Synopsis by Jingyoung Yoon

Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan come from a photography background which, as Sultan noted, is "unusual" in public art. They grew up in Los Angeles and were influenced by the traditions of movies, billboards and advertising. In 1972, they both went to graduate school at San Francisco Art Institute where they began to collaborate. For this presentation, Mandel and Sultan showed numerous collaborative works they have undertaken.

The first project shown, "Evidence"(1977), dealt with how photographs used to document scientific processes stay hidden in archives. Mandel and Sultan collected these photographs from outside an art context and created a new "fiction" or a "visual novel." They self-published this book and were interested in finding alternative ways to make their work public without going through curators and galleries.

Next they showed their billboards. They used billboards because they wanted to exploit and subvert the strategies of advertising. For them, the "context" really conditions how one reads the art work. They made incomplete messages that did not make enough sense in the advertisement. "The whole idea was to cause confusion to heat up the perception and activate viewer's attention," said Sultan.

In 1993, they did a project about education. They spent six months working with teachers and students in three San Francisco high schools and designed posters that were displayed on kiosks. The students provided visual and narrative material for them. These posters dealt with the situation in public education and, instead of being critical of the school system, the artists wanted to support the students. Through this project they learned that personal stories work as powerful tools in conveying abstract ideas or complicated situations.

The pool project in West Oakland was their first permanent public piece. Mandel and Sultan placed images of two local kids on a facade of the swimming pool using computer-digitized ceramic tile. For them, making public art in a place in which they do not live is very complicated. "What do you praise in this culture and how can you create something uplifting that the community will feel good about?" asked Sultan. This project made them shift their thinking, concerning how to function as artists in a community.

In every project their process is very similar. They function as photographers for their research and talk to the people in the area to gather information and ideas. "The pleasure of all this is that we get to work as photographers. The pleasure of being a photographer is that you get to hang out, look and talk to the people, and get your ideas that way, and then it becomes something else. Mike and I are in some way still functioning as documentary photographers. None of our work looks documentary but that training and that pleasure is still there," said Sultan.

Mandel and Sultan also showed some works in progress and examples of their individual works. One of the projects that Mandel did with his wife, Chatal Zakari, is a web site. They were communicating with each other through the internet on a very intimate level, within the electronic public space. Sultan also did several projects with his wife, Kelly Sultan, and with his students. He was questioning himself, "What is public space and how do we get people to pay any attention?" and was constantly looking for an alternative space outside the art institutions. In 1994, collaborating with his wife, he did a milk cartoon series called "Have You Seen Me?" This project used teenagers voices to define and defend themselves against gender stereotypes. Some of the Sultans' projects caused national media attention. He regards these as the more successful ones because they were art works that had life outside of the object or the image, and became part of the public dialogue and debate.

Sultan's and Mandel's main concern was to challenge the idea of public life and shared experience. All their works are anonymous and they are looking for alternative spaces to reach the "real" people in public spaces. According to Sultan, "Our collaboration requires a lot of arguing and discussing. It is not just about cooperation but about discourse which can be critical and argumentative."

Analysis by Leigh Anne Langwell

For artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, the context of the information in their work shapes the way the information is interpreted. Much of their collaborative artwork began in the postmodern convention of removing images from their original base of information and investing new meaning through recontextualization. As their work has progressed, their objectives have shifted more toward the introduction of public space within the intimate sphere of private domain. The voice of their work has also shifted from that of an impersonal imperative toward the use of individual voices and narratives, to represent larger issues While irony consistently resides at the heart of their perceptions and serves as a wake up call to their audience, the edge of cynicism that marked their earlier projects has been overtaken by a desire to create work that has the capacity to be as supportive as it is critical. The changes in their approach and bearing have created an artistic discourse expansive enough to express the deepening of concerns they have experienced over the duration of, both, their public projects and individual careers.

Mandel and Sultan discussed the role that the nature of the space they utilize has to play in their work. It became clear to them, early on, with their installation "Newsroom" that museum and gallery spaces were restrictive to attendance, as people have to make a conscious choice to enter those spaces. Intellectual and aesthetic agendas within the administrational framework of these spaces tends to exclude wider segments of a given audience. With the exception of their billboards, most of their other public spaces need funding from other sources to become anything more tangible than just good ideas. Part of the appeal of the earliest billboards, however, was their ephemeral appearance from seemingly nowhere and the fluidity with which the artists could move within their own intellectual and visual terrain. There is no doubt that Mandel and Sultan are keenly aware of the conflicts that can arise in the process of collaboration with larger public agencies and struggle to stay as true to their initial intent as that process will permit. One of the overarching impressions within their presentation and within the field of public, in general, is that spaces of every nature contain conditional imperatives that often wind up altering the ideas’ artworks set within it. These alterations are not necessarily detrimental and can even be an asset to the evolution of the artwork, but they do often force the artists to weigh the integrity of their original ideas against a checklist of concerns existing well outside the scope of the work.

Some of the pitfalls and rewards of the collaborative process were discussed on personal, as well as institutional, levels. The artists jokingly stated that they collaborate because they often feel that they are in over their heads with the volume of work and concerns related to the artistic process. While two people can more easily circumvent potential flaws and analyze successes and failures with greater perception, the collaborative process is not always one of friendly mutual agreement. Argument and criticism are necessities of the process to modify and enhance ideas. One of the pitfalls of collaboration on a more individual level is that the process can be insular to the point that interpretations outside those conceived by the individual artists are sometimes overlooked. Many conflicts can also arise in collaborative negotiation within institutional parameters, especially involving creative concerns, social and political imperatives and issues in remaining true to the subject while maintaining the original information and intent.

While Mandel and Sultan's work does make an effort to educate its audience, it does so without oversimplification. Their work maintains a certain amount of ambiguity that provokes dialogue and allows their audience to "fill in their own gaps." The nature of their work, for the most part, spurs the audience to think about a particular issue, not necessarily what to think about it. Larry Sultan assessed the success of a public work in terms of its ability to move from a physical space to a discursive space and mentioned, as a means to create, a debate that goes outside of art and becomes richer and more public. The press and the internet also enter into the private sphere and so serve to blur the boundaries between public and private space, furthering the scope of the dialogue generated by their individual works.