On 3 September 1988, MCASD presented Sky Poems 2, a performance and literary event created by poet and performance artist David Antin (1932-2016). The first stanza of the poem appeared in 1987 in the sky over Santa Monica. In La Jolla the following year, a team of aerial skywriters reproduced the second stanza over the beach and the Museum, writing letters in the sky with puffs of smoke. Thirty years later, this vividly ethereal work will be restaged in its original locations as a collaboration between MCASD, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Join us on the coast behind the Museum on the morning of September 29 for the first part of this day-long celebration, which will continue in Los Angeles that afternoon.
The Sky Poems project is organized by French artist Julien Bismuth as a tribute to Antin, who passed away in 2016. Antin wrote that the work was inspired by his childhood memory of a fleet of advertising planes sky-typing a message over Coney Island. His original idea for the piece was "an epic poem stretching across the United States... Gradually being written for people who would never see all of it." While Antin was only able to realize two parts of the epic poem, this 2018 revival will see the poem stretch across Southern California in a single day.
A great friend to MCASD and the San Diego art community, Antin was celebrated internationally for his performative talk poems developed in the early 1970s. He was a founding faculty member in the visual arts department at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught for 27 years. Antin published thirteen books and was the recipient of a Longview Award for Poetry; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984.
Julien Bismuth, associated artist of to the cycle While I was also listening [...] 2017-2018, initiated the restaging of Sky Poems as part of the yearlong curatorial and artistic project, with the support of director Sophie Kaplan.
A special symposium will be held at the Hammer Museum on Thursday 27 September, to commemorate Antin's legacy. The event will feature a group of poets, artists, and scholars, including Eleanor Antin, Julien Bismuth, Aram Moshayedi, Marjorie Perloff, and Jerome Rothenberg.David Antin is the central figure of the yearlong program dedicated to narrative run by La Criée, which borrows his title from him, While I was also listening to [...]. David Antin has been part of the two collective shows that opened and closed the program. The second show has presented a selection of Antin's archive on the Sky Poems project. The publication which follows the program includes an unpublished text written by the poet, entitled framed or being framed (to be to be published in December by Shelter Press).