Newport Beach Revisited

Traveling with a group of San Francisco artist friends in a 15-passenger airport limousine, video curator and videographer George Bolling recorded their 1972 road trip to show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Organized by Tom Marioni, director of the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, the trip itself and its documentation (by Bolling and Larry Fox) were considered to be works in Marioni’s exhibition The San Francisco Performance, which included Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Mel Henderson, Sam’s Cafe, and Bonnie Sherk. Several of the artists drove down together, making stops along the way to Baldasare Forestierre’s Underground Garden in Fresno and Chris Burden’s Bed Piece in Venice, California. One sequence features Henderson talking to the police about his intervention of spelling out ATTICA in Christmas lights on a ravine hillside. Art critic Charles Shere narrates the film, discussing key aspects of the significant work being made in Northern California at that time. Bolling produced this documentary in 1979 on the occasion of SFMOMA’s Space / Time / Sound-1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area, the first major museum survey of Bay Area Conceptual art and performance.