David Wilson, Arrivals
In 2013, for the SECA Art Award exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I installed a framed drawing in the woods, sixteen feet tall by eight feet wide. It lived out in the foggy eucalyptus-thick cliffs above the Golden Gate Bridge for three months as part my show Arrivals, which featured six outdoor installations throughout the city, each with a corresponding set of hand-drawn directions leading you on a walking or public transit journey from the museum to the site.
Up until that point (as far as I know), the biannual SECA Award exhibition had only ever shown the awarded artists’ work in the museum’s galleries, but this round happened to take place while the building was closed for its recent renovation. I tend to work outside, finding tucked-away public places and remote natural spaces where I can settle in to draw in observation and plan ways to bring people together for some kind temporary occupation-occasion. So this gallery-less exhibition was familiar thinking for me, though it was an interesting set of conversations to adapt the usual museum registration and conservation practices to works that were purposefully offered to the affecting elements of the environment. Change and damage and even theft were likely (and all did occur), so our first step in coming up with a conservation plan was to be open to the life of the project.
Each of the six sites had some element that was left for the imagined encounter of a journeying visitor or someone happening upon the spot. I tried to develop these found sites as resting places: washing and repainting a dead-end- alley bench in Chinatown; stringing up a hammock in an abandoned lot in the Bernal Heights neighborhood; clearing poison oak and debris from a grove in the Presidio. I invited guest musicians to create accompanying soundtrack cassette recordings for each space. Cassette players were kept in wooden boxes with other offerings, including blank notebooks for people to leave behind notes.
The most art-object- y thing in the show was the large framed drawing, a sumi ink on rice paper piece called Frog Woman Rock. The eponymous rock is a nine-hundred- foot-tall craggy cliff by the Russian River that I pass on the way to visiting the property of a dear friend, where we have shared in many years of collective creative effort. So, as a personal landmark, it represents that feeling of arrival. In preparing for the exhibition, I spent a week sitting at the base of the cliff by the river under my beach umbrella, drawing the cliff in sections, taking frequent dips in the river to break the summer heat, and then piecing all the pages together to make the one image.
The five-hundred-pound frame that the museum crew made was major. To give it the necessary structure to be able to “casually” lean against a tree and anchor this forest clearing as an outdoor gallery required a steel understructure and a whole pulley system. But it worked, and it lived in the Presidio woods peacefully for that time. On one of my frequent meetings with the park rangers, they pointed out the various markings and scat that were accumulating around the bottom of the wooden frame as the animals of the woods made sense of this new body in their zone.
In the final weeks of the show, I began having conversations with the exhibition curators, Jenny Gheith and Tanya Zimbardo, about the museum acquiring the drawing Frog Woman Rock. As we talked through what made up the work, we thought about how the sound recording was a key piece to viewing the drawing, and then expanded from there to think about how all the various ephemeral elements added up to the whole of the project.
It seemed to make sense to consider acquiring the undertaking in its entirety, with all the various components. Suddenly we had to take into account the materials that up until this point had been accumulating out in the world without “proper” documentation: the photocopied maps, the notes I made to create the maps, the small drawings I made while exploring and locating the sites, the wooden boxes, the recordings, the cassettes that held the recordings, the cassette players, and, perhaps most interestingly, the hundreds of notes left in notebooks and on scraps of paper at each site (including from a preschool class who engaged me in a written Q&A about fairies, since obviously fairies had put this massive drawing in the woods for the kids to find).
Amanda Hunter Johnson, the conservator at SFMOMA with whom I worked closely during the show and through the acquisition process, told me later that the acquisition was approved by the committee on the Friday before the last weekend of the show, which happened to be the first torrential rainstorm of the year. So now that the museum was preparing to receive the work into its collection, there was a different feeling regarding its safety. Would the drawing survive the downpour and make it through this final stretch?
The drawing did survive, and surprisingly the sumi ink remained fixed on the rice paper, though the bottom had significant water stains from condensation. The wood of the frame, on the other hand, was thoroughly full of bugs, animal pee, and mold. So even though the time and character of the piece had grown into the frame, the frame was beyond saving from a conservation perspective. Amanda told me how they had to quarantine the piece on the loading dock while they removed the frame, got the bugs out, vacuumed the paper, and generally cleaned the piece before it could be brought into the collection center. When I asked about the other elements that had been living outside, she seemed to think that the wooden boxes were bagged up and kept in a safe place while they inventoried everything.
As the work transitioned from exterior to interior, it became a fixed thing, more accountable in terms of its condition, less a part of a living system. The bigger questions that we considered in our follow-up conversations centered on how the project might be shown in the future. Could the drawing Frog Woman Rock be shown as a distinct work, or did it need to have its accompanying recording and other elements present in the galleries? Did the recording need to be played on a cassette player, or could it be digitized? Should the elements be displayed as a time capsule of the project, only with experiences that were collected from that moment in time, or could it perhaps be reinstalled and adapted to entirely new context to hold space for a new series of engagements?
We arrived at the sense that these elements were available as parts or as a whole. I appreciate that there’s an openness to what that might look like in the future, and in the meantime, it is an honor to have the project preserved.
