Hammer Blog

The Hammer Museum is looking for actors to participate in an artist project April 7-10th, 2011.

Ana Prvacki’s project, "Greeting Committee," is a dynamic scene in the entrances of the Hammer museum that magnifies and zooms in on the protocols and customs of basic hospitality routines, such as greetings, salutations, and welcoming. Working with UCLA students and the local community, the artist and the museum will invite visitors to participate in practical demonstrations and practices of cultural manners with each other.

Actors will be working within these groups of students led by etiquette instructors to improvise and facilitate social and public aspects of etiquette practices and gestures. This is an improv, unscripted situation with a fun, slapstick side actors can explore - as the artist said ”imagine Emily Post meets Borat".

The events will take place in the museum lobby April 7- April 10. The Hammer is looking

FANTASIES OF SOCIAL HARMONY, ETIQUETTE AND SLAPSTICK
By Ana Prvacki

Being half Romanian made me only half a stranger growing up in Yugoslavia. As a teenager my family immigrated to Singapore as Yugoslavia was self-destructing. Living in Singapore as an East European teenager was doubly foreign, as puberty can be a kind of exile, similar to a culture shock you would have coming from Eastern Europe to South East Asia overnight. Plutarch wrote, "The soul is itself exiled, errant, an arrival from elsewhere. Birth is a voyage into a foreign land". Within this foreign land, assimilation and adaptation are like survival mechanisms, important techniques within the choreography where appropriate behavior and etiquette are essential. To me these rituals of protocol hold a promise of social harmony, or at least engage a fantasy of it, opening doors for others and shaking hands with intent could possibly save the world if

The artist’s book Heat, (1989) recently acquired by the Grunwald Center, is a collaboration between the artist Robert Gober and the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote this short story about the life and premature death of a pair of twins in a small American town. Gober designed the two locked diaries, which include images inspired by the text with printed endpapers created by the artist. The text is hand-written by the artist. Heat is an edition of 140 with 10 Artist Proofs. The Grunwald has AP 1/10.

Robert Gober. Heat, 1989. AP 1/10. Book, 2 volumes: text printed on Saunders paper with lithography for end paper, outside of books are leatherette, each volume 5 ½ x 7 ½ in (19.1 x 14 cm). Collection Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum.Gift of the artist.
order essay

The museum has recently acquired Black Lagoon (2010) by Haim Steinbach for the Hammer Contemporary Collection. Over the past three decades, Steinbach has become known for his sculptures that place ordinary objects on display—some purchased, others borrowed—to explore the intersection of our personal desires, memories, and cultural values. The relationship of the objects to one another can appear non-existent at first glance, but reveals itself to be dense and multilayered after closer inspection. The objects chosen for Black Lagoon refer to amphibious creatures, the natural landscape, and Hollywood’s B-movie past all at once while their boldly-colored shelves recall the geometric forms of modernist sculpture.

Haim Stenbach. Black Lagoon, 2010. Plastic laminated wood shelf, rubber dog chew, resin and coir boot scraper, plastic "Creature from the Black Lagoon" figure, plastic sand scooper. 54 ¾ x 68 ½ x 21 inches (136.5 x 174 x 53.3 cm). Hammer Museum

A.I.R. artist Ana Prvacki shares her research and reflections on hospitality and manners in this weekly blog. Her project, Greeting Committee, will be presented at the Hammer from April 7 through 10.

TOO SWEET
By Ana Prvacki

I grew up with a possibly semi fictional story about multicultural manners and misunderstanding. My Romanian mother married my Serbian father and moved to Yugoslavia in 1975. There was a lot of curiosity about her arrival, family and neighbors were all dying to meet her, a young foreigner from the land of gypsies, vampires and Ceausescu, what could be more fun over coffee! Apparently they knew she was pretty but also possibly a thief, or at least very hungry and wild. And when she finally arrives she is tiny, does not speak a word of Serbian and is understandably confused by her welcoming committee standing expectantly in the doorway. Someone