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Entries include tours of specific locations that range from in-gallery handheld audio tours, PDA tours, and podcasts tours to cell phone tours.
Jury Chair: Tom Drury
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
 GOLD:
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My
Oppressor, My Love
Whitney Museum of American Art and Antenna Audio
A superb introduction to and consideration of Kara Walker’s panoramic works on slavery and its corrosive legacy. Drawing on the commentary of Saidiya Hartman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Kruger, Greg Tate, and the artist herself, the Whitney’s tour deftly explores the origins and process of Walker’s art while locating it within the cultural/historical context that it illuminates. Averse to “’dumbing down’ the content,” as the Whitney’s entry puts it, the tour’s creators impressively decline to soft-pedal the violence and sexuality of Walker’s imagery or to simplify her profound achievements. The rich critical input enables us to understand and appreciate the artist’s work as never before, and the candid, nuanced, and always engaging discussion makes this our best in show.
Producers said:
In the fall of 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art presented the exhibition “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.” Walker’s work addresses themes of race relations and slavery with imagery that is at times violent, sexually graphic and provocative. The content of the exhibition can be unsettling and intense and, as the exhibition’s title suggests deliberately contradictory. The free audio tour was intended to both acknowledge these contradictions and to make sense of them; to give people license to experience a range of reactions to the work while helping them navigate through its range of meanings. The tour brings in varied perspectives to shed light on the works, featuring excerpts from an interview with the artist, scholars of African American culture and literature Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Saidiya Hartman, artist Barbara Kruger, and musician and writer Greg Tate. A main strength of this audio program was its narration. The tour tackles difficult subject matter of the exhibition with great sensitivity and compassion. Rather than “dumbing down” the content, its narrative presents complex ideas and concepts in accessible, clear and precise language. The program was produced by the Whitney Museum and Antenna Audio. The production team included Kathryn Potts from the Whitney Museum and Anne Byrd, Mara Gerstein and Peter Dunne from Antenna Audio.
 SILVER:
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
Museum of Modern Art and Acoustiguide
Judges said:
A great match of form and subject. Given Richard Serra’s engaging, down-to-earth analysis of his own work, the tour’s creators wisely step back and let him speak directly to the audience about the materials, inspirations, and milestones of his journey away from the picture plane. Drawn from three interviews, the audio is edited seamlessly into short vivid commentaries on specific works and moments throughout Serra’s career. There is nothing flashy in the audio or video components of the tour, and that’s a strength: navigation is easy, and nothing detracts from the seeming experience of making one’s way through the exhibition in the company of a generous and pathbreaking artist.
Producers said:
Serra has been known to say, "There is no work without the viewer," a reference to his focus on process and engagement. The direct, unmediated Acoustiguide audio program produced for MoMA's Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years ensured that viewers were at the fore as they experienced the overwhelming scale of Serra's works both physically and via the artist's personal insights. Since Serra is known as a skillful and enthusiastic communicator, the program is comprised of three separate interviews with the artist. In these, he discusses his early experiments with materials, his inspirations for creating forms, personal anecdotes, and experiences around fabrication and installation. Each of the three interviews is accompanied by a different soundscape. For example, the garden recording includes sounds of the city as well as people murmuring to one another amongst his ambulating forms. The 2nd floor recording incorporates reverberations playing off of MoMA's large galleries and Serra's huge plates of steel. The audio program for Serra's exhibition needed to reach audiences familiar with the artist's career, the more casual museum-goer, as well as online visitors. Audio from the Acoustiguide program also provided the soundtrack for four videocasts posted by MoMA on MoMA.org, YouTube, and iTunes.
 BRONZE:
Richard Prince Retrospective
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Judges said:
In the absence of an advance installation plan and in fact “uncertain as to what would be installed,” the creators of the audio tour for Richard Prince Retrospective decided to go directly to the sources of Prince’s work, which is based on the appropriation and representation of images from mass culture. The tour summons an eclectic panel of pop-culture practitioners, and the subject is not so much the meaning of Prince’s art as it is the meaning of the commonplace and often unremarkable imagery that became its focus. The result is a tour that is unexpected, fun to listen to, and very good at suggesting why the images and texts that fascinated Prince worked and continue to work as discovered art.
Producers said:
The Richard Prince: Spiritual America audio tour is the primary method of gallery-based interpretation for this exhibition. This fluid approach to interpretation also compliments the particular exhibition galleries of the museum – with organically unfolding ramps spiraling upwards. The program took an unusual approach to interpreting the work of a provocative contemporary artist. Recorded interviews with an eclectic pool of commentators form the basis of the tour: magazine editors, pornographers, cartoonists, television producers, ad executives, authors, and so on. The artist’s identity is filtered through these commentaries, much as it is in Prince’s use of appropriation. Visitors, become immersed in Richard Prince’s world and ideas. Because the commentaries come from outside experts, not art world experts, visitors are allowed to form their own perspectives in relation to what they’ve heard. Ultimately, Prince’s work is taken beyond the narrow confines of the art world, and visitors are left pondering American culture itself. This unusual approach creates a dynamic way for visitors to understand their experiences of art, encouraging questioning and drawing from their own experiences of the world to form an opinion of what they see. This is in keeping with the museum’s educational philosophy of encouraging questioning and debate about art.
 HONORABLE
MENTION: The
Goat’s
Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide
J. Paul Getty Museum
Judges said:
The Getty’s audio tour for the Graciela Iturbide exhibition is near perfect as an aural companion to Iturbide’s enigmatic black and white photography. Just as the photographs seem to tell a story, or to be scenes from within a story, so too does the audio tour create a satisfying narrative arc—tracing the phases of Iturbide’s work from Oaxaca to East Los Angeles to the American South. The instrumental score (which can so often seem an afterthought in audio tours) works beautifully, and was in fact composed for the photography. Another nice touch is that the English and Spanish versions are not direct translations of one another, but differ in content as well as language.
Producers said:
Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide is famous for her poetic, black-and-white photographs that explore the adaptation and reinvention of indigenous and colonial traditions within modern life. The Getty Museum exhibition The Goat’s Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide included iconic images of in Juchitán women as well as images of Chicano culture in Tijuana and East Los Angeles.Language is an important aspect of Iturbide’s art, perhaps most evident in the wording of her titles, which hint at multiple layers of meaning. For that reason and because of the Getty’s location within Los Angeles—a city populated by people of Mexican heritage—we created two versions of the audio tour: in Spanish and in English. Featured is Roberto Tejada, a bilingual writer and scholar with expertise in Mexican photography and Chicano art. He has written about Iturbide’s photography and has known her personally for many years. He was traveling with her when she made two of the images included in the tour, and describes circumstances firsthand. Innate to the Spanish language version is Tejada's poetic evocation of Mexican culture. The English version adds the necessary cultural context, through narrator-voiced commentary, to his insights. Original guitar music reflects the mood of each photograph.
More 2008 Muse Award Winners
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