FOR JUNE 1

SFMOMA ACQUIRES ART IN TECHNOLOGICAL TIMES

Set May 21   RSS/mjm

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. — The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has announced the acquisition of recent works by Rebeca Bollinger, Janet Cardiff, Karin Sander and Sarah Sze that are featured in the exhibition “010101: Art in Technological Times,” on view through July 8. SFMOMA has acquired two works commissioned specifically for “010101:” Sarah Sze’s towering installation “Things Fall Apart” and Janet Cardiff’s site-specific audio and video walk “The Telephone Call.”

In addition, the museum will accession the suite of works by the San Francisco-based conceptual artist Rebeca Bollinger and German artist Karin Sander’s miniature sculpture of John Weber. The museum also acquired “The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands,” the first multimedia work by Rineke Dijkstra to enter the permanent collection.

“For ‘010101,’ SFMOMA’s curators scouted worldwide for the best contemporary art that deals with technological issues. The acquisition of key works created specifically for the exhibition dramatically enhances the presence of contemporary art in our permanent collection and reiterates the museum’s commitment to commissioning original works by an array of international artists,” stated David A. Ross, director.

Among the most stunning and complex commissions, Sarah Sze’s “Things Fall Apart,” 2001, features a fractured sport untility (SUV) that cascades down the central staircase and into the museum’s Haas Atrium. By slicing the SUV and replacing its original parts with simulations, “Things Fall Apart” suggests the sort of entropic, nonhierarchical sprawl that characterizes present day information systems like the Internet.

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s “Telephone Call,” 2001, is a 17-minute, site-specific audio and video walk through SFMOMA. Equipped with a small digital camcorder with stereo headphones, visitors journey through the museum by aligning onscreen images with actual physical space and listening to an extraordinary narrative collage that includes Cardiff’s voice, fragments of recorded music and the artist’s footsteps.

German artist Karin Sander added a three-dimensional figures of SFMOMA curator John Weber to her 1:10 series, which she began in 1999. The piece, “John Weber 1:10,” 2000, started with an elaborate, 360-degree digital scanning apparatus that recorded Weber’s appearance, posture and clothes. The resulting data was fed to a computer-driven extruder, which fabricated the figure by spraying plastic in thin layers, each representing a horizontal cross-section of the subject’s body. Finally, the plastic figure was sent to a airbrush artists, who colored it according to photographs.

The museum is at 151 Third Street; telephone 415-357-4000.