Benjamin Ball in conversation with writer and curator Brooke Hodge at UC Irvine Graduate Art Department

The UC Irvine Studio Art Lecture Series "Perfect Lovers" attempts to complicate the traditional grad school lecture by pairing artists, curators, and culture-makers in conversation with each other. We want to offer our program and the public the vital event of seeing artists discuss their work in a more spontaneous way; and give artists the opportunity to share their work, interests and obsessions in dialogue.

As the clocks in Felix Gonzalez-Torres "Perfect Lovers" move in sync and out of sync, we believe that pairing speakers whose practices may coincide and conflict can better highlight the stakes and debates of contemporary practice.

Table Cloth - Ball Nogues' Temporary Performance Space Debuts at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall

Table Cloth for the Courtyard at Schoenberg Hall

Ball Nogues Studio

A collaboration between the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, The Herb Alpert School of Music, and UCLA Design Media Arts

This project is made possible by the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a UCLA Arts Initiative Grant

Project Overview:

The new temporary installation in the courtyard at Schoenberg Hall will serve as an integrated set piece as well as a backdrop for performance and interface for quotidian social interaction.  We understand the work as a table cloth to adorn and activate the architecture of the campus.  Tables are places of social interaction.  Dining tables, specifically, facilitate organization and communication within the typical American home.  We see this project like the cloth adorning a dining table; however, at Schoenberg it will adorn the courtyard, an important social hub, and will facilitate community at the scale of the University.  It can be used for a variety of community oriented activities, from musical practice to performance, dance to lectures, and from informal socializing to academic discussions.  It will embellish the courtyard during the spring and part of the summer in 2010.  The processes to manufacture, assemble, and dismantle the performance space are sustainable.  We have utilized a holistic approach to design, manufacturing and re-purposing of building materials; a process we term "Cross Manufacturing."  

The Table Cloth will be comprised of hundreds of individual low, coffee-style tables and three legged stools.   Each of these household items will be a unique product in its own right and can be taken home by members of the UCLA community after the project is over.  The tables and stools link together collectively to create a “fabric” that hangs from the east wall of the courtyard. When the Table Cloth meets the ground, it unrolls to form an intimate “in the round” performance area. Visitors can sit on the tables and stools within this area.

The installation can be configured in two ways (see illustrations):

• Stage.  A small stage platform will be at the center of the crescent shaped seating area. This stage will be 18 inches high and will only be present during organized performances. When no one is performing some parts of the stage will be stored.
• No Stage.  Performances may take place on the ground anywhere within the courtyard. Approximately 25 individual “free floating” stools can be distributed throughout the performance area as desired. 

The configurations described above are only suggestions of how an audience and the performers' relationship can be mediated by the installation: the function of the Table Cloth is open ended. We hope that performers, choreographers, directors (to name a few examples) will invent uses and safe abuses for it.  Perhaps, some performers will develop programs specifically for the space and will collaborate with other members of the UCLA community to create works that can be showcased there.

It is possible for this installation to not only serve as a marker of a place for performance, but it could also be used as a set or a prop in a performance.  It can be a neutral backdrop or provocative presence.  It creates a context for interaction, perhaps inspiring a creative process from its conception to its execution.  To reduce liability there is to be no climbing on the Table Cloth, no standing on the seating elements, and no standing on the stage unless one is a part of an organized performance.

Because of the work's size and the materials used, its presence will help reduce reverberation and alter acoustical phenomena within the space.

Construction will begin at Ball-Nogues Studio in downtown Los Angeles during March followed by onsite assembly during the break between winter and spring quarters.  Within the weeks before the break, campus facility personnel will be onsite to make preparatory alterations to the building.  These will include drilling holes in the courtyard floor and welding tabs onto beams above two of the window openings on the east wall.  We invite students from the University to help (assuming risk assessment authorities will allow this) and it is our hope that students from the School of the Arts, AUD, DMA, and the Herb Alpert School of Music will contribute.  Furthermore, the construction process should help generate anticipation and enthusiasm for the project among students and faculty.

Upon dismantling, the seating and tables will be given away to the UCLA community.  Our aim is for the project’s stakeholders to help promote this process by turning the disassembly into an event - perhaps accompanied by a performance.

Project Theory:

Temporary spatial installations represent a growing phenomenon within our culture and with this comes a new demand for “instant” architecture.  Impermanent architecture is currently exemplified by the entire environments designed to function as advertising, stage sets, window displays, and event spectacles.  They have become forums for the production of architecturally scaled structures and spaces that exist for only a limited period. Our temporary performance space explores the making of impermanent structures which produce very little waste when their usefulness as architecture is complete. While there is an increasing interest among architects in recycling and repurposing temporary architecture, our project moves beyond this approach to consider life cycle through the development of a "cross manufacturing" strategy. Cross manufacturing is a design and production approach that considers objects as part of a continuum. After the structure has served its use as a performance space, the components comprising the installation will be dismantled to become smaller scaled commodities, immediately available as coveted products - in this case tables and seating. Unlike recycling, which down-cycles material into a less valuable state, this scenario foresees small products made from the parts of a larger product (the installation itself).

“Diversified series” is a fitting description for the resulting products rather than the “standardized series” that typically results from a mass production approach. Each of the tables and seating elements will be industrially manufactured but will remain unique; they will contrast the anonymity inherent in most industrially manufactured goods. At the end of the life of the installation, the approximately 500 tables and stools, no two alike, will be given away to the UCLA community.

By using a consumer good as its basic building block, the project expands and critiques notions of “green" architecture. As a visual concept, the installation serves as a symbolic gesture of sustainability and a poetic reminder that the buildings and temporary pavilions we construct are impermanent: frozen moments in an ongoing flow of products and materials. Outside of its environmental commentary, the Table Cloth dramatically re-contextualizes consumer products - symbols of mass consumption and standardization– into alternative gestures of hope and one of a kind manufacturing. 

Ball Nogues Studio at the Guggenheim, a project with collaboration from Jessica Fleischmann

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/contemplating...

Text from the Guggenheim Press Release

Since its opening in 1959, the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim building has served as an inspiration for invention, challenging artists and architects to react to its eccentric, organic design. The central void of the rotunda has elicited many unique responses over the years, which have been manifested in both site-specific solo shows and memorable exhibition designs. For the building’s 50th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum invited more than two hundred artists, architects, and designers to imagine their dream interventions in the space for the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. Organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, and David van der Leer, Assistant Curator for Architecture and Design, the exhibition will feature renderings of these visionary projects in a salon-style installation that will emphasize the rich and diverse range of the proposals received. Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from February 12 to April 28, 2010.

Aristotle famously pronounced that nature abhors a vacuum, an idea that still resonates in art today. In designing the Guggenheim Museum, Wright flaunted the notion of the void, leaving the center tantalizingly (or threateningly) empty. Over the years, when creating site-specific installations or exhibition designs for the building, artists and architects have imbued the space with their presences, inspiring unforgettable works by Matthew Barney, Cai Guo- Qiang, Frank Gehry, Jenny Holzer, and Nam June Paik, among others. For the building’s 50th anniversary, the Guggenheim invited scores of artists to leave practicality or even reality behind in conjuring their proposals for the space. In this exhibition of ideal projects, certain themes emerge, including the return to nature in its primordial state, the desire to climb the building, the interplay of light and space, the interest in diaphanous effects as a counterpoint to the concrete structure, and the impact of sound on the environment. Conceived as both a commemoration and a self-reflexive folly, Contemplating the Void confirms how truly catalytic the architecture of the Guggenheim can be.

Submissions were received from all over the world from a wide range of artists, designers, and architects, including emerging as well as established practitioners. In addition to the exhibition in the Thannhauser and Annex Level 4 galleries, Contemplating the Void will be accompanied by a comprehensive exhibition Web site, which will document each submission and feature introductory essays texts by Nancy Spector and David van der Leer.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Lecture