Reflections on Project Los Altos
I spent the last five years living in the south bay and a year studying in Los Altos. Thus it was particularly interesting for me to attend SFMOMAâs Project Los Altos and to see how an important contemporary art organization approached this town that I felt was smack bang in the middle of cultural nowhere. According to SFMOMAâs promotional materials, as soon as it was clear that the museumâs expansion would mean a two-year closure, curators began conceiving of ways to move âbeyond the museumâs wallsâ and outside of San Francisco. Project Los Altos was born because SFMOMA was interested in âheading down the peninsula to see what would happen if we invited artists to reflect on Silicon Valley, a region of exponentially growing fascination and unparalleled importance in shaping contemporary life.â[1]
 Project Los Altos contained the work of nine national and international contemporary artists. The main curators of this project, Jenny Gheith and Janet Bishop, selected two pre-existing works for the exhibition. Jeremy Blakeâs piece Winchester Trilogy was chosen because the subject matter of the piece, The Winchester House, is located in nearby San Jose. According to the curators, the local community was familiar with the Winchester house and the mythology surrounding it, and this justified the inclusion of Blakeâs piece in the exhibition. The curators also included work by Charles Garoian. Garoian had taught for a period in the 1970s at Los Altos High School and in his time there he engaged students in a series of performance art pieces. Documentation of these performances was included, again because of its local relevance.
 There were seven other artists, however, who were commissioned by SFMOMA to make new work specifically for this project. These artists were given free rein to do as they pleased with their commission. The only parameter was that their work would be presented in the community of Los Altos. I want to consider how four of these seven artists addressed the location and comment briefly on whether I thought their engagement with the location and the local community was âsuccessful.â
Mike Millâs selected the local Costume Bank as the venue in which his work was to be shown. Millâs produced three pieces that dealt with Los Altoâs past, present and future. To engage with Los Altosâ past, Mills went into the archives and found a local newspaper from 1976: the year that the Apple Computer Company was started. Millâs inserted Appleâs original partnership agreement into the Los Altos Town Crier and these documents were available for audience members to take. To engage with Lost Altos in the present Mills asked local residents to donate their clothes to him. He had (almost) exact replicates made of these clothes and then displayed them as documents of â2013â. The clothes were hung on racks in a similar style to the costumes found in the Costume Bank, which were also organized by decade. To engage with the future of Lost Altos, Mills created a video piece in which he interviewed children of Los Altos whose parents work in the tech industry. The video is comprised of Mills asking the children questions about technology, the future and the state of the environment.
 Overall, I thought Mike Mills engaged with Los Altos, and with its residents, in a very comprehensive way. I liked the attempt to look at the past, the present and the future of the community. I also liked that the making of the clothing piece seemed to have fostered genuine relationships between Mills and the local community, specifically the volunteers at the Costume Bank. Mills spoke eloquently about how he felt that the artist should not come in and expect the members of the community to participate in the work by merely doing the artistsâ bidding regardless of their own views and aesthetic preferences. He suggested that he wanted a more equal collaboration with the community. I thought these views came through in his work.
 For me, however, the most aesthetically successful piece was the video. I think this piece transcended just engaging with Los Altos and reflecting on Silicon Valley. This was a really fascinating look at how children who are coming of age with the internet and the iphone as staple features of their world, see their future. It touched on how they feel about technological devices, affluence and poverty, and environmental problems. I thought the idea was really simple and it was filmed in a straightforward way but it was very effective in raising questions about where we are heading. It also seemed like Mills had genuinely engaged the children, he had earned their trust and taken their views seriously. I thought this was successful as an artwork, and as a site-specific piece.
Spencer Finchâs work â Back To Kansasâ was an exploration of the subjective nature of color perception. Finch painted a series of colored squares on the interior wall of a converted gallery space, in a place where the color grid would receive natural light. Over the course of the day, as the light changes in the room, Finchâs painting changes too. Apparently at dusk all of the colors fade to gray in a poignant way. All of the colors in this painting are taken from the film âThe Wizard of Ozâ and the paintings dimensions are scaled according to the original aspect ratio of the first projection of the âWizard of Oz.â
In a way I think it is kind of unfair to evaluate this piece given that I only saw it in pitch darkness! That said, I think the idea of the piece was interesting. I think the subjectivity of color perception and perception in general is fascinating.
I am not really sure what to make of the reference to the Wizard of Oz though. Why is Oz important? Is this a piece about our first cinematic experiences with films in Technicolor? Or is it about the content of that film itself- namely a kind of imaginary utopia that children escape to in rough times? Or is the Wizard of Oz used because it is a familiar cultural reference? Finchâs motivations for using the color palate from the film were unclear to me.
That said, this piece presented an interesting way of being site-specific. I liked that viewers had to be there and wait with the piece if they wanted to notice changes. I also liked that it might encourage the community to come back to this place at certain times and that this might foster interaction between different members of the community all coming together to watch the sunset. That said, I donât think this piece really responded to Los Altos in particular. It was site-specific in a generic way⊠this could have been installed in Oakland, or some other town/city and I donât think it would have radically changed the piece (unless the light was incredibly different).  So it engaged the community, but didnât respond to Los Altos as Los Altos.
 Jessica Stockholderâs piece â Cross Hatchâ was painted onto the road, sidewalk at the intersection of Fourth and State streets. The painting consisted of vibrantly colored geometric forms painted onto a variety of textures: the asphalt, the stone pavers, and the curb.
It was hard to get a sense of this work as a painting and to see the whole composition, as one has to walk over the piece or drive over it or pass through it. I think however, that this is the kind of interaction that Stockholder wanted with her work. Instead of interviewing community members, or representing or depicting the Los Altos residents, she has literally altered their existing environment. She has changed the local landscape. The piece will fade as the community continues to use their town, as they drive over the piece and scuff it with their shoes.
This piece is site specific in an interesting way: it is sort of forced interaction! I would be curious to know what residents think of the painting and to see if graffiti artists paint over it or if people want it to be maintained. It made me think about the Miwon Kwon article that we read and the suggestion that site-specific artwork may actually be a response to the homogenization of urban centers. It was suggested that cities may welcome site specific art pieces as they provide a way of differentiating a town, showing that it is unique, special, worth visiting. I wondered whether residents would feel this way about the Stockholder piece- whether it could become a kind of way of differentiating Los Altos from say Mountain view, or Palo Alto or any of the other very similar looking neighboring towns.
Alec Soth produced a series of black and white photographs of important locations in Silicon Valley. The style of Sothâs work is straight documentary photography, and the absence of color in these images really stresses that these photographs are documents of the campuses, office spaces and tech locations in Silicon Valley.
I guess this work was hardest for me to see as âsite specificâ. It is a response to this particular location certainly, but it is a very formal response. The photographs arenât warm, and they donât really demonstrate a deep engagement with the area or the community. There is a more clinical feel to this work: a kind of claim to an objective or matter-of-fact description of this place. I love Alec Soth, but I feel like this work was a safe (and traditional) kind of engagement with this area. That said, they were technically impeccable photographs!
I wonât discuss Katerina Seda, Chris Johanson, or Christian Jankowskiâs pieces in detail. Suffice to say that Sedaâs piece was very interesting and I think it may prove to be the piece that most directly engages with the community of Los Altos. I also liked the subtly of Johansonâs interventions, particularly his almost hidden sign at First street. I thought this was a very respectful way to provoke thought and reflection without intruding too violently in the townâs landscape. I am very interested in how Jankowskiâs videos turn out- but without having seen them it is hard to assess them.
Finally, I want to briefly compare the Los Altos Project to Station to Station. I think that the Los Altos Project was INFINATELY better than Station to Station both in terms being a public art event and a site-specific art event. The Los Altos project was designed to respond to this community in particular (not just to pull up in the city and present Leviâs wares). There was obviously a lot of planning and organizing and discussion with the Los Altos community not just to secure the venues for exhibition, but to coordinate the actual art pieces (for example, both Mills and Seda had to work very closely with members of the community in the construction of their works.)
Although the artists in the Los Altos project had very different ways of engaging the community, either by directly involving them in the creative process, or by altering the town landscape, or by documenting the surrounding areas, they were all respectful of the community and produced well-considered works. This vastly differs from Station to Station where the artists were not engaged at all with the locations that the train visited. Rather they were asked to design pieces that were typical of their style and this was driven across the US. I thought the organization and the clarity of the vision for the Los Altos Project made it a better event. It had focus- the town of Los Altos- and that allowed for creative variation. All in all the Los Altos project was far less of a spectacle and had more substance than Station to Station.
Finally, I think that audiences of the events were slightly different. The Los Altos crowd was older, with more families in attendance and perhaps less âtrendy.â There was also a very strange mix of the art crowd with the local crowd (the carol singers and the Christmas folks were pretty interesting!). This mash up was kind of surreal, but I thought it was a positive thing that made the event different from other art events.
[1] From SFMOMA's little red booklet distributed at the Los Altos Project.
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