Outside Event 1: Doug Hall Lecture at SFSU

Link to Doug Hall's official website: http://doughallstudio.com

Not long ago artist Doug Hall came to SFSU to give students and faculty a talk on his past work.  He graduated in Harvard in 1966 and got his MFA in Sculpture.  The opening of his talk was a video piece that was very reminiscent of old slide projectors.  It was a political piece presented as a timeline of photographs with explanations of what was going on at the time in between.  The video focused on the 1960s through 1970s: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, and the coming forth of the gay population.  The video was completely photographs and text with violin music playing in the background.  Doug describes himself as a product of East Coast Suburbia of the 1950s and this perspective comes across in his work.  But in college he became radicalized and involved with the anti war movement as well as Marxist philosophy.

Out of everything he presented, I was most engaged by his MFA project called The Inner Space Modulation Portal.  It was designed as a control station where Doug would live for 7 days in a building at the school.  He described it as a performance piece where he was on a journey of the mind while in one place; he also said that the experience felt a lot like being high on drugs, though he didn't specify what kind.  There was a screen outside of the piece that showed his face inside and he could communicate with those who stood directly in front of it.  My favorite part of this work was the fact that people started to trust him and came down at 3 A.M. to talk to him as if he were some kind of confessional.  When he came out of the machine he described the experience as being reborn as an artist, I found this statement quite beautiful.  His mother was even there for the ceremony.

After Grad school Hall and a couple of his friends started the T.R.U. Collective.  They did more performance pieces such as walking down Mission Street painted entirely white and another called Thirty Two Feet Per Second Per Second where they were attached to a wall about 25 feet high sitting in chairs with cameras and microphones.  

Another video piece that was interesting yet confusing for me to understand was called Really I've Never Done Anything Like this Before where a dual screen of scissors are shown cutting a sleeve revealing the arm within, while the excerpt of a book was read.  He also shared some photographs that I really enjoyed because they made me laugh.  They were called Teaching Old Hats New Tricks and they involved Doug with a bunch of hats in a row on objects that made them look like they were performing circus tricks.

All in all I was really impressed and inspired by all of Doug's work and he is currently working on several projects that he is really excited about.  I will continue to follow his work.