Museum Chief, Version 2.0

Perennially hip, technologically savvy and attuned to the show-biz side of the art world, David A. Ross is in his element. About three years into his tenure as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he is perusing the museum’s latest exhibition, “010101: Art in Technological Times,” with the gusto of a kid in bell-and-whistle toy heaven.

He’s so enchanted with the centerpiece of the show, Sarah Sze’s deconstructed Jeep Cherokee, called “Things Fall Apart,” that he’s sure the public will want it to remain at the museum as a permanent fixture. Made of a vehicle that has been sliced into three pieces, pulled apart, packed with magical vignettes of consumer-age detritus and installed as a sweeping spiral in the museum’s central, open staircase--Sze’s work, says Ross, is not only a stroke of contemporary brilliance, it’s an update of Italian Futurism.

Standing in galleries that display an eclectic array of video works, sound pieces, digital projects, multimedia environments, paintings and sculptures, the 52-year-old director says he is so smitten with Roxy Paine’s automated sculpture-making device, “SCUMAK,” that he’s going to buy it for his home. The improbable, computer-driven contraption spews out a stream of warm, liquefied red polyethylene, which falls into an irregular, coiled stack on a conveyor belt. As the material cools, it settles into a voluptuous blob, which moves down the belt and makes way for the process to start again.

“It’s so fabulous,” Ross says. “Roxy has built a machine that regulates the amount of stuff that comes out at any one time, the cooling time between layers and the agitation of the material. It has an unlimited number of variations. Plus they are beautiful. And the color, that red, it’s like a giant hunk of lipstick.”

Moving on through the show, Ross implores visitors not to miss Janet Cardiff’s piece, “The Telephone Call,” a 17-minute audio and video walk through the museum that mixes real sights and sounds with astonishingly believable recorded effects. “You’ve never experienced anything like it,” Ross tells a gathering of onlookers. Then he confides: “We have decided to acquire it for the collection because it freezes a moment in time of this museum’s physical history.”

Just when it seems that Ross might be planning to buy the entire show, along comes Phyllis Wattis in her wheelchair. “I have to see what’s going on,” says the 96-year-old trustee and philanthropist who has given the museum nearly $100 million so far, including funds for works by Piet Mondrian, Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse and Brice Marden.

When Ross arrived in San Francisco in 1998, he took charge of a museum that had an imposing new building--a $65-million edifice designed by Swiss architect Mario Botto, which opened in 1995--and a weak collection. Hired by the trustees as a visionary who could push the museum into a leading position, he was wooed with the promise of funds to significantly upgrade the collection.

Galleries devoted to the permanent collection offer impressive evidence that the promise has been kept, by Wattis and many other major donors. And the art world has noticed. “No American museum has been as big a player in acquiring the best contemporary art available as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” the New York Times noted in April 1999, about nine months after Ross became director of the institution.

The museum’s new building in Yerba Buena Gardens, a 12-block redevelopment project south of Market Street, made it a popular destination. But under Ross’ leadership, SFMoMA seems to have attracted an even larger following. On his watch, annual attendance has grown from 545,000 to 725,000, membership has increased from 24,000 to 40,000, and the endowment has jumped from $32.2 million to $55.8 million.

The facts and figures suggest that Ross can do no wrong in San Francisco. And that’s quite a change for a guy who left a messy situation at a much more prominent institution in New York to lead SFMoMA. As director of the venerable but embattled Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1991 to 1998, Ross was embroiled in so many controversial exhibitions, expansion plans and trustee power plays that it sometimes appeared--at least in press accounts--that he could do no right at the Whitney.

Ross doesn’t put it that way, but changing coasts has transformed his professional life, he says. “There’s a big difference between California and New York. The subtitle of life in New York is ‘Waiting for the Crucifixion.’ In California, people do not feel that your success comes at their expense. It’s not a zero-sum game. One of the things that makes New York so powerful, as well as so difficult, is that it is a zero-sum game there. You measure your success against everyone else’s failure.”

*

A native New Yorker who grew up on Long Island, Ross says he still loves New York but doesn’t miss working there. “You know how it is if you’ve had a toothache for a real long time, and you finally get the tooth fixed? When the pain goes away, you say, ‘Did I live with that?’ A human being can accommodate anything.”

His move from New York to San Francisco isn’t quite the leap it might appear to be, however, because he got his professional start in California. He was deputy director for programs at the Long Beach Museum of Art from 1974 to 1977 and organized a landmark program of video art there. He became acquainted with the Bay Area from 1977 to 1981 while serving as assistant director for collections and programs and chief curator of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. He was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston for nine years before his directorship at the Whitney.

“I’m one of the luckiest people in the world,” says Ross, whom colleagues describe as an eternal optimist. “So many people spend their lives trying to get even remotely close to what they really love for a couple of days a week, or a couple of days a month, or on vacation. I don’t take vacations very often because I really love what I do.

“Yeah, there’s stress in it,” he says. “Running a big business is running a big business, whether it’s a for-profit corporation or a not-for-profit museum. Having 270 employees whose livelihoods depend on me making reasonably good decisions is somewhat stressful. But I just love what an art museum is and what it does. And how can you not love an art museum that is so embraced by its community as we are?”

Part of his luck is that he “walked into a situation that was beautifully built” by former SFMoMA Director John R. Lane and his staff, Ross says. “They really worked hard to build the confidence of the community and to ignite them. In the early 1980s, this was a quiet scene, to put it kindly. There were some great artists, but the art community was never on fire.”

While some local artists privately note that the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts--just across the street from SFMoMA--routinely trumps its wealthy neighbor with exhibitions of up-to-the-minute contemporary art, Ross has brought a new emphasis on technologically related art to his institution.

Too young to ride the wave of art and technology that hit the art world in the late 1960s, he became involved in the early 1970s through his interest in video. “My feeling was that if television was the dominant information and entertainment medium in American culture, it was important to mess with that machinery,” he says. “And the only way you could do that was through poetry of one sort or another. I thought it would be great if artists could have direct access to the medium, and if art museums would just get out of the way and allow artists to have direct relationships to people who don’t have to buy into the sociology of the art world.”

Reflecting on his naivete, Ross says his hopes for video didn’t pan out. “Video became a branch of sculpture, and an incredible one” in the work of Bruce Nauman and other artists, he says. “But I got disillusioned with the idea that it was going to allow for a profound change in social relations.”

As he watched the evolution of the Internet, he decided that a seminal change in artistic discourse was beginning to happen in another way. Rather than leading the charge, artists were among masses of people who gravitated to the Internet and figured out ways to adapt it to their purposes, he says. Using the Internet as an artistic medium, artists could do their work without confronting gatekeepers of the conventional marketplace and museum system.

“It would seem that institutions were made obsolete immediately, but we have a role to play,” Ross says. “The museum is like a search engine for people who don’t have time to find these works of art. Like the good bookstore you can come to and find great poetry, we gather things that we think are significant and connect people to artists.”

The works on display in “010101” compose the second component of the exhibition, which was launched online with five Web-based commissions at one minute after midnight on Jan. 1. The title of the show refers to the timing as well as to the digital system of converting information into zeros and ones.

The exhibition was organized by five curators and sponsored by Intel Corp. Ross acted as a sort of moderator for the project, which includes everything from paintings by Kevin Appel and Adam Ross to Karin Sander’s tiny, computer-generated plastic sculptures of people, and Jochem Hendricks’ ink drawings, made by a device that tracks his eye movements.

*

Enthusiastic as Ross may be about “010101,” he makes no grand claims about its significance. “It’s another show, another set of ideas put out there to start conversation,” he says.

And the conversation will get more interesting on Friday, when an exhibition called “Points of Departure” opens, he says. The show of art from the 1960s, drawn from the permanent collection, is accompanied by hand-held devices that allow viewers to learn much more about the works on view than they could from traditional wall labels, accessing artist interviews, critical commentary and other contextual sources.

The technology for “Points of Departure” was developed by the museum as a multimedia program called “Making Sense of Modern Art,” which Ross expects to market to other museums. “It’s just something that happened as a natural byproduct of the fact that so many people around here are engaged in thinking,” he says. “I would have been foolish not to recognize its importance, and that it should be shared and brought to the marketplace.”

Launching a specialty software company doesn’t present a conflict of interest for the museum, he says. “Rather than just asking other people to give me a percentage of their companies because we want them to do the right thing and be good citizens, why not have our own company? The entrepreneurs on our board love the fact that I think entrepreneurially. They love the fact that when I ask them for money, I have done everything I can to earn it myself.

“I don’t see it as a compromise; I’m wired that way. But no matter how well that product does, it’s never going to remotely equal the kind of generosity we have had from our supporters,” he says.

Ross takes an equally broad view of the museum’s mission. While critics debate whether art museums should be temples for the elite or cultural theme parks, he contends that they can--and should--be both.

“The worst thing is if we think we understand those verities about art, but the poor general public doesn’t,” he says. “We all live in the same commodified culture. It’s not as jarring as it seems to be part of an experience that is actually popular and still be able to engage in something that’s individualistic and singular. Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

*

“010101: Art in Technological Times,” through July 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., San Francisco, (415) 357-4000. Open Fridays-Tuesdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.