to clean dead bodies in Culiacán, Mexico who were victims of drug-related incidents.
How has curating this project influenced or affected your curatorial activities at LACMA and LAND?
It can’t be separated out for me, it all feeds one into the other. While working on the James Turrell show, which I’m co-curating with Michael Govan, I’m thinking about what people call the ‘repression’ of architectural components for the sake of purity. Turrell considers architecture like sockets, molding, windowsills, and elements that are otherwise charging the space to be a frame. As an institution, we’re operating as a white cube. Working in outdoor spaces is incredibly challenging and rewarding because you can neither suppress nor free that location from history, weather and the sound of traffic. That’s why I start with Turrell: that charge, which you cannot rid an outdoor space of affects the access to and meaning of the work. Curatorially, it’s extremely exciting to have layered contexts like that, it’s a multidimensional frame.
What charge do you get from Los Angeles and LACMA?
The way that, if you stand on Wilshire Boulevard at 4 a.m. on a weekday, you hear a sound that sounds like traffic in the distance and the silence of the middle of the night. But that sound is actually somehow mixed with the bubbling of the tar underground [from the La Brea Tar Pits] so you have these simultaneous nuanced sounds from opposite corners of the spectrum: earth’s geological rumblings versus the sound of Toyotas from circa 2012.