Wow. Right here in Seattle. Whodathunkit?
Local artist/security guard, Amanda Mae, has been fired from her security gig at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) for participating, perhaps a little too deeply, with Yoko Ono’s participatory piece called “Painting to Hammer a Nail.” Ono’s work is a small panel with a hammer hanging next to it, and a printed wall label encouraging viewers to “pound a nail into this painting.”
At SAM, someone had the idea — whether it was a museum official or a member of the public is disputed — of using the license granted by Ono’s work to nail a piece of paper to the museum wall next to it. In short order, the piece was surrounded by a dense ring of announcements, receipts, business cards and other detritus that visitors had posted, all under the museum’s approving gaze. Informed about the paper-hanging, Ono stipulated that it was acceptable as long as the scraps were preserved as part of the work, and returned with it.
On Aug. 20, Mae — who in addition to working at SAM, also makes performance-based photo art, and is about to start a graduate program in museum studies at the University of Washington, according to Stranger art critic Jen Graves — decided to take things a step further. She set up in front of the work and began to remove all of the pieces of paper, categorizing them in neat piles for archiving. Mae dubbed her own performance Yoko Ono Excavation Survey, or Y.E.S. After a half hour, SAM curator Michael Darling arrived, and ordered Mae to halt. The next day, she was fired.
While specifics are a bit lacking, I certainly understand Mae being fired if she spent a half hour of her security shift working on her Yoko Ono Excavation Study. It’s not clear to me whether or not she was on shift though. Regardless, it does seem quite a slippery slope to enforce an arbitrary limitation on the participation with the piece. Where do you draw the line?
You can see pictures of the work before it became a bulletin board and after over on “Another Bouncing Ball.” Sadly, I haven’t turned up any photos of Y.E.S. in-flight.
[via Artnet News and Artforum]
