Five Questions: Timothy Buckwalter Posted on November 20, 2009 by Megan Z
[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests. Here's Timothy Buckwalter in the Koret Visitor Education Center.]

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?
My name is Timothy Buckwalter. I live in Albany, California. I’m an artist and I’ve recently started curating and I also write about art. I have a blog about art. If I had a hobby, I think my hobby would be listening to music. I love music. Music is tied in real closely to my paintings.
Do you collect anything?
I collect art. Contemporary art. I like to collect art that I relate to. I’m not going out and buying Joan Miro prints or something. I want to have something in my house that I have an emotional or psychic connection to. The work that I have is often by people that are my friends, or just work of someone that I respect or work that touches me.
If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?
It’s a tough question because I have so many friends that are artists that I see all the time. I guess it would have to be somebody that was a hero of mine. I can tell you who I wouldn’t invite; I wouldn’t like to have dinner with Andy Warhol. I think he would be incredibly dull since he’s so staged. Maybe Dorothea Lange. Her work has always fascinated me and her ability to just continue working. I would like to have dinner with her. You know who I think would be wonderful to have dinner with? I’ve always admired Joan Mitchell’s paintings. I would love to have dinner with Joan Mitchell. It would be a really wonderful dinner.
What if I could invite a couple people to dinner? He’s my dream dinner: it would be Dorothea Lange, Richard Prince, Donald Judd and Joan Mitchell. To me that would be the perfect dinner party. There would be endless debate. Or endless chastising. But it can’t be a friend? I would totally like to have dinner with my friend John Zurier who is a painter who I have lunch with a lot and we talk about art.
If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?
How about we rephrase the question because as an artist I don’t want to steal someone’s art. But if I could have a painting in my house. What about that huge Pollock that was in Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment? I would love to have that piece. I mean, there are so many pieces. I would love to have one of those early Stella black paintings. That would be amazing. A Kline, a really big Kline, like Chief at MoMA or something. Or I would love to have a Barnett Newman. One of those big Newman’s. But then I would have to have a bigger house. I would love to have a big piece of art but then I’d need to have a bigger house. I would like to have something that I’ve always thought about. It’s funny, last year on my blog I asked people what their dream collection was. The other thing I would love to have is Duchamp’s Étant donnés – it’s the barn doors that you look in and there’s a naked woman. I would totally love to have that piece. Bridget Riley did this amazing painting that’s like a nautilus that you walk into, that you spiral into in the late 60s; I would love to have that piece. A Robert Frank photo. There’s that Frank photo of the flags and the matronly women that you can’t really see their faces in the window, that Frank photo is amazing. I would love to have everything. All at once. I would go back in time too. I would love a della Francesca one of those frescos that are on church walls. If it’s art, I would probably take it. Actually, I don’t like Yves Klein so I wouldn’t take a Yves Klein.
What’s your favorite tool?
You mean like George W. Bush? That kind of tool? Does a paintbrush count as a tool? Then I love a paintbrush. I would say the paintbrush is my favorite tool. In the positive sense of a tool.
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You may have seen Tim before when he put together a music-filled “Collection Rotation” in June.








Eileen Myles, my favorite writer in the whole world living or dead, read at Modern Times bookstore Wednesday night. It’s now Friday and I haven’t gotten around to writing about it because I keep being paranoid that I have swine flu and taking to my bed at embarrassing hours. I think I am just exhausted from those tours I was on. Eileen has been traveling the entire world reading from her newest book, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. Wednesday night she read from the title essay, which recounts her visit to the Iceland, a country she really loves, and her adventures staying in Roni Horn’s water library, where water from Iceland’s 12 melting glaciers are displayed in tubes I imagine to look like really expensive mineral water bottles. Eileen gets mud and grass all over the tranquil space and that is what is the best about Eileen, her writing is like that, it trails the mud and grass of her boots all over everything, calling everyone’s attention to what is missing from pristine environments metaphorical, literal and literary – bodies, her body, probably your body, certainly my body. Eileen’s writing makes a mess, and nothing is hidden. I mean her process is transparent, she leaps from thought to emotion and all the way back around, taking you for a ride on her tangents, like her mind is the most excellent roller coaster and lucky you, you get to belt yourself in and come along. Eileen considers and mucks up the water library, she rolls her luggage through gravel pondering the way she travels — like a very young person or an unprotected old person? She hitches a ride with a farmer through the rolling Icelandic countryside, she details the Icelandic tradition of epic poetry, and her reports come to us strained through the whole of her, detailed by a New Englander, a poet, a New Yorker, a dyke, the scramble of her altering the landscape as she delivers it to us.



I heard an anecdote somewhere that the three words in the English language that evoke the most visceral response are “free,” “sex,” and “sale.” I’m not exactly sure if there’s a particular order to which is more popular, and it’s funny to think how someone could come up with a good marketing slogan involving all three at once and create the best business model ever (”Free Sex Sale?” Uhhhh. Now that’s a bit of contradicting genius, isn’t it?).
Also, a while back I discovered an amazing Canadian documentary called 