OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

[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.

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

Nick, a.k.a kukkurovaca, took this picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I in the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden. Looks like the person on the left is entering another dimension.  The dapper gentleman on the right may have just returned from it.

Nick says:

“There’s no real story to this photograph—If I remember correctly, I had just gone to see the Avedon exhibit for the first time, and the Adams-O’Keeffe for the third or fourth time, probably. I went up to the roof, got a beverage, and sat down to people-watch. I had my camera with me—I suspect I’m not alone in going to the roof in part to take out my pent-up photographic urges from the no-photography areas of the museum.

The composition that I wound up with is not quite what I had anticipated. At the time I brought up my camera, the fellow on the left was just standing and looking up at the piece; it was entirely fortuitous that at the moment I pressed the shutter release he began to step past it, or, thanks to the perspective, into it.“

Collection of Bill Berkson & Constance Lewallen

[Our monthly feature, Collection Rotation: some wonderful guest organizes a mini-exhibition from our collection works online. This month's guest-curator is the marvelous Fayette Hauser, shining, beautiful Cockette, costume designer, & collector extraordinaire. On December 3, we're hosting the Cockettes for a rare film screening and celebration of their FORTIETH year. You will LOVE this rotation, which includes some Cockette clips. Thank you, Fayette. xxoo, SS ]

Fantasy and the Cosmic Collection

When I entered the Artscope it felt like swimming, deeper I went underwater into the image sea. What luxury.

The first artist that hit me was Claude Cahun. Soon I realized that this was a woman, in drag as a man, in drag as a woman. Perhaps she felt genderless or omni-gender, as I often do. Obviously her fantasy life was more important to her than anything. Again I relate.

I grew up in a world of my own, raising myself in fantasy. This world was much more real and vital to me than the other, the actual world. When I first came to San Francisco in 1968, I was already deep into my Victorian fantasy, so excruciatingly dense, but all in my mind. What I found was that everyone was living out their fantasies, seriously. I was home at last.

Of course the psychedelics only amplified this concept. Which brings us to the wild pursuit of the great and fabulous item. There will never be an experience quite as fulfilling and uniquely sublime as the old Alameda Flea Market on Acid. Items would combine themselves in the most profound way, then leap at you and beg to be absorbed into your realm, telling you their stories along the way. I’ve been a collector ever since.

Many of us felt this way and we needed to be together, all the time. So we became the Cockettes and lived together in the Cockette House (actually there were three of them). We went full tilt into the biggest and best of our fantasies, the deeper the better, dark or light, usually all at the same time. We did it for as long as we could, not long enough for me.

Here I’ve assembled a collection that reflects our influences and favorite things. I have added some archival Cockette film clips to tempt you into attending our 40th Anniversary film night at SFMOMA on Dec. 3rd.

Views of Paris c. 1900 complement early Melies and Pathe film clips, while risque French postcards help to illustrate some of the early influences of the gender bending, acid drenched, outrageous  Cockettes. (Music on this clip by Baishaus)

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I Just returned from Jazz harpist Destiny Muhammad’s Birthday Celebration at the Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts in Oakland. Tonight Destiny hosted a group of musicians ranging from an extremely impressive youth jazz ensemble (youngest member 10 years old.) to a string trio featuring Vincent Tolliver and Tarika Lewis to internationally recognized artists such as Dwayne Wiggins of Toni! Tony! Tone!

Destiny Muhammad is a harpist in the tradition of Jazz innovators such as Dorothy Ashby and of course the legendary Alice Coltrane. Both John and Alice Coltrane were renown for music that was palpably buoyed along by their spiritual convictions but unburdened by religious dogma. In other words if you knew nothing of their religious perspectives you were likely to be moved anyway. Destiny’s music has this affect as well and she brings the extra-added skills of a trained songstress to her mix of gospel inflected sacred jazz. So it was no surprise when Bishop Franzo Wayne King of San Francisco’s Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church appeared at the climax of this celebration of Oakland’s community treasure. Bishop Franzo King delivered a short sermon on the musical “trinity” of rhythm, melody and harmony with the sounds of Coltrane’s classic “A Love Supreme” presenting his words like a gift to the audience turned congregation.

After the concert the artist Mark Dukes presented a reproduction of one of the Coltrane church’s painted icons to Destiny. Dukes’ work is unique in that he brings the Byzantine icon painting tradition into the 21st century by immortalizing revered modern figures such as John Coltrane. The icons of John Coltrane at the Saint John Coltrane Church in the Fillmore district are particularly striking and beautiful. Dukes is also a deacon at the church.

Seeing Destiny beaming with a glowing smile while holding the Coltrane icon was so special that I had to share it with the SF MOMA Open Space audience.

As one of the creative artists and culture workers in West Oakland I’m often times on Pine Street in deep west Oakland talking and interacting with the artists, writers and musicians there. Just last week I stopped in to pay a visit to painter Githinji WaMbire at his 1195 Pine street studio. Githinji is a Kenyan artist working in Oakland. I came to “chop it up” with him and get some healing vibe from his sanctuary. It didn’t take me long to realize that this space is also a stage that Githinji uses to perform the ritual theater of his creative juju. Sometimes painting by a single candlelight surrounded by elekes (symbolic beads) for Orishas, the African spirits, he takes the materials of the neighborhood and reconfigures them into the shape of the African continent. Each one as multilayered, complex and idiosyncratic as the continent it represents.

I can recall a panel discussion that I attended in New York where artist/cinematographer/film theorist Arthur Jafa discussed how African artists use the power of objects that have been used and contain what the Yoruba of Nigeria call “ashe” (inherent life force) that is evidenced by the patina of utilitarian objects. Githiji’s work accesses this ashe because he uses the slats, wood and debris that comes from buildings and old houses in the west Oakland neighborhood that is home to his studio. The house that is home to his studio was dubbed “Cornelia Belle’s Black Bottom Gallery” a few years ago. It was named after the old black woman that lived in the house for many years. I was part of the five person collective that showed work there about a year ago and I’ve watched it transform into different types of cultural spaces ranging from café to gallery and now studio.

Here are a just a few images of Githinji Wambire’s studio. Look for an interview with Githinji in my next series of posts.
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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 trust Eileen Myles’ writing more than anyone’s. She’s just so honest, she’s not afraid to make a goon of herself so she is utterly unafraid to call bullshit on any number of things, to recount moments painful or triumphant. She has a great piece about coming up against menopause and her car starts fritzing out like it too is having hot flashes and they’re in it together. She pitched it to all these magazine and no one wanted it but thank god she wrote it anyway, she just trusted it would find a home and it did, this collection I’m telling you about. Other pieces have been published, like the narrative about flossing her teeth, it’s about class, that one, because teeth are absolutely a class thing. Whether or not you have them, the shape they’re in, etc. You know, how dreams of losing your teeth are supposedly about money, they totally are, right, and this is really Eileen’s terrain. One of many of her terrains. She wrote about sleeping in a cardboard box designed for homeless people, that was in Nest, that great interiors magazine that went under, RIP. She writes a bunch about the filmmaker Sadie Benning, there are a ton of art pieces in the collection, though my favorite are the section titled Talks. I love listening to Eileen talk, period, just ruminate on anything and then when they get shaped into deliberate essays like these, part essay part dharma talk part philosophy part wandering total poetry – amazing. Eileen is so cool, the band Japanther just had her come into the studio and record one of her poems so they can wrap their sound all around it. Basically, I think you should buy this book immediately. You’ll feel smarter by the end of it, smarter and like a better person actually, like your heart got opened up alongside your mind. Yeah.

http://www.eileenmyles.com/

I love the matching blue shirts and the Avedon gestures of these two.  The pictures come from Anitechi’s flickr, and she writes:

“This trip was our honeymoon, and I was glad there were fabulous exhibitions in my favorite museum. I appreciate that you like these photos. It will be a special experience to see our photos on SFMOMA’s blog.”

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?).

Let’s focus on just one of those words right now: FREE.

I’ve been sick for almost four days, holed up and trying to take advantage of the fact that a lot of TV shows are available online via websites like Hulu, etc. So far I’ve watched the first few episodes of PBS’ NOVA series “Becoming Human,” and marveled at the sort of stiff animation of our ancestors (available streaming for free on the PBS site), as well as several installments of the docu-drama “Secrets of the Dead” (one, on the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 -was not the most enlivening to view while being ill, I might add). Also some episodes of Season 6 of Project Runway on Lifetime.com, my shameful pop culture vice (”Make it work!”). But I was supremely let down to find out PBS had just yanked their Michael Pollan epic “Botany of Desire,” from the free section and had just missed viewing it by a day.

So in the midst of this FREE-for-all I wanted to alert everyone that for a limited time every episode of Art21 (”Art in the Twenty-First Century”) documentary series on contemporary art is available to view for free. The new season has some great episodes with William Kentridge, Cao Fei, Paul McCarthy, and more. Catch it now! It’s your tax dollars at work! OK, well I guess it’s really not free, is it. Arrrrr.

Also, a while back I discovered an amazing Canadian documentary called “RIP: A Remix Manifesto,” which explores issues of copyright and media appropriation in our late-capitalist culture. With interviews with copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig, musician and Girl Talk frontman Greg Gillis, and a most wonderful section on how Brazil has taken on issues of breaking copyright (in this case pharmaceutical) for the sake of medical equity for its people, this is a wonderful documentary. All that and cameo appearances by Gilberto Gil? OMG. The cool thing is that you can purchase it for download on a pay-what-you-will model, a pioneering example along the likes of Radiohead and others who are trying to navigate the new world of digital downloads and cutting out the middleman distributor. I highly recommend checking this out — it’s fresh, funny, political, and will energize your thoughts about creative production in a media-saturated world. Also, despite the fact that free is fun, I will gladly pay to support an artist’s project directly.

Now back to the big question: watching Battlestar Gallactica Classic or Project Runway? Or maybe flipping through the latest US magazine and checking in on that affair Fergie’s husband may have had. Being sick certainly has its charms…