From humble beginnings, the collection of the Pear Museum has grown exponentially. Initially made up of works by artists taking part in the (now revered) Pear Resident Practitioner Program (P.R.P.P), it has swollen to include 50,000 holograms, translocative simulations and multi-clone-related media works, many of which were acquired from Kenneth Mader’s New York gallery. Pear also owns some 22,000 traditional works such as paintings, sculptures, digital videos, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and design objects, as well as film stills, scripts, posters and historical documents. The museum’s Visual Research Centre contains 300,000 books, artists’ books and periodicals, and the museum archives hold approximately 2,500 linear feet of pre-digital, digital and post-digital documentation and a photographic archive of tens of thousands of prints, including installation views of exhibitions and images of the museum’s building and grounds under construction.

From the day the Pear Museum opened, in March 2021, its collection has attracted a degree of public interest equal to that of its performance and events program. However, since that day, three major pieces of work have been notable by their absence. ’s The Fall, Adam and Eve Tempted by the Pear; Flag 2019 by Todd Cross and David Destino’s Young Cyber-Virgin Auto-Cloned by Her Own Pearpod® III were all, unfortunately, damaged during the opening night’s festivities. In March this year, RePear Central® announced that, after a painstaking struggle and some major scientific breakthroughs, the restoration of all three works was nearing completion. The museum immediately confirmed a date for ‘Re-Launched: The Pearmanent Collection’ and, although repair work on The Fall fell short of completion(1) and Cyber-Virgin III was, in fact, stolen the night before the event,(2) the re-launch went ahead, on Friday May 12th, and Cross’ immaculate Flag 2019 stole the show.

For anyone who had witnessed the sorry state of Flag 2019 before it reached RePear Central®, seeing it at the re-launch, looking more impressive than on the day it was painted, was quite breathtaking. And, after being upgraded with Pear’s new all-encompassing, as-yet-unnamed hardware, Destino’s two (remaining) Cyber-Virgin sculptures were also looking more striking than when they were created. In keeping with the concept of his project, each time new Pear hardware is released, the sculptures are fitted with the latest cutting-edge device. On their completion, in 2021, the sculptures were fitted with vintage laptops which were replaced last year by the Peartop® then the Pearpod® and here, as part of ‘Re-Launched’, by the state-of-the-art Pear device which will, apparently, go by the name PearUntitled®.

Beyond the hype surrounding the reintroduction of damaged works and the unveiling of PearUntitled®, ‘Re-Launched’ served as a debut outing for many recent acquisitions, including Destino’s impressive installation Pearcine, Marguerite Gruin’s hologram Monument to Everyone Who Has Ever Loved, documentation of Conversate by Sol Zimmerman and Shirlee Brumley’s Shirlee From the Streets series of hologramatic stills. While the Pearmanent Collection is characterized by wide-ranging subject matter and media, the pieces listed above have much in common, not least with regard to their imaginative play on the properties of time-based art.

Destino’s Pearcine which, on a superficial level, could be described as a sensationalist pig factory is, on further investigation of its technical and theoretical implications, fascinating. In making this work, Destino invented a new category of ephemeral art. Almost as soon as the installation was documented, prior to the press preview on the morning of the re-launch, one of the pigs ran away and the rest began to biodegrade due to their accelerated lifespans. Destino, who had already been invited to exhibit the piece in several other museums, did not seem overly worried by this development and simply ordered that the piece be remade (i.e. the pigs re-cloned) in the afternoon for the purpose of the public opening and the same logic be applied every time it was to be shown in the future. In this way, he also removed any obstacles to the work being held in the museum collection as it will be recreated every time it is brought from the vaults and into public view.
Monument by Gruin, on the other hand, is bound by a conceptual contract that it will only be exhibited once. The hologram, of infinite duration, is not a monument in the traditional sense of a three-dimensional object but a moving hologram, depicting two lovers, which freezes after several minutes to leave an illusion of, or allusion to, traditional sculpture. Technically, Gruin’s piece is a moving hologramatic projection but, from the point at which the footage is suspended, one could plausibly deem it a hologramatic still.
The ambiguity of expression of the ‘frozen’ lovers is echoed in the faces of the homeless people represented in Brumley’s Streets series. Shirlee Brumley’s work is notable for its grit and determination, achieving a feeling of authenticity in the stills that can, perhaps, only be accomplished by an artist with deep empathy for her subjects. Brumley, who spent many years ‘down and out’ in L.A. before becoming involved with an Art Vengeance social services project, has embarked on a remarkable journey from rags to riches. Despite her new-found success, the young artist remains ‘Shirlee from the Streets’ and, when photographing the weak and diseased of her former haunts, avoids the vulgarity of paying her subjects to disrobe. The interplay of dominance and subordination in the act of viewing another is never called into play here, as there exists profound mutual respect between artist and subject.

While undoubtedly a more somber affair than the grand opening of the Pear Museum, ‘Re-Launched: The Pearmanent Collection’ served as a landmark event, illustrating the progress this museum has made and the immense impact it has had, and will continue to have, on the local, national and international art sector. Although much had been made of the re-introduction of some of the original works into the collection, what can be drawn from the proceedings is more a sense of a changing tide in art than a re-instatement of the old guard. While Destino, with his youthful enthusiasm and caustic wit, admittedly goes from strength to strength, perhaps some of his contemporaries lack the guile and resolve needed to hold their own in an experimental creative climate dominated by an exciting new breed of talent fresh from the PearUnis®, P.R.P.P. and L.A. alternative scene alike.

Mikki LeBeau is a regular contributor to Pear Journal. He is course leader of American Dream Studies at PearUni®IV in Chicago where he recently initiated an artists’ and entrepreneurs’ residency program open to students of all PearUni®s.

1. After three years attempting to remove the red-wine-fuelled vomit of elusive architectural critic, Kermit Brine, from ’s masterpiece, on the eve of the re-launch the work was agonizingly close to completion. After much consultation, Chief Pear Scientist Joel Eppinger III, decided that what was required was a natural antidote to the vomit. Accordingly, the painting was hung for the re-launch and Brine – who had been banned from Pear Museum since his exploits on March 6th 2021 – was controversially invited to attend. Through the course of the evening, he was encouraged to consume vast quantities of Pear House White® and was then led to admire, at close quarters, the precision for detail and realism displayed in’s work before projecting a stream of clear, watery vomit against the painting at point-blank range, at which point equilibrium was restored.
2. The perpetrator had substituted the iconic sculpture for a box of bones, a feather, a burnt out Malawi Rainbow cigar, a cuddly toy, a copy of Ricardo Powell’s new title Religious Art at a Crossroads (on it said ‘Onitsed’, which is ‘Destino’ on its head) and a vintage food blender. The theft is believed to be a hoax as it is not expected that the perpetrator intends to sell the piece on the black market. RePear Central® representatives are unsure if it was a prank or is linked to an abusive message, received by Pear Museum, complaining about the use of sexually-explicit imagery in Destino’s work. The motive is unclear but the artist said, if the act was designed to scare him, it had not worked. He continued, ‘it was an encouraging response to my work. If someone has a problem with my provocative imagery then, obviously, I would prefer it if they tried to scare me in this way than if they spoke to me about it in a civilized manner.’