Here you can see the last alteration to the PWC 1st Public White Cube in the SF MOMA in San Francisco. What agitations we have had to deal with! Our leg was pulled once, when a bidder didn’t change anything at all and conned us instead into believing in a digital manipulation, and then Scott MacLeod constructed a “Situation Room” that led to diplomatic resentment between him, the PWC-team, and a leading member of the museum staff. And shortly before the end, Aiofe van Linden Tol simply made mincemeat of everything and presented the Public White Cube as a post-apocalyptic heap of shards. As a consequence, what our last winner Emanuel Tschumi has realised now appears almost tame by comparison. Tschumi is a professional. He is an art director and designer in Zurich. And so he sets a milder tone. Our final is pure poetry.

Tschumi, prominent graphic artist of the otherwise strictly typographic Zurich scene, borrowed an old issue of the magazine “Twen” from 1968, a water-shed year in Europe, from his good friend Willy Fleckhaus‘ archive, and has sent one page half way around the world by courier. He included a few pins in the package and asked the museum team to hang it up, unframed, somewhere in view of our webcam. Twen was a slick magazine with outstanding graphics; an epochal boost in the graphic design zeitgeist and a libertarian mag promoting the liberated Radical Chic. And Fleckhaus was co-founder of this free-thinking gazette, at least before he influenced the book and magazine design of bourgeois West German intellectualism at Suhrkamp and a major German daily newspaper. Fleckhaus is a hero of graphic design in Europe, who died - quite suitably - in Italy.

And what do we see in the PWC today? A naked couple on a horse, riding through a landscape of dunes with their tracks in the sand visible in the foreground. Alas, the romance of youth! Soft-core kitsch. Sexual liberation for older newspaper voyeurs. But then there is the charm, the commercial utopia of a world now perished, an item of published private taste on a museum wall. Tschumi wants to reconcile us with ourselves, and in the process he has got hold of an original for the museum - an original with an aura. He sends it in the post from old Europe to the Pacific coast. Sure, it is an “original” that comes from a magazine distributed in a large edition. But it is still a collector’s piece. He would like it to be placed - almost ironically, one might suppose - so that it is visible from the webcam. In the end, is that what’s left of the idea of participation? A romantic, transfiguring signal from the past? But in the end, even when you’re riding off into the sun, points for performance always count. Tschumi - expert on art books and friend to artists - has explained quite casually how appropriation works. He doesn’t take the museum seriously. He has created a memorial to Willy Fleckhaus, but only a small, an ironic memorial. It doesn’t matter what you hang on the walls. The important thing is that your clothes fit comfortably and that you ignore the deadly solemnity of museum politics.

Wham! That struck home. Aoife van Linden Tol, our winner of the week, has made a real hit with her intervention – and she’s managed to do so without adding anything that wasn’t already there within the sacred walls of our little Public White Cube. There’s not much left of Scott MacLeod’s “Situation Room” now. For London artist Aoife is famous for blowing up all sorts of things and scattering the pitiful remains in the exhibition space. And so she assigned us the task of turning Scott’s interior into mincemeat. From “Situation Room” to “Situation Doom”, as she calls her intervention!

Scott’s white and black boards, his maps and tables stick out – or rather broken bits of them - from Ledia Carroll’s sand dunes. Aoife’s fury of destruction didn’t even stop at the dummy’s legs in their jeans and training shoes. They lie among the other parts of the previous installation as if in a splatter film, lending the entire Public White Cube the uncanny atmosphere of the site of a bombing attack. And yet, although it is almost impossible to believe: this installation seems tidy, somehow. When you take a step back, van Linden Tol’s smash-up massacre has reconciled all the disparate stuff that MacLeod carted into the Public White Cube last week with Carroll’s sand dunes. The explosive force of public participation in a museum exhibition, which led to factionalism of all kinds last week, has been subdued by an explosion, oddly enough.

You’re not satisfied with this? You have a better idea, a better suggestion? Now our very last auction has began. Make your bid! There won’t be another opportunity like this for a long time. Whatever you do, you will determine the final face of the Public White Cube .

Ultimately, it is only a question of temperament whether you call this a full-blown argument or a difference of opinions. There is no argument about the facts, certainly - although in the meantime, neither side is very happy about the publicity; the museum no doubt even less so than Scott M. MacLeod, our second to last bidder.

But what was it all about when an assistant curator at the museum and the bidder documented their mutual lack of understanding for the constraints and needs of the other side? One fact is that MacLeod did not want to shut the double doors to the exhibition room, which have only really been opened for photographs and alterations up until now. MacLeod, a “preparator” at the SF MOMA and a professional artist, wanted publicity for his intervention. He saw the room as part of the overall exhibition and wanted to move it visually closer to the other exhibits. He attacked the PWC team in Berlin and chafed against the regulations and restrictions of the museum, which is a major institution with routines and conventions aimed at smoothing the course of day-to-day professional life, and is - ironically - also MacLeod’s employer.

The assistant curator refused to comply with MacLeod’s special wishes. Declaredly unhappy about the continuing misappropriation of the MOMA’s curatorial staff for participative services, she demanded adherence to regular procedures. In MacLeod’s view, she coolly informed the winner of the auction that the public would surely manage to find its own perspective. Perhaps this was not the exact dialogue. Our webcams don’t convey dialogues, nor do they allow us to share any heated debates about the precise limits of a museum’s participation. The whole exhibition project is called the Art of Participation. But what actually is the role of art in all this participation? And when is the point when participation becomes painful for a museum, to which even small participatory steps must seem like a disturbance of its peaceful running, since even interactive museum art is directed towards preservation?

It is difficult to say who is right, even though we can’t help feeling certain sympathy for this defiant bidder. MacLeod is testing the system. Sometimes, he does so in an aggressive way, when he attacks us, for example. He is concerned about his work and lays claim to all the conservational care that he begins to resent when the museum refuses to open the door to Pandora’s Box. But his questions are well thought out. He suspects us of bigotry because of our part-time participation, and this cannot merely be swept aside. His intuitive sense that all our rules hamper aesthetic freedom cannot be dismissed out of hand. Scott, you express your doubts in interaction! We can say little about that, and we have no mandate for peace missions. But for a moment, we did think it was funny. It’s funny that there is no occasion for argument with all these other participatory artworks. But we already asked ourselves that in 2001 - and founded the PWC for experimental purposes.

Do you still remember Tim Roseborough? That’s right; Roseborough was the winner of our very first auction. At that time, the colossal, seemingly insurmountable refuse installation by 10 lb Ape was still standing in the middle of the Public White Cube. Roseborough had all manner of impossible plans for it. He wanted to disintegrate it, explode the sculpture onto the walls of the exhibition room and organise a performance to mark the destruction of the socio-cultural shelter. We asked ourselves what exactly he wanted. Why make things so complicated? And yet we were still disappointed when the action failed to come about because the museum didn’t want to overdo its efforts, or at least planned to charge us for them. Roseborough replaced his plan for the sculpture’s destruction with an intellectual, documentary project. Roseborough gave up - or so we thought. But we misunderstood him, because we hadn’t fully realised his intentions. Roseborough, our speed-chess master bidder, didn’t want to construct art; he just knew more than all the others about the slick approximations of virtual space. He didn’t appear as an artist, but in the role of an artist. He played with our expectancies and reappeared to win a second auction only a few weeks later. Roseborough became Arthur Basille.

And we swallowed his new role, not as a de-constructor this time, but as a sand sculpture artist. Now, Roseborough alias Basille made a bid for the right to change Ledia Carroll’s sand dune landscape. He offered us beach art and covered up our webcam. This was not due to any artistic aspirations to power, as we had believed so impertinently, but so that he would not be recognised. He crawled about underneath the veiled camera, perfecting his super sand cone. But the cone that he set up in one of the dunes doesn’t exist in reality. Roseborough created it on the computer.

Roseborough’s alias Basille’s intervention into the Public White Cube, therefore, consisted of a change in the structures of communication and the ways in which this project is publicly represented and commented on: in a kind of experimental set-up, his aim was a thorough check on the universal faith in the media, in order to find out the truth. He wanted to make “a powerful statement about our reliance upon technology in contemporary society”, as we can now read effortlessly on our website (http://art.timroseborough.com/PWC/index.html).

He certainly succeeded in pulling the wool over our eyes. The project is communication. But we hadn’t thought that communication was so important that it in itself, rather than the respective artwork in the exhibition room, would become the aim of the interventions. “Public White Cube” is now fittingly summed up in Roseborough’s artist’s vita under “Online Projects”. Roseborough has laid open our power of definition. But in order to do this, he also joined forces with the museum against the Public White Cube; it knew what was happening all along. Roseborough concludes his detailed, almost painstaking documentation with the remark: “As of the date of this documentation, the organizers have not noted the discrepancy between the real and the mediated.” And of course he is right. We fell for his 3D and Photoshop arts, his consistently realised double identity, and above all for his restrictive intervention into the image and commentary apparatus. With all due respect to Roseborough: the museum is an amusing antagonist. So amusing, in fact, that it immediately and very proudly demanded a statement from us. OK, we admit it - that was an A+ with an extra star. If Roseborough is ever in Berlin, we’ll treat him to a coffee in the beach bar.

First, he inundated us with a long list of images and told us all about situation rooms, crisis-representation, interregnum and climate collapse, and then he embellishes our homepage with a flood of comments (see: http://publicwhitecube.com/pwc/?p=583). And now he’s walking the talk: on Wednesday, he installed his so-called “Situation Room” in the Public White Cube.

On the walls, for example, he has hung a series of clocks, a board of maps, and two chart boards, one white and the other black. On this one, MacLeod has permitted himself a small play on the homophony of “board” and “bored”: “black, bored”. Written by a disappointed Obama fan, perhaps? Or a highly political statement on the black, downtrodden lower class? The only person who knows is the artist. Beside this he has spread out all manner of equipment - an old ghetto-blaster or loudspeaker, a small slide viewer, and his heralded mini sculpture made of asthma inhalers. One of his tables appears to have a blood stain on it. Did some sort of fight take place here? The dummy wearing jeans and training shoes, half-buried under Ledia Carroll’s sand dune, seems to confirm that possibility.

But if so, against who or what has MacLeod been fighting a mortal battle? The sand? That is unlikely, since he has ignored Carroll’s contribution for the most part and simply realised his own exhibition instead. Against pretensions to museum quality? Perhaps this is nearer the truth - after all, he commented with some irritation that there were complications when he wanted to fix up a plaque identifying and explaining his work. For this is someone who will use any means in order to be perceived as an exalted artist. Scott M. MacLeod would probably be happiest if it was not the 1st Public White Cube that was an official part of the exhibition “The Art of Participation”, but he himself - without the double framework of a public white cube within the separate museum. When we compared his installation to a “news room”, he responded with closed-off commando headquarters, and he is now publicising internal communications on our homepage as a counteraction. But in the end we welcome that - as it sheds light on the entire project’s structures of communication and representation. And is that not all a participatory art project can ever hope for? What about a comment on that, Scott? You have time until Sunday, when the final auction of our project begins at 12 noon Californian, and 9 pm Central European Time. That means there is only one more chance - time to make your bid!

In the second to last auction, the Public White Cube has finally arrived at the place where it is actually standing - in the museum. After a sand sculptor used Ledia Carroll’s sand landscape to exhibit his creative trade in the last round, the current auction-winner comes from the museum itself. Scott M. MacLeod, a designated artist with an extensive vita, earns his everyday livelihood as a “preparator” in the SF MoMA. Of course, he made the bid in his spare time, and won as an artist. For once, now he has an opportunity to show what he has to offer as an artist within his employer’s noble rooms.

But Ledia Carroll’s spilt sand, with no apparent beginning and no end, also caused him to hesitate. MacLeod required a little time before he told us about the final plans for his intervention in the Public White Cube. But to make up for that, what has now reached us is extremely up-to-date, even sensational. The Public White Cube will be made into a newsroom. Not just any old newsroom, one hastens to add, but the “Situation Room” of CNN; the sacred place of political reporting with its well-known anchorman Wolf Blitzer.

MacLeod will collect together all kinds of visual material and objects on the forth floor of the SF MoMA. Images of commando centres, rows of clocks, blurred maps, but also loud speakers and sculptures made from asthma inhalers. This can only mean one thing: current daily politics has reached the Public White Cube. Ironically in these times of crisis, MacLeod paid the lowest price bid to date. The recession has caught up with the PWC - elsewhere, it consumes entire museums.

But what does all this have to do with sand? MacLeod doesn’t much want his ensemble to resemble the Mad Max scenario of a world after climate catastrophe. But what is the alternative? The Iraqi desert? The Gaza Strip? Car repair shops, crumbling into dust? A desolate Wall Street? According to the most recent reports, the artist in command intends to comment on the change of power at the White House. But as yet, these are no more than scenarios. In any case, MacLeod will be re-installing our webcam. Newsroom live will then be showing the artist’s home game.

It looks good, the little cone that Arthur Basille has constructed in the Public White Cube: on the pictures that we received this morning, it rises up - quite perfect, smooth and regular -from one of the four heaps of sand created by our artist Ledia Carroll. But perhaps it is a trifle unspectacular. Sadly, we can’t really check that out. For Basille has re-hung the Public White Cube’s webcam and - as already announced in the run-up - he is claiming complete control over the visual material.

Here is someone who not only wants to control his own creative image, but also the media reproduction of that image. Someone who wishes to have power over copyright and the visual sphere at all cost, and insists on specifying the way his contribution should be read. No picture is available, for example, of how Basille’s cone looks in proportion to the whole space, and nor is there one allowing us to judge the relation between Caroll’s original contribution and Basille’s intervention. Basically, the fact that these pictures are missing is symptomatic of Basille’s approach, for ultimately he ignores Caroll’s landscape of dunes and understands it merely as a beach replanted in the museum; a place where the local sand sculptors can now embark on a competition ennobled by its museum location. That is no problem; Basille is welcome to do that - he paid a not inconsiderable sum of money for the privilege, after all. But it is also rather a shame. For it means that he has erected a fence of privacy around the Public White Cube and has so created a situation in which the only things that permeate to the outside world are those defined by him.

We look forward to hearing what the next bidder plans to do with Ledia Carroll’s piles of sand - and with Arthur Basille’s cone. We are also keen to find out whether our view of the Public White Cube will be free again next week or not. Why not join the bidding and decide for yourself - the next auction already starts at 12 noon PST and 9 pm CET.

Our first winner of the year in 2009 is quite serious about controlling all communications, as he already informed us via the management of the SFMoMA on Monday. First of all, he has remained incognito for longer than has been customary to date, and he also made us wait for a long time before letting us know what he actually intends to do with his right to intervene in the Public White Cube. And now this: we wants to re-hang our webcam - at least for the duration of the installation, if not for the whole exhibition - and to keep full control over the resulting visual material so that it doesn’t “fall into bad hands”.

And why? Our bidder, who - in his own words - is a semi-professional sand sculptor, doesn’t want his competitors outside to watch the way that he works. He doesn’t wish to betray his alchemistic tricks, his secret knowledge about compression, sticking together and modelling, which he will employ - as he announced - to simply construct a four foot high cone in one of Ledia Carroll’s sand dunes. For, if we can credit his words, there is a lot of excitement in the sand art scene of the Bay Area about the fact that someone will be going to work, not as usual on the beach or the car park of the local shopping mall, but in a proper museum.

So who knows, perhaps we will soon see the start of a battle of the local sand sculptors, who - after hard-won bouts of bidding - will move into the Public White Cube like a gladiators’ arena, one after another. An exciting prospect. Oh yes - so what is his name, our first winner? In the meantime, we are permitted to - indeed we should - leak his identity to the public. The final words in his short email to us were: “Feel free to let people know my name, now. It will make them jealous. :)”. Well then - the best of luck, Arthur Basille!

There have always been global centres in art. You need only think of the Italian Renaissance in architecture and painting, or recall the French Baroque in music. Today, there can be no doubt that the centre of world sand-sculpture art is Holland, where the World Sand Sculpting Academy is located near Den Haag. Its aim to establish “formats, standards, rules and regulations” for international competitions promises a heyday of sand sculpture in the not-too-distant future.

So it is all the better for the WSSA - and for us - that sand sculpture is now due to return to the place where it had a missionary significance in the past. In California, Christian missionaries once carved out biblical scenes in the sand. Now the winning bidder in our most recent auction intends to transform the 1st Public White Cube in the SFMOMA into a sand sculpture. He has divulged no more than this. We are awaiting news from San Jose, the home of our anonymous sculptor.

Already, he has had us inform the museum staff that he understands his proposal as a “conceptual” intervention. He also wishes to control any communication concerning his intervention. So we obviously have an author here; a director at the threshold to the PWC who will make his mark with tracks in our sand. He is certainly keeping up the suspense: we wait to hear about further refinements to his project in the course of the night.

What will remain at the end of time, when all of man’s paintings, sculptures and artistic, socio-cultural collage-huts have become weathered and worn? When the floodwaters ebb after the climate catastrophe, the world is going to be a beach with no bathers. Sand survives every culture, and if the recession ends up turning all our museums into dust, even the best and most influential curators will have built on sand. The longer you think about it, the more universal Ledia Pearl Carroll’s artistic material seems: a truckload of sand, which is tipped out to create a sand dune in the exhibition space.

But actually, although she does not say so, the artist is concerned with something else. She transforms our exhibition space in the SF MOMA into something like a black hole. The purified, sieved sand that she uses is light-coloured and attractive like the yellow ochre on a painter’s palette, certainly. But sand has no form. Whatever you do with it, its own amorphous nature wins in the end. You can ponder for as long as you like. You can sit down on the sand, leave things on it, dribble substances onto it – sand always remains sand. It just lies around in the exhibition – sleepy and still like the undeviating coastline of Miami Beach, while inside in the Convention Centre the art fair comes to nothing.

But hang on a minute; we are beginning to sound like strategists in a desert war! We have completely forgotten that art is not a tactical weapon. Sand is beautiful. The consistency and granularity of sand can be a wonder of nature. This washed sand “Olympia #2” from the south of San Francisco is “a beautiful light colour” and when you let it trickle through your hands onto the floor it falls in a charming way. Or at least that is what Ledia Pearl Carroll tells us during the run-up to the installation; she has created a painting of a singular kind – pure abstract and yet one hundred percent concrete.

And in the end, she is quite right. A sand dune has taken possession of the museum. The audience strolls along to the right and left of a strip of bare parquet between two ‘hills’. Interaction is now all about trying to grasp something formless. Bidding will restart on January 1^st, 2009. Once again, you can acquire the right to alter the exhibition space in a series of auctions. This is PWC Level 2. New game. Next level of difficulty. Why not show the sand who’s in charge here? Together with Ledia Pearl Carroll, we look forward to your tactical moves.