Hot on the heels of the SFMOMA website redesign comes the Hammer Museum’s new site.

It’s a knockout that weaves together many threads of programming - events, exhibitions, and the crucial multimedia that bind users to a site - into a cohesive experience that satisfys the needs of many kinds of visitors.  Even better, they’ve embraced an openness to multimedia distribution and sharing so unusual among organizations of this type.  A user can subscribe to the museum’s offerings through podcasts or RSS, embed video or audio into their own website, or post content to content sharing sites like Facebook.  These are fundamentals in 2008 which a lot of museum sites still aren’t embracing.

The design team also came up with a minimal and elegant design that frames the museum’s programming transparently, throwing emphasis onto the many visuals the museum naturally generates through its events and exhibitions.

The Hammer also has crack crew making sure their site runs smoothly.  Audio and video and images are everywhere and that’s a testament to all the little monkeys behind the scenes who are producing, cropping, editing, formatting, and posting this material.

Tip o’ the hat, folks.

I confess that when I first went to their site I was nervous it was going to be an all-Flash hell hole on the order of the epic disaster that is The Kitchen’s website: a nightmare of an interface, a buggy, error-filled disaster that probably halves attendance figures because content is so freakishly hard to find and so garishly designed.  The Kitchen’s website is made even more painful because of how it stands in such stark contrast to their outstanding programming.  Although I have many friends that work at that august institution, I have no idea what happened behind the scenes that led to their digital debacle.  I’ll assume it has something to do with an overworked staff entrusting the project to developers who had absolutely no business making websites.  It’s a total heap and needs to be redesigned completely and immediately for institutional solvency.

Anyway.  Back to The Hammer.

It turns out that Flash is limited to the homepage and discreetly around the site in audio and video modules and an effective (if random) interactive Membership matrix.

Featured programs are listed on the homepage (although I wish it would say “Featured” since I thought that all I saw on the homepage was all that was at the museum (wrong)).  They’ve nicely integrated video into the homepage (but didn’t allow it to go fullscreen).  The full bleed background images switch as the user selects different featured programs - cute.  Upcoming events are conveniently listed on the bottom.  It works.  It’s full of stuff but is coherent and offers a lot of info in a compressed way.

The real killer feature - and it’s simple - is the section that drops down from the main horizontal navigation bar when you roll over major section headers.  Mouse over “Exhibitions” and before you click into the unknown, a helpful menu drops down to show you what to expect: exhibitions on view, etc.  For each section the dropdown area shows you the most important stuff.  It’s so good.  They’ve really done a nice job of not forcing people to click, instead enabling users to find things simply by hovering.

I like how they list their current and upcoming exhibitions together on the Exhibtions landing page but it’s a bit obnoxious that in order to see more current exhibitions one has to click a tiny right arrow for the other thumbnails to slide in.  Hammer: just have it drop to the next level.  This type of hard-to-find-button-to-push-to-see-more-stuff won’t pass the mom test.  Also I’m not sure if segregating the past exhibitions into its own area is necessary but it works well nonetheless.

The Programs section does what SFMOMA’s didn’t do: tag lots and lots of images to every single event.  I know from firsthand experience that it’s annoying and it’s grunt work but it makes the section look visually delectable and encourages visitors to click on things they otherwise wouldn’t.

The Collections sections provides an overview but doesn’t even attempt to put anything online.  Bummer, but they’ll have time to fundraise for that functionality in the future.  In that case they can look to SFMOMA who did a great job.  And the Met, of course, who does an even greater job (and from what I’ve heard will be launching some exciting new online collections soon).

The best part of the site is the “Watch and Listen” section which does what every museum should be doing: have a whole section fully and totally devoted to the gobs of audio and video that they are producing.  The Hammer nails this section.  First off, you can watch things right there on the website but you can also embed it into your site or subscribe to the podcast feed.  SO BASIC BUT SO GOOD.  Why can’t most every other place get this so right?  Filtering works well but Search doesn’t.  Just to see if search functionality actually functioned, I searched for words that I saw in the titles: “Lopate” and “Arbus” in my case.  It said nothing could be found.  Uh.  Tsk tsk.  Fix this.  I also wish there was a browsable list of all the multimedia participants so I could just skim and see if my favorite artist was there.

I’m not sure why the section is called “News and Blogs.”  How many blogs do they have?  As far as I can tell it’s just one.  And just call it “News.”  I don’t think you have to drop the “B” word.

The user interface is really elegant and smartly prepared.  Content flows intuitively and key information is presented immediately with secondary or extra information accessible through a mouse click.  I would boost the overall site font size.  Small looks sexy but it’s hard to read for a lot of (older) visitors.

All in all - this site is a real triumph and the team behind it should be complimented on an outstanding offering.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern art (SFMOMA) has redesigned their website, sfmoma.org, after more than 8 years.  The new site takes few risks, adhering to conservative and time-tested user interface and design standards.  As a result, it’s a success - head and shoulders above most of the museum websites in its class.

Of course, it’s not perfect but first with the good and then with the bad:

Simple, clear, consistent user interface
The navigation interface is in the time-tested, user-approved tradition of horizontal navigation bars.  Sure, it’s conventional but it works.  Things stay put as you go from section to section and as a result, the site coheres.  Some museums try to go experimental and end up user interface nightmares.  Take, for example, the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Look at the IMA’s frightfully confusing homepage.  There are literally three separate content sections with their own horizontal tabbed-interface bars instead of one unifying interface.  How do I know where to click?  Inundated in a deluge of information, I’d rather leave than “explore” which is what most of these bad websites expect visitors to do.  That assumption is wrong.  90% of visitors want to get in and get out.  10% are ready for some exploration.  The Metropolitan Museum is a user interface disaster of another order.  Many times its navigation bar COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS after a mouse click leaving a visitor with no navigation reference.  That’s one site in need of a serious overhaul.  There are others that need redesigns too.

SFMOMA has one of the most logical, organized, and consistent navigation structures among museum sites making it stand tall amongst its peers.  Thoughtful and smart copy, too.

Good use of Flash
There’s been some griping about the Flash introduction SFMOMA uses on their homepage: too fast! too much stimulation!  As the guy that runs the New Museum website I can tell you that since the average site visitor will give you about 1 minute of their precious time, you better offer as many visuals as possible in the hopes of stimulating a longer visit.  SFMOMA understands this imperative and their Flash intro is smart.  It will show visitors with extraordinarily short attention spans (most) what’s on view in an engaging way and encourage them to learn about those exhibitions.  It’s also nicely designed; if you roll over one of the items it pauses so you can carefully look at the picture or read the text.  That’s considerate.  Compare this to MoMA’s lumbering Flash show which is too boring, too slow, and keeps rolling on irrespective of user attempts to pause it.  Also, SFMOMA is using sIFR to render non-websafe fonts.  It’s done really well and it’s nice to see such a good implementation.

Good design
This is completely subjective but I like the boxy, flat design of the site.  No faddish gradients, rounded corners, or pinstripes.  It’s a simple and elegant container to house the text and images that make a museum site so strong.

Information rich
SFMOMA has a massive amount of content - events, exhibitions, collections, education initiatives - on and on.  Their calendar tool is very powerful and well organized: clearly showing information and allowing for fine-grained filtering.  The search tool is surprisingly good.  The collection highlights encourage exploration without resorting to visual tricks.

But with the good comes the bad.

No RSS or iCal
I’m very unlikely to visit the site repeatedly but if updates were to drift into my RSS feed or into my calendar - then I’m far more likely to stay connected to the museum.  This omission is completely unforgivable in a modern website.
SFMOMA: add RSS and iCal right now.

Hidden email signup form
A site, heck, a museum, thrives on email outreach.  Why bury the email signup form in the Exhibitions and Events section?  It’s illogical.  More emails means more contact which means more members and more visits.
SFMOMA: put your email subscription form on every single page.

Confusing Events and Exhibitions section
This is going to be SFMOMA’s most frequently visited section and its contents are surprisingly unclear.  The Exhibitions column is broken into two sections - what appear to be Featured Exhibitions and Other Current Exhibitions.  The necessity of a horizontal division is questionable (isn’t the difference in size enough?).  But if they insist on a horizontal break, each should be titled.  As it currently stands it interrupts the understanding that all of these exhibitions are happening at once.  Also, Events should have pictures associated with them.  I happen to know who RoseLee Goldberg is and I also happen to know who Tom Marioni is but the majority of site visitors will not be art geeks and would rather click on a picture of a woman with a bob or a photograph of a bottle of beer.  People don’t click on words; they click on pictures. SFMOMA: don’t do it for all events - far too big a task - but add pictures to Featured events.

Confusing Exhibitions detail page

Take this page as a sample of their Exhibition page template: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/306
Their design is based on keeping things “above the fold” - the 600 pixel height that content can appear in safely without the user having to scroll down to see it.  To keep things above the fold they are making people click.  But they’ve gotten it all wrong.  People aren’t afraid to scroll, they are afraid to click. When you scroll, you know where you are and you know where you’re going.  When you click, you have no idea what’s going to happen or what’s going to change.  Amazon.com and their millions in user testing is proof of the power of the scroll.  Their product pages are incredibly long but Amazon knows that’s preferable to a user than a click-intensive option.

The way that subsection content relates to the overall exhibition detail page is not intuitive.  If you click “Participating Artists” under “Related Links” you are shown the list of artists and the other related links but the main exhibition information is gone and you have to click “Back to Exhibition Page” to get there.  That’s just bad design, folks.  Since these “Related Links” well, relate, directly to the exhibition at hand, it’s important to keep that Exhibition overview information on the same page.
SFMOMA: put all the exhibition content on one, long page.

I’ll leave it there.  I know that the web team has a list longer than mine of bugs, design issues, and problems they need to fix.  Also, they’ve likely got close to zero budget for user testing so this is effectively their beta release.  Keep going SFMOMA!  You’re doing alright.

Lynne Pidel, a gallery attendant at the New Museum has kindly organized a show of works by many of its employees.  There was no “curating” either artists or pieces.  The only criteria for inclusion was whether or not one worked at the NewMu.  Most of the artists are from Security or Visitor Services.  There are very few full time employees showing.  None from Curatorial, Development, or Education.

Your intrepid blogger will have one of his drawings on display.

So be a sport and see the show.

The Stanton Chapter
176 Stanton St., New York, NY 10002
Tues-Sat 12-6pm

November 3 - December 1, 2008
Opening reception: November 3, 6-8PM

Unrelated to art but a very good (and short) interview with a philosopher on the meaning of friendship:

Philosophy Bites: Alexander Nehamas on Friendship.

Adam Hayes, an artist from Newark, NJ (remember when it was the new Brooklyn?) is having a show at the gallery Number 35 in Manhattan.

Sadly I can’t dig up much information (make a website for yourself, sir) but the press release suggests his drawings “feature a moment: hair blowing, the space between drapery, a shadow of a neck. They turn in images of incomplete sashes and quick snapshots of fur collars.”  Could be.  I like their spareness and the way they appear to be in formation.  Proto pictures, maybe.  More on Adam via his gallery’s badly designed site.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964

There’s a performance of Fluxus event scores this coming Thursday, October 22, 2008 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.  I’ll be in the audience eagerly watching.  Join me, will you?  Info here:

Issue Project Room
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Thursday, October 23 at 8:00 pm

Fluxus scores interpreted by Bradley Eros, Lary 7 and others
Tony Conrad: 3 Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders (1961) interpreted by Lary 7
Yoko Ono: Cut Piece (1964) interpreted by Bradley Eros
Nam June Paik: Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971) interp. by M.V. Carbon
Emmett Williams: Duet for Performer and Audience (1961) interpreted by Ryan Tracy
Other performances TBA

Bradley Eros’s art practice includes expanded cinema, sound collage, performance, photography, writing, curating, mediamystics, subterranean science, and archival investigation. He is the co-founder of the Robert/a Beck Memorial Cinema and has presented work at the Whitney, MoMA, The Kitchen, Millennium, and Anthology Film Archives among countless others.

Lary 7 is an audio explorer using self-invented sound-producing objects involving the detritus of the twentieth century. He founded the Analog Society and was co-founder of the legendary Directart Productions Ltd. He has released work on Touch, Diskono, Ectoplasm, and his own Plastikville and Plastiktray imprints.

M.V. Carbon is a cellist, composer and improviser who plays and sings through tape loops, pedals and circuits. She occasionally incorporates film imagery into her performances. She is part of the electronic duo, Metalux. Her work has been released on 5RC, Load, No-Fi, and Atavistic, among others.

Ryan Tracy is a composer, writer, and performer with degrees in conducting and composition. He has fulfilled residencies at Yaddo and The Edward Albee Foundation. He is the founder of Collective Opera Company and blogs at CounterCritic.com.

Presented in part by Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts

Perry Garvin, TUY754, 2008
Tape, graphite, and colored pencil on paper
11” x 8.5”

This is quite off-topic but I can’t check my excitement with being able to see hi-def footage of the Built to Spill show I missed last month (due to FLUXCONCERT conflicts).  Fan-based audio and video recordings of live concerts (with full approval of the bands, mind you) has reached such a level of quality that they can easily outmatch most competing live media that the bands themselves put out.  Just play this video and see what I mean.

Built To Spill, “I Would Hurt A Fly” from PDX Taper on Vimeo.

Perry Garvin, [Title TBD], 2008
Paper, tape, wood, graphite, colored pencil, headphone cable
11″ x 8.5″

Tick…tick…tick…  The art world time bomb is about to blow up…  tick…tick…tick…

From the New York Times:

Sales Underwhelm at Art Auctions
October 10, 1008

“Adding to speculation about how the worldwide economic downturn will affect next month’s big auctions in New York, two sales abroad drew disappointing numbers. On Tuesday an auction of Islamic and Indian art at Christie’s in London sold just 47 percent of its 439 lots, Bloomberg News reported. The auction generated total sales of $18.1 million, according to Bloomberg; a similar auction at Christie’s in April generated $20.5 million from 282 lots. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, Sotheby’s in Hong Kong had lower sales than expected at the end of a five-day auction of Asian art. The auction was expected to yield about $257 million, but garnered $141.7 million from a sale of 1,700 items.”

Arts, Briefly - Sales Underwhelm at Art Auctions - NYTimes.com.

Francesco Longenecker, Bed, 2008, oil on canvas, 60" x 80"

Francesco Longenecker, Landing, 2008, oil on canvas, 60" x 96"

Francesco Longenecker, Pond, 2008, oil on canvas, 48” x 58”

Francesco Longenecker is a young painter (b. 1981) in New York with a promising show of new paintings at Rare Gallery.  Here are some selections.  More here.

Video of FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27: five overlapping performances in rumination on love, loss, and human bonding.

John Milton Ensor Parker is a painter working out of Brooklyn.  After investigating his very thorough (and well designed) website, I was only really taken with these pictures (above).

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the minisite I designed and built to accompany the Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the New Museum.  Features include an audio slideshow, interactive timeline of Peyton’s life and career, and an essay by the show’s organizer Laura Hoptman.  Special thanks to Amy Mackie and Nick Hasty.

SARAH BRAMAN AND JOEL SHAPIRO A project inspired by dialogue between Rita Ackermann and Andrea Rosen Gallery September 13 - October 18, 2008 Gallery2

Lord knows I’m not a Joel Shapiro fan.  I find his post-minimalist sculptures downright offensive.  His anthropomorphized geometries appropriate the “look” of minimalism without retaining any of a good minimal sculpture’s finest attributes: aloofness, mystery, and ambiguity.  Shapiro’s sculptures are too immediately accessible, too easily read.  And all within the visual framework of a movement that at its best made the viewer work.

Despite this I’ll still visit a show in the back of Andrea Rosen Gallery which presents the work of two artists: Mr. Shapiro and Sarah Braman.  Braman’s are works I think I can get behind.  I’ll withhold any opining until after I’ve seen the show but I’m hoping that when both artists are presented together Shapiro will look even more the hack that he is.

This Friday and Saturday is FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27, an instruction-based performance that I wrote and directed.

September 26 & 27, 2008 | 8PM
Abrons Arts Center (directions)
466 Grand St., New York, NY (map)
$10 - RESERVE TICKETS NOW

Five simultaneous instruction-based performances overlap and weave together to develop an oblique exploration of love, loss, and the ambiguities of human bonding.

A total of 71 performances occur simultaneously in 48 minutes, overlapping according to the following structure:

- An action occurs every 1 minute for a total of 48
- An action occurs every 3 minutes for a total of 16
- An action occurs every 12 minutes for a total of 4
- An action occurs every 24 minutes for a total of 2
- An action occurs every 48 minutes for a total of 1

Each action is different, generated according to concise textual instructions. Each of the five performances develops individually and in aggregate to present a quasi-narrative rumination on human emotion.

The performance draws on the legacies of Fluxus event scores and Conceptual Art to generate an evening of ambiguity, improvisation, and absurdist performance.

FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27 will be accompanied by a collectible poster-sized program designed by David Rager graphically articulating each performance action and explaining the overall structure guiding the show.

FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27 is performed by Anthony P. Clune, Ryan Anthony Donaldson, Joseph Gross, Rick Herron, Ben Kerrick, Paul Moreno, and Ethan Wagner. Written and directed by Perry Garvin.

Katherine Gressel, Takeoff, 2008, acrylic on tyvek paper, 44 x 24 inches

Check out a show full of smart-looking work curated by my friend Jeanne Gerrity: Creative Cartographies at Brooklyn Arts Council.

From the release:

“Influenced by the organization inherent in cartography, the twelve Brooklyn-based artists in BAC Gallery’s latest exhibition, Creative Cartographies, present viewpoints both personal and political, mapping their own thoughts, journeys, and observations. Collectively, the artists show that structure and expression are not mutually exclusive and utilize a variety of materials to create imagined and real geographies. Maps traditionally suggest stability and a sense of purpose; they originally served to chart new territories and make the unknown less intimidating. In the age of Google maps and GPS, art inspired by maps continues to aid the viewer in navigating unfamiliar territory, but it also veers from the scientific and factual to the creative and subjective.”

The SFMOMA’s two massive Sol LeWitt atrium wall drawings - the last works still up from his retrospective in 2000 - are being painted over to make room for an upcoming Martin Puryear installation.

It doesn’t sadden me that they’re no longer on view.  Because the instruction set is the kernel of the work and can lead to infinite authentic resurrections, the piece is simply in one less place.  What’s more poignant to me is that after eight years the exhibition that changed the course of my personal, artistic, and professional life has finally concluded.

I feel fortunate that my first encounter with Conceptual Art wasn’t a chilly philosophical affair.  For while a Kosuth or Art and Language show would has been just as likely to pique my interest in this realm of art making, I’m grateful that it came in visual terms.  And in Sol’s unique way.  His work’s breathtaking delicacy, lyricism, intellectual rigor, and modesty are core features of the best art I could make and, by proxy, of the best life I could lead.

While his SFMOMA retrospective is now relegated to memory, I suppose it always was.  Our lives are lived in recollection, looking back on the wake of experience cast off from the fleeting present.

And since Sol’s work is fundamentally about the idea behind the work his pieces seem architected in the language of memory.  It’s appropriate, then, that his retrospective is now over - freed from binding physicality and loosened into the realm of remembrance.

Regular readers will know I’m simply mad about painter Kristine Moran.  Here’s a painting she made on view at a group show she is in at Anna Kustera Gallery.  Terrific, terrific.

John McCracken will be talking and signing books at David Zwirner in New York at 11AM this Saturday, September 13.