February 26 2003

By Glen Helfand

TO ANYBODY FAMILIAR with San Francisco, Capp Street is a Mission District corridor lined with grand Victorians, endearing community centers, and sidewalks littered with professionally used condoms. It's an area steeped in its own gritty personality, a place that's very much an experience to stroll down. Some mornings, you used to see artist David Ireland, a tall, silver-haired man who resides in what can only be described as an ongoing, living installation in a Victorian at 20th and Capp Streets, tending to his property by sweeping away the condoms and syringes the way suburban dwellers rake away fallen leaves.

Ireland, a Bay Area conceptualist who mixes art and architecture, has much to do with another vision of Capp Street, one relating to this city's maverick heritage when it comes to alternative arts. Capp Street Project, an evolving artist-in-residence program, was started back in 1983 by philanthropic art visionary Ann Hatch in a small, corrugated metal-covered house designed and built by Ireland on that street. CSP emerged from its Bay Area back road and went on to offer some major international artists decent funding and the technical support they needed to work on pet projects they probably never would have the nerve to engage in under the glaring track lights of New York galleries.

They include light-and-space artist James Turrell, mixed media-installation makers Ann Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Bill Viola, Fred Wilson, and Gary Hill, and numerous others who have gone on to major projects. Hamilton and Wilson have been selected to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale, while the architect team Diller + Scofidio, relatively unknown during their San Francisco residency back in 1987, are about to open a career survey at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. During the early days of CSP, each artist was offered three months to create an installation, $5,000, and the help of a staff whose primary function was to facilitate and document their vision. It's a gracious model, one that in the early '80s was groundbreaking.

In a city with such a high population turnover, including artists, the legacy of so notable an endeavor quickly evaporates. CSP turns 20 this spring, a milestone celebrated with an anniversary exhibition and a major symposium this weekend, both organized by California College of Arts and Crafts' Wattis Institute, which now operates the residency program. It's an opportunity to rethink the notions behind "alternative space," an area in which San Francisco has long been a leader. (The Mission-based Lab also celebrates its 20th this fall.) "A lot of things in San Francisco [art] happen because the museum isn't doing it," CSP founder Hatch tells me. "In Minneapolis, there aren't a lot of nonprofit spaces, because the Walker Art Center does serve the artist community." And she knows, as her great grandfather founded the well-respected and artistically adventurous center in the late 19th century and growing up she watched it evolve into an internationally respected site for new art and ideas.

The original CSP location – Ireland's distinctive 2,200-square-foot A-frame at 65 Capp – soon grew too small for the evolving program, which then moved to a former auto body shop nearly five times the size, not far away on 14th Street. The artists would live in the 65 Capp building while mounting large projects in the vast industrial space, with a balcony mezzanine offering aerial views. Perhaps the most memorable work at the 14th Street location was Hamilton's 1989 Privation and Excess, a fragrant, poetic piece comprising 700,000 pennies spread and shimmering over the floor, held in place with honey, and a pen of live sheep braying in the back. That same year, Viola created Sanctuary, a grand work in which a thicket of tall pine trees masked a large video screen showing footage of a woman giving birth.

"When I moved to New York," says Mary Ceruti, CSP program director from 1992 until 1998 and currently executive director of New York's Sculpture Center, "I realized that artists did things at Capp Street that they would never do here in Manhattan. They were far enough away from the spotlight, they could work on a scale that was rarely afforded in Manhattan, and they were encouraged to do something that may or may not have a clear outcome. They were encouraged to do something they didn't know how to do."

The 14th Street location proved to be a bit dicey as well, so in 1993 the project moved to a two-story location on Second Street near South Park, where some remarkable installations were produced, such as Glen Seator's 1996 Approach, a full-scale re-creation of the street outside the building – including every inch of oil-stained asphalt and dinged parking signs – inside the building. (Seator died in a tragic accident a few months ago.) It was a curious trompe l'oeil in three dimensions, an understated but highly complex spectacle that had to be experienced but couldn't be sold or transported. It was very much site specific.

"The legacy of Capp Street, besides creating a space on the West Coast that was particular to the installation form," Wattis Institute director Ralph Rugoff says, "is that it wasn't an institution – it allowed for more freedom for artists to stretch. Glen Seator's piece, for example, stretched the whole organization, and it was a career-changing piece for him. James Turrell, he had never worked in such a small space, and he did a great piece. There was a lot of work that went into talking with the artist about their pieces, pushing the artist beyond their second or third proposal. [CSP] offered feedback, and it really seemed to work."

It didn't remain effective forever, however. "When I started to disengage from it, I realized that the artists had many opportunities to do work; we weren't the only place where people could do things like this," Hatch says. Artists found it increasingly difficult to devote three months to a single project, a situation brought about, Rugoff says, by the proliferation of international biennials that demand a certain type of career artist be in all manner of exotic locations for chunks of time.

In 1998, Hatch donated the CSP name and archive to CCAC, sold the original house, and went on to found the Oxbow School, a live-in, arts-focused high school program in Napa, a partnership with Robert Mondavi and an interesting outgrowth of the CSP model.

CCAC currently invites artists to create projects under the CSP banner, though without the stand-alone space, the program's identity is murky – but then again, so is the notion of installation art these days. Recent projects, selected by the Wattis staff, have included a very experimental piece by digital designer John Maeda, a guidebook to California by British artist Jeremy Deller, and a huge, interactive Styrofoam sculpture by Hong Kong-born, Los Angeles-based Shirley Tse. The anniversary exhibition, with projects by Roni Horn, Ann Veronica Janssens, Mike Kelley, and Mike Nelson, explores the theme of the elusiveness of the installation medium. Rugoff's approach, befitting the educational setting, is perhaps more intellectualized than the previous incarnation of CSP, and pieces like Horn's installation of photographs she took of the Thames in 2000 are carefully, perhaps subtly configured for this site. Kelley, a revered L.A. artist (well known for his work with stuffed animals in the '80s) who, oddly enough, has never had a solo show in the Bay Area, reconfigures some elements from his own house to reference a 1920s piece by constructivist Moholy-Nagy. Is it installation, sculpture, or what?

Such questions will be discussed in a celebratory (and critical) symposium that launches the anniversary exhibit. "A lot of rhetoric in the early days of installation art involved the nature of the viewer's participation," Rugoff says. "But it's still a key issue for the involved artists. They continue to reactivate the viewing experience, so you're more aware of what you're bringing to it." And if anything, Capp Street Project continues to advance that cause.