While investigating various histories relevant to the Pickpocket Almanack program, Renny Pritikin pointed me to a rare publication surveying SFAI’s brave departure from business as usual, organized by Tom Marioni. It was a year-long series of weekly projects called The Annual or Annual Space. The series involved institutional partnerships and off-site locations including two at SFMOMA.
Photo: Marco Sanchez
I was instantly charmed by this image of stockings that match the SFMOMA grand staircase and walls. Thanks Marco!
Here’s what he had to say about the shot:
“The legs belong to my girlfriend Holly. The story is nothing special, I was feeling creative after we saw the Robert Frank and Richard Avedon photographs and I saw the similarity between the wall and Holly’s stockings. So I whipped out my point & shoot and took the shot.”
Ariel Schrag. Photo by Sara Seinberg
I can tell you a bit about Ariel Schrag because I spent the last 4 weeks introducing her every night on the Sister Spit tour. Ariel grew up in the Bay Area, and did she waste her high school years drinking too much at the Rocky Horror Picture show and falling in love with bisexual witches named Perry? No she did not. Ariel, who went to Berkeley High, began documenting her experience as an out queer in the form of comics. They were ultimately compiled into 4 graphic novels – Awkward and Definition (9th and 10th grade, published in one volume), Potential, and Definition. Potential is getting made into a film by Killer Films, the badasses who brought us Boys Don’t Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Scarlett Johansson is not really going to play Ariel, that is just a bad joke I made to help Ariel sell her Potential t-shirts at our shows. Ariel used to write for The L-Word, where she tried to get the staff to let her put the annoying main character Jenny on tour with Sister Spit, which is so meta. Like I said on stage every night for 28 nights, it was way better to have Ariel Schrag in the van than Jenny. Every night she would show slides from her comics and narrate them, setting them to music (Aimee Mann, Dead or Alive, Kate Bush, the soundtrack from Rent) and doing the voices, perfectly switching between the frazzled speaking-in-tongues of a crazy man on a park bench, the hysterical pitch of a type-A party-planning lesbian, the timid lilt of her gentle mother, or the bored snarl of a troublemaking girlfriend. She did all this, plus ran the tech every night. Ariel Schrag is a total hero, and storytelling genius whose comics are full of inky life and angst and honesty and hilarity. Her timing for letting a moment hit you is superb, and her nuances are sort of wicked and totally clever. The Contemporary Jewish Museum has brought her around to teach a graphic novel workshop today, November 5th, here in San Francisco, much to the delight of all the Bay Area Sister Spitters who miss their new best friend so much. Get the details at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/event.php?eid=154764438589&ref=mf
And now here’s
a tiny interview:
Michelle: Did your mom name you after the Sylvia Plath book?
Ariel: Nope, the Shakespeare play The Tempest
Michelle: You totally get the great trick of writing (or drawing) memoir is to expose all the stupid or weird things YOU do. But then how do you deal with having shown the world all your weirdness? Are you in denial? I am.
Ariel: The way I see it is there are two goals: to make something funny and/or to make something relatable. So if you take some really embarrassing or painful experience but you make it funny or express it in such a way that other people sympathize or empathize it’s like everything is OK. It’s only when people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t get what you’re talking about at all – what does this even mean??” that it sucks.
It is a little weird though for people to know all this private information about me that I probably would not otherwise have shared so soon. That I try not to think about. So yeah, denial works.
from Likewise
Michelle: Does the world look to you like a series of panels, like storyboarded? When you feel inspired to document an experience is it laid out like that or is it something totally different?
Ariel: When I’m currently working on a comic this phenomenon happens pretty regularly. Events, both current and in the past (or future even) will flash across my mind in black and white comic panels. Never color! If I’m working on a prose thing, though, I find myself describing events in my head in my narrator’s voice. So basically whatever creative project I’m working on tries to take over my general life.
Michelle: Can you talk about the Potential movie, where it’s at right now?
Ariel: It’s moving along! We just got a great new producer, Jamin O’Brien. Rose Troche is directing and she’s amazing. I love working with her. We’re hoping to shoot this spring.
Michelle: What part of the Sister Spit tour would have made the best comic?
Ariel: If I was going to write a comic about tour it would really have to be the whole thing. How everyone got to know each other, switching off between scenes in the van and all the crazy different shows. I can say that astrology would have a very heavy presence.
Michelle: What are you going to teach in your workshop at the Contemporary Jewish Museum?
Ariel: The joys of comics! My lecture is basically just me talking about all the different amazing things you can do with the medium of comics and showing examples from my favorite books. I also have fun exercises to go along with different topics. I really love teaching comics. They’re endlessly fascinating to me.
Michelle: One night on tour I had this crazy dream about goats and it was because of the panels you showed about your own crazy goat dreams. What is the most recent dream you remember?
Ariel: I recently dreamed that I was back on tour and had done my laundry at a hotel but left it in the machine and we’d driven three hours away! I think my laundry represented the tour itself, and it was a dream about being sad that tour was over.
from Potential
Robert Overby, Hall painting, first floor, 1971. Latex rubber, plaster, paint and burnt wood.
[Part two of a conversation, keyed to our One on One series, between Michelle Barger, deputy head of conservation, and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, on Robert Overby's Hall painting, first floor.]
Michelle Barger: How did you come to chose Hall painting, first floor for your One on One talk? Were you familiar with Overby’s work as a commercial designer prior to becoming an artist, and did this play into your decision?
Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher: In 2000, I was working at the UCLA Hammer Museum as the curatorial assistant when Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969 was exhibited, so I have been familiar with all the various strains of his work since then, including the graphic design. However, this was before switching from a curatorial interest in contemporary art to architecture. When I was combing through the permanent collection database recently in search of works for an exhibition proposal, I was thrilled to discover that SFMOMA had one of the Barclay House casts.
Even though Hall painting, first floor is in the Painting + Sculpture collection (and not Architecture + Design), I think it brings up interesting issues related to capturing and displaying architecture. I abandoned the exhibition proposal once I learned that it was on view in Vincent Fecteau’s show, but I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time thinking about this work and how it relates to Architecture.
As you know, an A+D department in an art museum is always working with secondary materials. We can never exhibit a building, only representations of a building. Of course, everyone experiences architecture every day, especially how it defines space and program. Hall Painting, first floor offers an impression of a familiar piece of architecture—a house—using a method I’ve never seen in the field. By creating a cast of a detail from the house—the hall where a painting was on the first floor—one is given a very personal view of an interior. This impression captures details that a photograph cannot—the paint from the walls and pieces of the burnt wood, which reveal an intriguing history of the house.
MB: Doorways and architectural passageways are represented in other early works by Overby, bringing up the relationship between the body and points of access. Can you talk about this relationship in Hall painting, first floor?
JDF: I hadn’t really thought about the door represented in this piece, because I consider this work a fragment of the larger project of capturing the whole Barclay House. But, of course, you are right that most of the other casts are only of doors or windows, and he also did concrete casts of doors. As you mentioned, it also relates to Overby’s other works and interestingly, even the later paintings of (mostly) female body parts with rubber S&M apparel, where the orifices are either covered by latex or are the only body part revealed. I’ve always considered the rubber casts as images of spaces special to Overby; however, writer David Rimanelli wrote that Overby considered the casts as process art, in which case the works stand as an index to the action. To get back to your question, I wonder about the bodily action in “masking” the house (and finding parts of the house’s skin—plaster, paint and burnt wood—embedded in the cast) as a pseudo sexual act.
I look forward to speaking about the notion of the work as an index a bit more during the One on One talk on Thursday, November 5th at 6:30pm.
Image: A salt desert, looking toward the center of the Spiral Jetty. Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio
Assistant curator of painting + sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio, on the Utah desert, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, and more. Part I is here.
In August I went to Utah for the first time to continue my art-mediated obsession with desert landscapes. I traveled to a portion of The Great Basin—famous home to the Great Salt Lake, the Mormon Church, the glorious Wasatch Mountains, and the Bingham Copper Pit. My purpose, however, was to see the Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson and the Sun Tunnels (1973 – 76) by Nancy Holt (two earthworks made by artists who were, incidentally, married), as well as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover base (active since 1996).
My journey began with a visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), where my friend and former colleague Jill Dawsey (now curator of contemporary art at UMFA) had organized the exhibition Desert Secrets, comprised of photographs from the museum’s collection. Trevor Paglen’s photos—about the geography of state secrecy—were of course already familiar to me. And although I was familiar with Richard Misrach’s work, I had never seen his stunning photograph Chrysler Newport, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah (1992), of an abandoned old car in the middle of the white, crackling desert, taken in an area in Utah renowned for being so flat and expansive that when you stand in it you can see the earth’s curvature. Misrach has been photographing desert landscapes for over 35 years, and has produced a large body of work referred to as the Desert Cantos, about which Reyner Banham has written, “Misrach’s images are important because they make us see with the eye of art this man-mauled desert that we try not to see in real life, and to see that it is beautiful.” Coming away from the exhibition, I was reminded again of the ominous presences the desert conceals: military bases, nuclear test sites, industrial wreckage. These harbingers of doom are of course interspersed with revelatory moments of natural wonder, making the desert a place rife with contradictions.
When I paid a visit to “The Fountain Of Giant Teardrops,” Neil LeDoux’s solo show at Silverman Gallery last year, I had seen only a very rough reproduction of one of the paintings in a newspaper. Underneath it was a small story regarding the roots of these pieces.
“He recounted seeing a fountain in the thick Louisiana forests, the fountain’s beauty was so astonishing that he immediately wanted to share it with his friends and family but when he took them back to see it it was nowhere to be found.” This piqued my interest, as the story seemed to work simultaneously as a veil and an entrance. When I was finally inside the gallery facing the paintings, I was immediately impressed by their size and their dealing so deftly in dark brown. I liked being given a story for work that was decidedly abstract.
Neil recently had new work hanging in the nave at CCA. When I saw the first piece, I was immediately reminded of the cover to a book by the great Moroccan story teller Mohammed Mrabet titled Harmless Poisons Blameless Sins. Neil’s work is more refined and the canvas still very large compared to any of Mrabet’s work, but their paintings share a quality of having cut a live and unknown organism in half, its tendrils flailing about in a dark pool unleashing some further form of pointed magic. They seem older than time, as if they had waited very long to be discovered.
In the mid-90s, on the block of South Van Ness bordered by 16th and 15th streets used to be a little art gallery called Bewegung. It was the brainchild of Heather Haynes, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Heather lived in the back and the gallery was in the front. Heather was my best friend for a bunch of that decade, when I was young and just moved to San Francisco. I would come over to the gallery and Heather would be giving the whole space a spiritual cleanse, mopping it with a solution of like cow’s milk and blue crumbly balls of something from a Botanica in the Haight plus flower petals and when she was done she’d go in the shower and give herself a spirtual cleanse as well, dumping this great-smelling potion over her shaved head. The whole space used to be a Chinese restaurant – Heather would find animal carcasses in the backyard while gardening – but now Heather had performance and art in the windowed storefront while she and a roommate lived in stilted wooden boxes in the back, like treehouses. I was always locking myself out of my own house and sleeping at Heather’s house, in her cloud bed made of piles of down comforters and tossed with throw pillows stuffed with vetiver. If it sounds magical it’s ’cause it was. I once even saw a ghost hanging out over Heather while she slept, but that is another story.
Nobody is endorsing this particular brand of magical blue cleansing balls.
The best show I remember from Bewegung was Charles Herman-Wurmfled, the jack-of-all-trades who went on to make a bunch of movies, first Fancy’s Persuasion, a classic in which he cast Justin Bond as the mom a la’ John Waters’ choice of Divine as the matriarch in Hairspray. After that he did Kissing Jessica Stein and next, amazingingly, Legally Blonde 2, but I remember when he hung a bunch of art involving blue maribou on the walls of Bewegung and in front of it I go-go danced, topless and painted blue, wearing shitty cut-off jeans and combat boots, to the sound of Hole blasting through my Walkman, while balanced on a cinderblock. A few other ruffians were similarly Smurfed-up and stuck on a block to dance to the beat of their own Walkman, while off to the side a cellist played elegant music. It was kind of amazing.
Now Heather lives in Toronto, where she runs Toronto Free Gallery www.torontofreegalery.org an art spaced dedicated to showing work that deals with social justice, cultural, urban and environmental issues. TFG is sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a Caribbean patti take-out joint, and the owners of the take-away place did a Caribbean patti workshop as a part of the current exhibition curated by Maiko Tanaka, Tejpa Ajji and Chris Reed. It’s that sort of true community space. The current exhibition, Toronto Free Broadcasting currently has an open call out for instructional videos and a bunch already received are up on their site, assisting with hands-on problems like How to Break Into a Hotel Room, as well as more conceptual issues like How to Become a Hot Chick or How to Ruin a Relationship. http://torontofreebroadcasting
Emory Douglas, Hallelujah! The Might and the Power of the People is Beginning to Show, from The Black Panther Newsletter, May 29, 1971
Heather Haynes is also publishing the art, media + politics magazine Fuse, which has an awesome cover story on the art and career of Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of of Culture and the creator of all of the movement’s amazing graphics, an excellent mix of pre-punk folk art depicting yelling ladies and kids bearing protest signs, beaten pigs and of course Huey P. Newton with a gun. Some looks like zine art and some like propaganda and all are so full of beautiful energy and dynamic gusto. They look like they could have been created yesterday and, in the words of the artist, “You’re talking about unemployment, decent housing, dealing with the prison industrial complex, and the disproportionate number of people of color dying in the military. All those things still exist today.”
When Sister Spit was just in Cleveland some local queers gave us the hard sell on their town and claimed it to be akin to San Francisco in the 60s or the East Village in the 80s. I don’t think this is true, but the rumors are coming in that this might be the case for Winnipeg. Writer Eileen Myles was just up there reading from her brilliant new book The Importance of Being Iceland (so brilliant it made me cry in the tour van three different times with three different emotions) and she said it’s like the coolest place ever, and an article in Fuse that talks about the scene also makes it sound like one of those beaten down cities that eventually produces some cracked-out cultural diamond. But my favorite part of the article is the bit about how someone vandalized a new and heinous luxury condo development with the tag BAYAREA! Ouch. The truth hurts. http://www.fusemagazine.org/
Did you have your picture taken tonight at our Halloween party / Fall Members Opening? The full Flickr set is here!
How to Saw a Woman in Half. Photo by Rita Harowitz
Rita, a.k.a Seenyarita, snapped this picture at the entrance to the current Richard Avedon exhibition. From time to time, the SFMOMA freight elevator is in use during public hours and the doors open, much to the surprise of visitors. Rita explains her picture better than I could:
“I’ve been to see the Avedon show 3 times now. Probably will go back at least one more time before it’s over. I was intrigued by the way that the image on the elevator parts to reveal another world. I feel that Avedon was able to show worlds to us through portraits on a white background. There was no need to see anything in the background beyond the subject since the portraits themselves spoke volumes.“
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