More than a repository of objects or texts, the archive is the process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past—in short, making history. Artists, scholars, and activists have been rethinking the politics of what archives preserve (thus, what constitutes cultural memory). A growing list of exhibitions, conferences, panels, seminars, and publications give play to archival practices. The most interesting initiatives, I think, depart from the premise that archives constitute that which they purport to document (that archives are, in a... More
Life in the Archives
01.27.2012 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
Diary of a Crazy Artist : Day 1
01.25.2012 | ByFiled under: Projects/Series
Once upon a time artists mostly produced art. These days, however, artists are supposed to put on shows; curate shows; deal with media, with marketing, with galleries (and with gallerists!), with designing their own websites, with photographing their work, with not dressing like a slob, with paying rent for both their apartment and their studio; bu... More
SECA 50th Anniversary Artist-on-Artist Talks, starting THURSDAY with DAVID BEST
01.25.2012 | ByFiled under: 151 3rd, One on One
Tomorrow night sculptor David Best (1977 SECA Art Award), well-known for his fantastic art cars and immense temporary temple constructions at Burning Man, kicks off a new iteration of our One on One talks with an in-gallery chat about Joan Brown’s Noel in the Kitchen. It’s going to be awesome.
In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve temporarily restyled our weekly curator talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees, who will give us their particular takes on something on view. Mark cale... More
Congratulations, Alla Efimova!
01.24.2012 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
The institution formerly known as the Judah L. Magnes Museum reopened last Sunday in a new format. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life invited the community to view its splendid new quarters in downtown Berkeley, a site once used by the university as a printing plant.
The 25,000-square-foot building is three times the size of the Magnes’s former home, a charming clinker brick house built at the turn of the last century on Russell Street. The old Magnes, although a scene of exceptional cultural vitality, was much harder to acce... More
The Holy Spirit of the Sea
01.24.2012 | ByFiled under: Essay
“The only thing you have to hold on to is your own natural savagery, and your ability to recognize your own natural savagery has been given to you by this art, which in turn is the cause of your anxiety about not being able to recognize anything but yourself. And that is the last thing one wishes to recognize.”
—Frank O’Hara
There were... More
One on One: Victoria Gannon on Francesca Woodman
01.23.2012 | ByFiled under: One on One, Projects/Series
When I was 22 I couldn’t imagine life going on any longer. It wasn’t because I was sad or depressed, though I probably was. It was because I could not see beyond that year, at the end of which I would graduate from college. That event — my graduation — had loomed for so long as a destination, I could not fathom that it could also be a starting point.
The summer before my final fall semester I had a conversation in a bar on Cape Cod with a boy who woke up every morning that August and drank vodka with cranberry juice, refilling his glass... More
Le sacre du printemps (reconstructed)
01.22.2012 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
The Joffrey Ballet in Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)
Choreography : Vaslav Nijinsky
Music: Igor Stravinsky
There are days that I need to remember that patience is a virtue. Times when I stay still and listen, giving the world a chance to wash over me with a pandora’s box of beauty. Today I was reminded by the volatile 1913 premier... More
Inventive Re-Use
01.21.2012 | ByFiled under: Field Notes
Terry Berlier is an inveterate recycler and a committed anti-consumerist. Her sculptures repurpose and recombine outmoded technologies and salvaged materials to generate new patterns of perception. She is a perfect fit for Recology, where an unusual artist-in-residence program offers unrestricted access to the dump. (more…)
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