Art Invades the Home at 10 Welcoming Addresses

A news conference is taking place in Jack and Patrice Waidner’s cozy family room. As onlookers crowd into the adjoining kitchen, Ditte Wolff steps up to a podium. From behind a gaggle of microphones she says gruffly, “I have no comment.” The onlookers mumble among themselves.

Has a neighborhood murder occurred? Has a kidnaping shattered the tranquility of this quiet, upscale community? Neither. Art is happening here.

The scene is an installation created in the Waidner’s four-bedroom Montecito home by Erika Rothenberg. Titled “The Celebrity Simulator,” it is designed, said the Los Angeles-based artist, to “make ordinary Americans feel as important as people on TV” by allowing visitors like Wolff to take the podium, face a camera and watch themselves on color TV.

The artwork is one of 10 major installations done in 10 Santa Barbara County homes open to the public today through Oct. 9 for “The Home Show,” an unusual exhibit organized by the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.

Eleven emerging and established artists from around the country worked in homes ranging from a serene ocean-front Eden to a dilapidated 80-year-old edifice in neighborhoods ranging from affluent to, as one artist said, “undesirable.”

With its roots in the modern art ethic that art should relate to life, the exhibit’s conceptual installations relate to each home--its architecture, its occupants, or both. Joseph Kosuth uses words and black paint to imbue a psychiatrist’s bedroom with Freudian innuendo, Ilene Segalove plays audio tapes about pets in the home of a woman who paints pet portraits, and Jim Isermann creates a hip conversation pit out of bright vinyl beanbag chairs in a classic ‘60s ranch house.

The show, inspired by a 1986 exhibit in Belgium, aims “to expand the boundaries of traditional exhibition formats,” said Betty Klausner, arts forum director and the exhibit’s organizer. “Artists are yearning to break out of the white walls of the museum and gallery. This also gives the public a chance to see art in a new situation.”

Added Kosuth, a leading New York-based conceptual artist and the only “Home Show” artist to take part in Belgium: “Art should have a life within the context of people’s lives, rather than people experiencing the institutionalization of art.”

Recurrent themes in “The Home Show” are sociological, as in Rothenberg’s stab at the mass media; architectural, as in David Ireland’s sculptural restructuring of an existing stairwell, or personal, as in the work of Lisa Hein.

Discovering that she shared an unhappy childhood with homeowner Cy Madrone, Hein created “Trouble Growing Up” throughout three stories of Madrone’s half-built habitat. It begins with a bottomless baby crib out of which rise bed sheets tied together like a jailbird’s lifeline--will the baby hoist himself to freedom, escaping family adversity, or fall into the dark crawl space beneath the crib?

“We imposed a biographical order on the visitors’ movement through the house so there’s a progression from scenes of infancy through adulthood,” Hein said.

An intriguing dynamic of the exhibit is the relationship between homeowners and artists, some of whom moved into their hosts’ abodes while working.

Most teams hit it off. New friends were made. At times, though, the chemistry wasn’t there, as with Hein and Madrone.

“At first I didn’t like him at all, he was very contrary,” Hein said. “But I liked his house, so the project was about getting to know him. We get along fairly well now.” (It turned out that Madrone, an architect, collaborated on the installation.)

Obviously, it takes an interest in art, or at least an adventuresome spirit, to give your home over to an artist or open it to the public. “Home Show” homeowners, four of whom are arts administrators, had both, said the art forum’s Klausner. And while it’s too early to ask what it’s like letting art-loving strangers traipse about, homeowners who have had company over seem content.

“It’s been fun. That’s the bottom line,” said Susan J. Rose, who recently threw a party in her Isermann-styled living room.

When the “Home Show” ends, most of its installations will be dismantled. Some will be for sale, however, and others may stay intact.

“I have no plans to alter it at all after the show,” said psychiatrist and bachelor Tatomer, speaking of his black bedroom by Kosuth. “To me it’s a piece of art. I don’t particularly care for the ‘Mona Lisa,’ but I wouldn’t put a mustache on her.”

Other artists in “Home Show” are collaborators Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Ann Hamilton, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Norie Sato.

To tour the exhibition--accessible Thursday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m.--pick up a map and tickets ($12 each) at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 7 W. De La Guerra St., Santa Barbara , (805) 966-5373. Saturday bus tours are also available.