Emptiness is Form
(Golf and Donuts)
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles
2009 March 5, 7:00 pm
(Golf and Donuts)
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles
2009 March 5, 7:00 pm
About
The popular game of miniature golf is recast as a community social event as Knifeandfork installs a custom course that appropriates the museum’s unique architecture, utilizing both interior and exterior spaces and following multiple paths through MOCA's Grand Avenue campus. Visitors team up and utilize balls outfitted with RFID tags to show off their skills. The RFID golf balls trigger interactive surprises throughout the evening.
Knifeandfork attempts to merge two understood structures of social activity, miniature golf and museum-going. By playing the former in the space of the latter, participants détourne the museum itself into a site of physical competition, rowdy behavior, and cell phone use typically considered anathema. Further, rather than the exhibition galleries of the museum intended for public view, Emptiness emphasizes the private, hidden spaces of the museum. Participants get an inverted view of Arata Isozaki's acclaimed building as they play through the the boardroom, the roof-top overlooking Grand Avenue and the city, the office hallways of the Curatorial and Education departments, the mailroom, elevator and stairwell shafts, and down into the underground storage bays and loading docks, ignoring the display of art while exposing the inner workings of the museum and the people who run it.
Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) also has a secondary layer of meaning relating to the philosophical question of holes. Each of the golf balls used by a participant is embedded with an RFID tag programmed with the participant's cell phone number. When a ball goes into a hole, a string of activities is triggered as an onsite donut chef is alerted to make a donut hole and in addition, the participant receives a phone call with a pre-recorded monologue on holes delivered by performance artist Nathan Phillips (participants were able to call Nathan back at his location in New York, expanding their engagement with the performance into yet another realm of activity). Engaging in a philosophical play on words and the absurd nature of interconnecting dissimilar activities, this particular minigolf setup is at its heart, a giant system for making donuts, fueled by its human participants. Golf is an event during which players ostensibly traverse a space and engage in the process of filling holes (putting balls into holes). In this particular game of golf and constructed system, every time you fill a hole, you make a hole (donut hole).
Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts) draws on a history of performance with an interest in interactive forms and audience engagement. In particular we were interested in the work Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg, which includes a tennis performance by Frank Stella. Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts) is deformalized in comparison to a performance such as Open Score, as there is a dependence on the audience for generating the social and community aspects of the work and a requirement for the audience to exist and participate in order for the work to be realized even in the most minimal sense. As such, there is a tentative relationship to theater and the need for a theatrical audience to be present in order for the work to be fully realized, however the requirement is even more stringent in the case of a performance piece as Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts), as the evening of the actual event is in fact both the first rehearsal and the opening night wrapped all into one. As such, Knifeandfork is setting up a framework for interaction and performance as opposed to strictly choreographing the performance itself.
Other influences are Allan Kaprow's work with blurring the lines between everyday activities and art, and Chris Burden's piece Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, in which he digs below ground into the foundation of the exhibition space, encouraging the visitors to step down into the exposed space. We were interested in this view of the museum as a space beyond the exhibition walls.
Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) is one of three works that Knifeandfork made while Artist in Residence at MOCA, Los Angeles. The project is documented in its entirety at the residency blog Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) Archive.
The popular game of miniature golf is recast as a community social event as Knifeandfork installs a custom course that appropriates the museum’s unique architecture, utilizing both interior and exterior spaces and following multiple paths through MOCA's Grand Avenue campus. Visitors team up and utilize balls outfitted with RFID tags to show off their skills. The RFID golf balls trigger interactive surprises throughout the evening.Knifeandfork attempts to merge two understood structures of social activity, miniature golf and museum-going. By playing the former in the space of the latter, participants détourne the museum itself into a site of physical competition, rowdy behavior, and cell phone use typically considered anathema. Further, rather than the exhibition galleries of the museum intended for public view, Emptiness emphasizes the private, hidden spaces of the museum. Participants get an inverted view of Arata Isozaki's acclaimed building as they play through the the boardroom, the roof-top overlooking Grand Avenue and the city, the office hallways of the Curatorial and Education departments, the mailroom, elevator and stairwell shafts, and down into the underground storage bays and loading docks, ignoring the display of art while exposing the inner workings of the museum and the people who run it.
Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) also has a secondary layer of meaning relating to the philosophical question of holes. Each of the golf balls used by a participant is embedded with an RFID tag programmed with the participant's cell phone number. When a ball goes into a hole, a string of activities is triggered as an onsite donut chef is alerted to make a donut hole and in addition, the participant receives a phone call with a pre-recorded monologue on holes delivered by performance artist Nathan Phillips (participants were able to call Nathan back at his location in New York, expanding their engagement with the performance into yet another realm of activity). Engaging in a philosophical play on words and the absurd nature of interconnecting dissimilar activities, this particular minigolf setup is at its heart, a giant system for making donuts, fueled by its human participants. Golf is an event during which players ostensibly traverse a space and engage in the process of filling holes (putting balls into holes). In this particular game of golf and constructed system, every time you fill a hole, you make a hole (donut hole).
Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts) draws on a history of performance with an interest in interactive forms and audience engagement. In particular we were interested in the work Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg, which includes a tennis performance by Frank Stella. Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts) is deformalized in comparison to a performance such as Open Score, as there is a dependence on the audience for generating the social and community aspects of the work and a requirement for the audience to exist and participate in order for the work to be realized even in the most minimal sense. As such, there is a tentative relationship to theater and the need for a theatrical audience to be present in order for the work to be fully realized, however the requirement is even more stringent in the case of a performance piece as Emptiness Is Form (Golf and Donuts), as the evening of the actual event is in fact both the first rehearsal and the opening night wrapped all into one. As such, Knifeandfork is setting up a framework for interaction and performance as opposed to strictly choreographing the performance itself.
Other influences are Allan Kaprow's work with blurring the lines between everyday activities and art, and Chris Burden's piece Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, in which he digs below ground into the foundation of the exhibition space, encouraging the visitors to step down into the exposed space. We were interested in this view of the museum as a space beyond the exhibition walls.
Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) is one of three works that Knifeandfork made while Artist in Residence at MOCA, Los Angeles. The project is documented in its entirety at the residency blog Emptiness is Form (Golf and Donuts) Archive.
Credits
Concept, engineering, and production
Brian House
Sue Huang
Sue Huang
Voice interventions
Nathan Philips
Donuts
Deanna Moody of Dee's Bakery and Donuts
DJ set
Blogging
Production assistance
Matt Miller
Ronald Vega
Ronald Vega
Video documention and editing
Alex MacInnis
Photo documention
Patrick Miller
Thanks to
Aandrea Stang
Meghan Grebing
MOCA Think Tank and staff
Jay Yan
Meghan Grebing
MOCA Think Tank and staff
Jay Yan
All material copyright © Knifeandfork
