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Oral History Office 75Th Anniversary the Bancroft Library Oral History Project University of California, Berkeley

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Oral History Office 75Th Anniversary the Bancroft Library Oral History Project University of California, Berkeley San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Regional Oral History Office 75th Anniversary The Bancroft Library Oral History Project University of California, Berkeley SFMOMA 75th Anniversary ROBERT RILEY SFMOMA Staff, 1988-2000 Curator of Media Arts Interview conducted by Richard Cándida Smith in 2009 Copyright © 2010 by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Funding for the Oral History Project provided in part by Koret Foundation. ii Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Robert Riley, dated December 1, 2009 .The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All copyrights and other intellectual property rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Excerpts up to 1000 words of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and the attribution below is included. Requests for permission or questions should be addressed to SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 or [email protected] and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary: Robert Riley,” conducted by Richard Cándida Smith, 2009, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2010. iii Table of Contents—Robert Riley Interview #1: April 15, 2009 [Audio File 1] 1 Birth and upbringing in Boston area—Meeting Nam June Paik and other artists at Windham Academy—Massachusetts College of Art—Working at Institute of Contemporary Arts—New language of conservation and media—Art theory and practice—Doug Hall’s Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described—Moving to SFMOMA, curating “The Arts of Television” and “American Landscape Video”— Riley’s development of an international network of artists. [Audio File 2] 19 Tatsuo Miyajima’s Counter Line—Tony Hall’s Multiple Personality Disorder—Riley’s decision to leave Boston for San Francisco—Jack Lane—SFMOMA support for new media—Riley’s definition of new media—Learning from Graham Beal—John Caldwell—Van Deren Coke—Rediscovering and considering the SFMOMA holdings— Grace McCann Morley’s innovations—SFMOMA’s new media collections, acquisitions, presentation, conservation—Steina Vasulka’s The West—Presenting new media work to the SFMOMA accessions committee—The importance of the museum’s purchase of Bill Viola’s Passage. [Audio File 3] 37 More about Bill Viola and Passage—Vito Acconci’s Command Performance and other works—Julia Scher’s Predictive Engineering—Media as a representation of the times— Matthew Barney—Artists’ cosmologies—The art patronage of the Kramlichs—More about Barney—Jim Campbell’s Digital Watch—Generational moments in media arts. [Audio File 4] 55 Planning for the media arts galleries in the new SFMOMA building—SFMOMA attempts to commission work by Nam June Paik—Space and place, perception and experience in exhibitions—Riley’s decision to leave SFMOMA—Acquisition of Bill Fontana’s work—Commissioning Tatsuo Miyajima’s Counter Line—And Steve McQueen’s Drumroll—Riley’s relationship with Jack Lane—Work by Woody Vasulka and James Coleman—Curatorial planning, programming, collaboration—John Caldwell and Gary Garrels—What does it mean to be a museum of modern art?—Interaction with SFMOMA trustees—Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art—awards for electronic media and film. [Audio File 5] 75 Censorship—Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses—Curatorial travel—Riley’s Marquette University lecture—Dan Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on iv Time Delay—Documentaries, Raindance Collective, May Day—Riley’s career since SFMOMA—Writing and teaching. [End of interview] . 1 Robert Riley Interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith, ROHO Interview 1: April 15, 2009 [Begin Audio File 1 04-15-2009.mp3] Cándida Smith: The first question is if you could tell us about your background. When and where were you born? 01-00:05:04 Riley: I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Beth Israel Hospital. My mother followed her obstetrician there, a woman doctor named Snow, I think. Cándida Smith: You grew up in Boston? 01-00:05:21 Riley: I grew up outside the city when it was easier to get into Boston from Danvers because it was on the highway loop. The town had a considerable amount of history to it, because it was once part of Salem where witches were captured and put to trial. One of my first jobs was mowing the lawns, being the gardener of historical properties when I was a kid. I took care of witches’ gardens. Cándida Smith: What did your parents do? 01-00:06:15 Riley: My father was in insurance. My mother went back to work when we were small, worked for a cardboard container corporation. Part of our weekend activities were taking apart cookie packages and light-bulb packages to figure out how an exoskeletal corrugated container can be made, how all these packages would slip into the container. In commercial food production you have a very interesting structural problem about how your cookies and crackers arrive to you at market or table unbroken. All those little inserts and all those little cardboard 2 things that you find, it’s all about the packing. During the war, she worked for a roofing company, in construction. After World War II, she went back to work when we were little kids. She taught us all how to make certain types of dishes, and then with her absence from home at work we were responsible to make one of the suppers for each night of the week. Cándida Smith: How many brothers and sisters did you— 01-00:07:18 Riley: I have two sisters—there were three of us. We always had to negotiate that schedule of dinner productions, based in our catalog of recipes that we had committed to memory. All part of growing up. Cándida Smith: Was your family interested in art or culture, in any sense? Or fine art? 01-00:07:41 Riley: No. Art was actually something that I found. I was very busy with my own projects, building things, making thing, watching the world and how it functioned mechanically. Little things like pumps and science projects. Things that moved. Clocks. My grandfather, Hugh Nathaniel Boulter, who was Scottish, was my great defender. He was always saying, “Let the boy alone. Let him do his projects.” I became known as a little fix-it kid. If something was broken or something needed mending, if something happened, I could fix and repaint and make it as good as new. I was also very good with scissors. I used to cut out profiles of objects and put them on the window. In the neighborhood, it became a bit of theater. People would come over and see these funny little silhouettes that I used to make and tape to the windows. It’s still quite a joke in the family, actually. Cándida Smith: It’s nice. 3 01-00:08:57 Riley: We didn’t have a real cat, but we had a memory of a cat or a silhouette of a cat against a window. Cándida Smith: How did you drift from that into art? 01-00:09:17 Riley: I started winning things. I started to draw. I had an older sister; her idea of play was to play school with her two younger siblings. Basically, we had reading, we had writing, and we had art. That was what we did when we played. By the time I got to school, I had this ability to draw things. When something needed to be commemorated, people just asked me to draw things. My hobby led to trophies. When I was at the end of high school, I actually won the Scholastic Art Awards. I got a scholarship for college through Hallmark Cards for a collage. That was my beginning. Cándida Smith: Did you go to college with the idea that you would be an art major? 01-00:10:31 Riley: I did. I went to Windham College in Putney, Vermont, in the seventies. I met Nam June Paik, I met Carl Andre, I met Chuck Ginnevar, I met all these people of the 1970s, who came to Windham College through the art faculty. Artists had residencies and made presentations, things like that. I remember in 1970 meeting Nam June Paik and thinking, now, this is something. Cándida Smith: What work was he doing at that time? What was he working on when you met him? 01-00:11:07 Riley: I think the Paik/Abe Synthesizer had just been demonstrated as an instrument that could take the programmed television image and turn it into an animated image under the artist’s control.
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