#grandmother's basket

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Joseph Becker

Associate Curator of Architecture and Design San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, California sfmoma.org

Photo by Matthew Millman

SPECIAL GUEST SERIES

Joseph Becker is associate curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has contributed to over twenty exhibitions at the Museum, including the curation of Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion – Cloud Cities (2016-17), and Field Conditions (2012), as well as the co-curation of Nothing Stable Under Heaven (2018), Typeface to Interface: Graphic Design from the Collection (2016), and Lebbeus Woods, Architect (2013-14). During his 11-year tenure, Joseph has also been responsible for numerous major acquisitions for the Museum’s collection, as well as exhibition design and visual direction of many of its architecture and design exhibitions. He has served on architecture, design, and public art panels; been an invited juror at national architecture programs; led workshops on exhibition and experiential design; moderated public dialogue; and lectured internationally. Joseph earned both a bachelor of architecture and a masters of advanced architectural design (in design theory and critical practice) from the California College of the Arts, where he is currently a visiting professor. When Joseph is not working, you can find him sailing his 1979 Columbia 9.6 on the San Francisco Bay, or working on a slow remodel of his 1948 house in Bernal Heights.

FAVORITES

Book: I really avoid playing favorites, and I love books, so I’ll just say that Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies is always on my list of required reading, both because of my interest in architecture and as a native Angeleno. I don’t have much time to read for fun, so I’m currently picking at short stories by George Saunders. Just the right amount of weird.

Destination: Marfa. Worth the journey. I’ve been lucky to visit a handful of times over the past few years, doing research on Donald Judd’s furniture practice. The wide open sky of West Texas has a very special quality.

Motto: I once had a keychain that said “Screw it, Let’s do It.”

Prized possession: Right now I’m really excited about my 1953 O’Keefe and Merritt stove, which I just put into my kitchen. I have many small collections of really wonderful and quirky objects, but I love the four-inch pine needle basket that my mom wove for me at our family forestry-service cabin in the Sierras, where I am right now.

THE QUERY 

Where were you born?

At home in Los Angeles.

What were some of the passions and pastimes of your earlier years?

Certainly when I was a child I was a big Lego fan. But I also took art classes at Dorothy Cannon’s renown studio in North Hollywood, which exposed me to paint and clay and charcoal. She was an amazingly encouraging teacher.

What is your first memory of architecture as an experience?

When I was four, my parents bought their 1930s ranch house across the street from my mom’s sister, and worked with an architect to build an addition. I have early memories of exploring the house under construction, and especially sitting at the bottom of the empty swimming pool and marveling at the scale and curves and very different quality of space inside the concrete shell.

How did you begin to realize your intrigue with architecture and design?

I think I was always interested in building and making things, even as a child. My dad and I used to make model rockets, and we built my bedroom furniture to my designs when I was around 13. I also remember traveling with my parents in the UK when I was 14, and chose to take them to the Design Museum in London because of an ad I saw in the underground. It was a Verner Panton exhibition, and from then on I was hooked on the idea of total environment. The psychedelic aspect was pretty good, too.

Why does this form of artistic expression suit you?

I think I’m interested in the logic of design and architecture – the creative response to problem solving. But I really get excited when the boundaries break down, and the architecture or design response is an artistic critique of societal conditions, and perhaps a vision for an alternative future.

What led to your coming on board with the San Francisco Museum of Art?

I knew I wanted to study architecture, but not necessarily practice it. My interest in art led me to explore curatorial practice as a way to combine the two.

What is your greatest challenge in this role?

Each exhibition or program has unique challenges. Working with living artists is a really exciting challenge – pushing and pulling in a dialogue while keeping their vision pure. I think the greatest challenge is that I never feel like I have enough time for robust scholarship on any exhibition, no matter how far in advance I begin planning.

Is there a project along the way that has presented an important learning curve?

Each project is an opportunity for growth in a different arena. I think my very first project at SFMOMA, which was designing the giant walk-in freezer that housed the Olafur Eliasson ice-covered hydrogen powered race car chassis called Your mobile expectations, set a high bar. The car fit in the freight elevator by two inches and we had a pretty hard time calculating what it would weigh once laden with its frozen shell.

What exhibition remains most memorable, even today?

There are two exhibitions I have curated that I actually see as a continuation of a single idea. Field Conditions (2012) and Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion – Cloud Cities (2017) each deal with pushing the boundaries of architecture as conceptual spatial practice, with foray into the hypothetical and visionary. I worked with some amazing artists in Field Conditions, and was very excited to put drawings by Lebbeus Woods on view that I had studied in undergraduate school. I acquired those drawings for the Museum collection, and then co-curated the first comprehensive survey of Woods’ work after his passing.

How would you describe your creative process?

As a curator, you’re always looking around for new artists and projects, and connecting them to explorations in the past. I think my process is really just about trying to see as much as possible and trusting my instinct when it comes to what I think is interesting, and want to share with the Museum’s audience.

What three tools of the trade can’t you live without?

I’m completely indebted to our museum library, and the ability to access hundreds of amazing publications. Obviously the internet is an indispensable research tool, but I try to not get mesmerized by it – you can get tangential quickly. And without my glasses I’d have a hard time doing anything, so I have to credit LA Eyeworks for keeping me bespectacled with their amazing frames.

How has your aesthetic evolved over the years?

I lean toward simple and beautiful things, often with history, or some sense of timelessness.

Is there an architect/designer living today that you admire most?

For many reasons, I tremendously admire Olafur Eliasson. His multivalent practice spans many of my interests, from complex geometry to color and light. Beyond sculpture, he works in architecture and design, as well as humanitarian and socially driven design work. And his studio culture is really quite incredible, revolving around food and collaboration.

What has been a pivotal period or moment in your life?

I lost the 1907 loft that I had lived in for a decade to a house fire in 2014. It was a 2,000 square foot unfolding architecture project that I had spent ten years building and rebuilding, and was the center of my world. A fire at the other side of the building ended up red-tagging the entire structure, and all the tenants were subsequently evicted. I spent the next few months in formative self reflection, and can attest to the power of pushing through.

Do you have a favorite artistic resource that you turn to?

I spin through a handful of different art, design, and architecture websites. I think biennials and triennials are amazing opportunities to see so many contemporary projects at once.

From where do you draw inspiration?

Inspiration is everywhere, if your eyes are really open.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Certainly to remain open to new ideas and experiences. Say ‘yes’ until you have to say ‘no.’ This can be problematic when you say ‘yes’ to too many exciting projects. Really, the best advice is to just show up, and see where it goes.

Is there a book or film that has changed you?

I have always been fascinated by Film Noir for its portrayal of architecture, and the city as a character that is laden with nefarious potential. I love the art of storytelling, whether in cinema, poetry, or history.

Who in your life would you like to thank, and for what?

I am in general incredibly grateful for so many people who have had a positive impact on my life, from family to friends and colleagues. Two people I would love to thank, but can’t, would be both of my grandmothers, who were each incredible artists in their own right and taught me how to look, and see, the creative potential inside me and in the world beyond.

What are you working on right now?

I just delivered a commencement address for the graduate programs at the California College of the Arts, so that was something that I had been focusing on until last week. I’m currently wrapping up the details on an exhibition catalogue that I am the co-author of, with my colleague Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, on The Sea Ranch, which will launch when the show opens at the Museum in December. Next month I’ll open a small show of Steve Frykholm’s playful Summer Picnic Posters for Herman Miller, which he created from 1970 to 1989. And, in two months, I will be opening an exhibition that I am curating on the furniture practice of Donald Judd, which I am very excited about. We will have Judd-designed chairs outside the gallery that our visitors can sit in!

What drives you these days?

I’m coming out of an incredibly busy six months, with opening four exhibitions, teaching, and writing for various projects, so I’m just counting down days until I can take some time off in August.

[experiencingmyjoy]

Walking Within Wisdom #38 Elisabet Sahtouris

September 26, 2019

Today I needed some real BADA$$ wisdom. Listening to our youth especially Greta Thunburg,  I looked for someone that could frame the world in another, perhaps more disruptive way that may be a frame for the work of our youth… I went down an awesome rabbit hole listening to Elisabet Sahtouris, and spent most of my walk listening to this YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYslJEUyQM&t=2366s 

Elisabet Sahtouris www.sahtouris.com is an evolution biologist, futurist, author and consultant.  In her unique approach, called "Living Systems Design," she applies the principles of biology and evolution to organizational development so that organizations may become more functional, healthy living systems, with increased resilience, stability, and cooperation.  She wrote "Earth Dance: Living Systems in Evolution."

Sahtouris describes, “we are facing three simultaneous crises in the world today: crises in energy, economy, and climate. These add up to the greatest challenge in all human history.” Sahtouris is optimistic about the future and pointing to biology she says, “Life gets creative in a time of crisis.” She explains how the survival of bacteria, which have been on the planet for over four billion years, has given us a model of how we may evolve into a mature species. In the best case scenarios in evolution there is a move towards cooperation and co-creation. She points out, “It is literally cheaper to feed your enemies than to kill them. And, in the best case scenario in evolution, those cooperative ventures become the next larger unity.” 

It is these words that sent me down the proverbial rabbit hole. 

In the above YouTube video she illustrates how ecology and economy are actually the same. Nature’s economy is all about recycling and because we have never learned economics from nature we are in the position we are today.

I listened with awe as she described ecology and economy using the human body as a metaphor

Nature has billions of years of experience, so suppose you look at your bodies economics.  Imagine the northern industrial organs are above the diaphragm and they have the ownership of the rest of the body so that the raw material blood cells that form in the bone marrow can be mined and shipped to these northern industrial organs. Then the heart and lung system gets into play and they clean up the blood and oxygen is added and the heart distribution center announces what the body price for blood is. You ship the blood, only to the organs that can afford the blood price… So you can see very quickly that this sort of ownership and pricing system would not work well in a healthy working system. In fact that those bones that were mined (like countries where we do our mining) may not be able to afford the final product. So there is a lot to learn from nature about economics. Your body is gifting currency into the economy all the time, is to monitor the economy to with no repayment demanded and certainly no interest charged. The credit line goes up if there needs more currency in the system and goes down if there is too much… There is no reason why we can’t copy this human system.

She went on to describe evolution in both the East and the West… Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest, is taught in the west. Darwin’s evolution is an endless struggle and competition for resources. In the east, Russia in particular teaches a different type a different system. A system of cooperation. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 essay collection by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Nature doesn’t do either or’s… Nature is a conservative ecosystem of cooperation nature is not only going to do competition or cooperation it’s a balance.

Sahtouris gave an example about this kind of cooperation when she discussed going to a basketball game in China. The person sitting next to her cheered for both teams getting baskets where we in the west believe in competition cheer for only one team, those in China cheer for excellence not competition.

The way to talk about the transition from competition to cooperation she describes the metaphor of the butterfly. The caterpillar consumes 100’s of times it weight in one day until it is so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep. Dormant cells that have been hiding in the folds of the cells… the cells melt down into a nutritive soup. 

The competitive phase happens under the first genome and the cooperative phase under the second. She loves this as a metaphor because it means the future world is going to look very different. We are in huge crisis and we get to reinvent everything now. We get to build that butterfly world, that lives lightly on the earth instead of the heavy overconsumption mode. We can live a lifestyle everywhere that is appropriate to this planet that will keep the ecosystems healthy.

When we humans are faced with crises like fire, flood or earthquake we don’t just go to competition and survival of the fittest our first inclination is to actually roll up our sleeves and cooperate with one another, competition isn’t the first or only way.

The last thing I will write about here (believe me there is HOURS and PAGES MORE!) is Sahtouris describing how indiginous communities choose leaders. 

Our country's “forefathers” specifically Ben Franklin befriended what the white men named the Iroquois tribe where we got the United States Constitution… The tribe had great laws of peace where they had kept peace for a thousand years. And the best form of gender balance, and perhaps the best way of choosing leadership that Sahtouris has ever seen… Because when the US adopted the constitution they didn’t adopt the Iroquois ways, they put in voting which NO indiginous culture EVER uses voting to elect leaders, or none she has ever heard of.

The way they did choose leaders was through the grandmothers.  They choose the Chiefs because they watched the boys grow up and they knew who was best serve society, they had the backing of community… If they didn’t do well, they would get one warning and the council of grandmothers could remove them from office. The grandmothers didn’t need to be in public and be the politicians, they had the choosing rights. This is an AMAZING way to do this because of their lack of vested interest by the grandmothers they wanted a society to work well. 

Economies used to be run to feed everybody and give children a safe place to sleep. Somehow men have taken economics into a global casino gambling game that just should NEVER EVER HAVE HAPPENED!

So grateful to have walked in this wisdom today with this amazing woman…

Until soon when we walk again…