NARRATOR: 

Throughout their many years of collaboration, and in their respective solo careers, Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin have been influential in presenting social engagement as a form of art. Their collaborative partnerships with decidedly non-art communities have blurred the boundaries between subject and maker, audience and artist, and challenged museums and galleries as the exclusive domains of art experts.  

In 1998, SFMOMA commissioned the site-specific project Pictures Collected from Museum Visitors’ Wallets. The duo set up a copy stand in the museum’s lobby and asked visitors’ permission to photograph snapshots from their wallets. For more on that project, here’s artist Jon Rubin.  

JON RUBIN:  

The museum has this kind of constant stream. I mean, it literally looks like a river coming into the museum at points. And we thought, Well, why don’t we just sort of put a screen up to that river, or divert the river a bit towards our own purposes? In a way, to kind to look at, you know, sort of what people— what their values are. 

At the most basic level, it inverts the expectation of a museum visitor. You sort of expect to go to a museum to discover some, you know, artistic genius or some vision of someone who you’ve given the authority to create vision in the culture. And what we basically wanted to say is that perhaps, what is miraculous is already in your back pocket or your handbag; that vision creators, or this notion of who’s a kind of important cultural producer is nebulous, and it’s really just— it’s decided by institutions on a somewhat ad hoc basis. 

And we had, I think, about 150 people come through. We basically sat down with each person for probably about ten, fifteen minutes.  

And we started to talk to them about, you know, what they brought in their wallet, images that they— not that they needed, such as driver license, but ones that they decided to bring with them. You know, the photos you carry with you, you’re making a very condensed decision. And that decision, we found, was very reflective of, you know, sort of the perspective of that individual.  

So for the people who participated, they were generally thrilled to give out information.  

So they’re basically docenting us through their wallet and presenting, why these images should be in the museum’s collection, or why they’re interesting to themselves individually. So you know, in some ways, they— they take on a role of being sort of artists pitching, [chuckles] you know, a piece or— Which I thought that was great.