Note from author: This was originally going to be a collective review, but it didn't work out that way. The failed attempt at collective art criticism has given me greater respect for collective art making.

My gut reaction was salient dislike for this show, with a few pieces that were part of the Space 1026 effort as exceptions. The sheer abundance of current Bay area art cliches alone, prompted a serious bout of eye-rolling, though as none of the arts collectives represented were local, these art cliches must be national in scope.

For the record (in case this is being read at a sufficiently future date when the cliches of the mid 2000s have faded from memory), a short list of cliches in evidence: hipster color schemes (yellow, brown, pink, green), precious faux-naive drawing, 31 flavorism participatory art, lots of candid snapshots in a large grid, graphic references to abject pop culture icons from unfashionable eras, and images of the almighty deer head.

I counted 3 deer heads in the Royal Art Lodge's portion of the show and Space 1026's extensive display sported 2 deer heads, though perhaps there were deer heads amongst the multi-layered ephemera on the walls.

Count the deer heads could be the art show equivalent of the old childhood car trip game of slug bug (in which the first kid to spot a VW bug gets to punch the other kids sitting next to him/her on the arm). Deer head spotting - the game- would be much more rewarding a social art activity than Instant Coffee's attempt - the Bass Bench.

The bygone buzzword of "interactivity" has been replaced by "social practice" and "participatory" art. But while the high-tech hype of computer-based interfaces for audience engagement has been replaced by low tech everyday life-mimicking gambits -- the problems are similar. Both suffer from what I call 31 flavorism: audience participation through the choice of one of a bevy of similar items proffered by the artist. Does picking Low Fat Vanilla Almond Crunch or the blue one ... or a Little Eva 45 offer meaningful interaction? The enjoinder to choose one of a pre-selected set is limiting and its connotations of consumerism and shopping are especially problematic for an art movement which often values its work against consumerism and the Capitalist marketplace, and further, sees its cultural production as more authentic and personally rewarding.

It is ironic, that the logic of Instant Coffee follows that of big bad consumer culture -- you can't choose not to choose. Instant Coffee's unfinished plywood benches offer the stenciled admonishment, "Get social or get lost!" Though playing a record in an art center isn't an inherently social activity. ... But perhaps that's just me, who in college would treat the morning patrons at the library where I worked to Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music," in an attempt to avoid social interaction. Though certainly in this age of the ipod and itunes, listening to recorded music is often an asocial activity, and if listening to music is the goal, socializing impedes it. Perhaps if they put a boom-box in a tent, they could have called it the wepod ....

One could argue, "It's called the Bass Bench. It refers to DJ culture, which engages people and music in public space." With that, one could question how participatory that model is. Certainly people socialize at clubs or bars with DJs, but aren't people going in groups to galleries also socializing?

How artful is Instant Coffee's Bass Bench? What distinguishes it from the create your own mix CD booths at chain cafes and stores, or the mini jukeboxes at 50s themed diners? The collective is definitely based in the ethos of Kaprow's blurring art and everyday life, and thus the similar scenarios of their project to sites of commerce wouldn't be de facto objectionable. What purpose does putting a record player and some records in an art gallery serve? Is some significant statement being made? Why should we care? What do we, the audience, get out of it?

I get the feeling that Instant Coffee relies on a novelty factor for their work, which in the Bay Area with its highly-inventive avant-garde and extensive underground culture comes off as either hackneyed or ho-hum (like the group's make out parties that were part of SoEx's 30th Anniversary show in 2004).

In fact, YBCA's exhibition series of artist collectives is also operating on the novelty factor, and perhaps, in the visual art realm the collective's challenge to the myth of the individual genius artist is new (or newly new, as the art making collective had bouts of popularity and influence in the 60s and 80s). Perhaps this is testament to the issue of genre boundaries, so frequently blurred by artists here, but relatively intact at the institutional level. While in the visual art arena collective art making may be fresh and contemporary, compared to music, which also historically contained the same individual genius myth, collective composition is by all means nothing new.

Looking outside the boundaries of the visual art medium, Instant Coffee's work appears especially hackneyed. The Bay Area has a long and impressive history of public sound art from Phil Kline's annual Unsilent Night, a winter solstice event at which the general public is invited to bring boom-boxes and play as they walk, to a piece from the 1980s, orchestrated by Barb Golden in Oakland -- Public Hearing -- where all comers played their selected recordings over a loud speaker mounted on a building, to the recent "60 Second Symphonies" at Yerba Buena, performed by attendees and conducted by Jon Brumit and Marc Horowitz (in conjunction with last year's Erwin Wurm show). Tenderloin art bar, RX Gallery, has a weekly open DJ night, where attendees can bring in their ipods or audio recordings and play them for the public, not to mention things more in the pop culture vein, like the Sing-a-long Sound of Music, Rocky Horror, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Chicken John's Porn-e-oke.

I suppose it is in response to critical viewers like me that Instant Coffee stenciled on one of their benches, the self-effacing defense mechanism, "Instant Coffee does not have a monopoly on bad art." Am I supposed to feel more sympathetic to their work because of this statement? Am I supposed to think they are clever for saying they suck, a clich\'8ed punk rock gambit at least as old as I am? This of course begs the question, if the art is bad, and/or you acknowledge it's bad, why not do better? And why is it at Yerba Buena, an institution that has the curatorial and budgetary resources to exhibit good art?

Certainly, one imagines the ideal exhibition features works that take risks and succeed, but is failure worth showing? Personally, I'd rather see risky failures than well-crafted pabulum, but I don't even see much risk in what Instant Coffee did here (apart from equipment failure -- the record player had an "out of order" sign on my first visit). It has the fatuous toss-off quality that marks some of the less successful local efforts at conceptual or social practice art that rationalize their wan wankery through equating craft and intellectual rigor with elitism and authoritarianism, and masking the facile product of their work with fun and games, gimmicky props, or in Instant Coffee's case, a large flat screen monitor with a close up of the tacky knit bench covers and a series of public events in which other artists use their work as a platform. As an artist and curator, I did appreciate the gesture of the performances by local artists at "The Bass Bench," though these performances were their own thing, and didn't really cast Instant Coffee's piece in a more favorable light, and could be seen as an attempt at turd gilding.

The pink spray-painted interactive video keyboard from the Space 1026 crew was more participatory, in that it provided multiple openings for engagement. One could play with the sounds, try to elicit patterns of image and sound, experiment to figure out how it was constructed, or noodle for visual stimulus. While the thick pink coat of paint and the Nagelesque graphics didn't appeal to my personal aesthetic, I enjoyed the piece, as well as the "Please play purple copper poppies" electronic wall works, which seemed partly dysfunctional by the time I saw the show. The element of randomness and multiplicity of "ways to play" made these more rewarding than the Instant Coffee Bass Bench.

But let's step back from a critique of the art products, themselves. The curatorial statement emphasizes the collective nature of the work, the "communal open-ended creative process." This exhibition does well in presenting different forms of collective art practice. Royal Art Lodge's members take turns adding to the paintings in exquisite corpse-like fashion; Instant Coffee collaborates on a somewhat performative installation, and Space 1026 involves multiple artists in crafting an elaborate representation of their non-profit print studio and arts space.

The efforts of Space 1026 interested me most, as their project seemed only partly about art-making, but also about representing a cultural venue through an exhibition at another space 3000 miles away.

Their project was less meaningful to me as art works, but as documentation of a site of cultural production. I found it quite imaginative in its archival efforts with the all-over paste-up of posters and ephemera from past events, video documentation, a mini-library, and several works by individual artists. It definitely presented an image of overwhelming industry, some of it "mindless directionless energy," that corroborated with the image of the "innocent fresh out of art school skateboard kid" the space resembled to its founders.

The similarities in these Philadelphian posters to local efforts were quite striking: color schemes, subject matter, composition, and lettering. There is definitely a lot of local work that shares aesthetic sensibilities, and the skater art clubhouse galleries come and go and attract their loyal followings here in the Bay Area. The Space 1026 presentation reminded me most of the graphically-dense and exuberant local art website, fecalface.com.

In conclusion, when viewing this exhibition, I kept coming back to the critical question, "Can bad art be good programming?" As the curator of a venue for experimental work in many genres, I would be dishonest not to admit that some of our experiments were failures, though I wouldn't call Peer Pleasure I a failure, per se. The exhibition does succeed in answering the question, "What does collective art look like?" -- presenting 3 distinct approaches to collective art practice. It also succeeded in keeping to its agenda of following contemporary art trends, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, San Francisco being geographically distant from the locations where most of the contemporary art discussed in national and international publications is exhibited. Institutionally, as a regional art center, Yerba Buena challenges the stereotype of regional art centers as provincial backwaters and historical throwbacks, and for that I applaud this show.}