art lecture at PNCA April 29, 2008

Tuesday, April 29

Stephanie Snyder Lecture

Revolt and Anti-Authorship, 1975. Daniel Spoerri at the San Francisco Art Institute

In September of 1975, Romanian-born Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri arrived at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) with his lover Claude Torre for an intensive artist residency. SFAI’s new president Arnold Herstand and San Francisco art dealer Eliane Ganz invited Spoerri and organized his visit. Unknown to Spoerri, he was walking into a firestorm. SFAI was in the midst of a profound academic and administrative crisis over Herstand’s reorganization of the school. The students, supported by various SFAI faculty and community members initiated a takeover, withholding their tuition and publishing official documents and meeting notes in the student newspaper—the Eye. A series of traumatic ruptures ensued between students, faculty, and San Francisco’s intellectual and social elite, who, many felt, were colluding with Herstand to advance their class objectives. Spoerri, tangled up in an atmosphere of increasing hostility and subterfuge, acted out. On September 28, 1975, during a performance-based dinner at the Eliane Ganz Gallery, Spoerri assaulted one of San Francisco’s most celebrated art patrons and destroyed his installation. Several months later, the SFAI Board of Directors called for Herstand’s resignation and reorganized the school in accord with the students’ vision. This talk examines the complex of issues—anti-authorship, pedagogy, and subjectivity, to name a few—that are at the heart of this traumatic time in San Francisco history. Part of a larger body of research on Daniel Spoerri conducted as part of a Getty Curatorial Fellowship this talk elucidates the acute crisis in the institutional and social fabric of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1975, and by extension, their effects on one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and institutional practice in American art schools.

Ticket info: Free & Open to the Public

Official Website: http://www.pnca.edu