Jason Metcalf “Gutter Corner Gold” 2010 in response to

Richard Serra “Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift” 1969/1995

SFMOMA blog assignment ONE

This is Part one for Part two click HERE

An invitation was sent to a group of artists. I provided a curated list of works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection and asked each artist to make a work in response. This assignment continues my exploration as to how others interact with the museum, particularly how artists relate to works in the permanent collection.

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Julie Cloutier... More

A few local blogs have written about the events produced by Gay Shame at SF’s LGBT Center over Pride weekend, and I don’t want to poach too heavily from them. Thanks very much to curator Courtney Dailey for telling me about the Cry-In. Check outhttp://www.gayshamesf.org/ for complete info. BUT,  I do want to praise the excellent graph... More

I’m just so f’ing proud to be part of a community that Judith Butler is part of. And I’m really proud and happy that Butler decided to refuse to accept the Civil Courage Prize at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration, and gave an emphatic and eloquent speech explaining why. Christopher Street Day is a European LGBTQ Pride event that happens in various cities throughout Europe. Butler’s objections were based on the commercialization of the event, but more importantly, on problems with racist discrimination faced especially by immigrant LGBT peoples. Here is part of Butler’s speech, and part of the organizers’ response to her.

On  June 17th I attended the Now Playing event at the museum, a night which promised an experience of the museum “animated by artists and creative luminaries.” That luminescence appeared in many forms: floral synasthesia, well drinks, a really strong showing by local sartorialists, and of course the programming itself. The show included a “screening of Bay Area art documentaries, from the 1990s and early 2000s” and a musical performance by the conceptual band presented by Chris Johanson, The 17th& Capps.

The performance in the atri... More

The news keeps delivering entries for the popular, figurative sculpture file I’ve found myself building. Last week, we heard from the NYTimes that Mexico City police made some overzealous and apparently illegal raids on piñata vendors in recent months.  Their target: unlicensed pinatas!!!  The alarm over “counterfeiting business̶... More

My relationship with language and misunderstanding became compounded this week with my enrollment in a Spanish language immersion course. 3 hours, 3 times a week for 4 weeks, all in preparation for my upcoming move to Madrid, Spain. While, my scotopic sensitivity syndrome is useful for the type of slippage I am invested in within my art practice, but it is not so useful in conjugating verbs.

Arturo, my teacher at the Mesoamerica Institute in Berkeley, has been incredibly patient. Still my progress is slow. Perhaps, because I inevitably get derailed with such seemingly tangential matters as the assigning of genders to nouns. For any one who has studied one of the romantic languages this is not a new concept (and perhaps its just PRIDE week on my mind) but the binary constriction of masculine and feminine made concrete in language is a little more than my somewhat queer sensibility can take. How then, can we conjure multiple ways of being if the words we are using demand only two? What h... More

Party pics once again! Celebrating tonight’s opening of Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection. The full Flickr set is here.

My mom is terrified of walking across the see-through fifth-floor bridge at SFMOMA.

Pierre and his two friends are mighty brave to take this shot looking all the way down to the Atrium below.

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA”. You tag too!

 
Sometimes during my tenure as blogger, I will go see Hollywood blockbusters with artists and document, in impressionistic fashion, our experience. This is episode one.
 

I went to go see Get Him To The Greek (2010, dir. Nicholas Stoller) with the poet Evan Kennedy. We saw it at the mall. I got there a little early and after buying our tickets ... More

Jennifer A. González is professor of Art and Visual Culture, Contemporary Art, Race and Representation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. More on Félix González-Torres, here.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three day 75th anniversary celeb... More

Stephanie Syjuco is a San Francisco artist (and former Open Space columnist!).  More Sherrie Levine on our website.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely shor... More

One Sunday each month I plan to arrange a selection of videos found on YouTube based on a topic of interest. My first video segment on the blog will focus on artists in the Fisher Collection and will occur in two parts. For part one I’ve selected three short videos of films that will be shown in the Phyllis Wattis Theater beginning July 1st. View the complete list for “A Portrait of the Artist, or Fisher-Inspired Films” screenings HERE

Dreams That Money Can Buy
Hans Richter, 1946, 96 min., 16mm

The Chelsea Girls
Andy Warhol, 1965, 200 min., 16mm

A Bigger Splash
Jack Hazan, 1974, 105 min., 16mm

“It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation?”

Luce Irigaray,  Speculum of the Other Woman (1974, P. 587) (more…)

The first poetry reading I ever went to in San Francisco was at Adobe Books. I took the bus down from the closet I lived in in NOPA (those were in the old days when it was just called “kind of by the panhandle”) and ventured alone into a room of cheap wine-drinking scenesters chatting as the unmistakable aroma of feline urine wafted about.

The reading that night was two local poets I had never heard of: Brandon Downing and Kit Robinson. Both are important writers to me to this day. Brandon’s work has been expansive over the last decade... More

Blindfolded Docent Tour

BLINKS, 1969

On November 23rd, 1969 Vito Acconci walked down Greenwich Street in New York City holding a camera. He attempted not to blink; when he did blink he took a photograph.

On Tuesday June 8th, 2010 at 4pm, I arrived at SFMOMA. I blindfolded myself and was led through the museum by docent Dennis Treanor. Removing my e... More

Beth Lisick is a poet, writer, and performer. Her recentest book is called Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, 10 Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone. Chris Johanson, former long-time Bay Area artist, is in the house today rehearsing with The 17th & Capps for tomorrow night’s Now Playing event. More on the SFMOMA... More

We are now into the 10th week of one of the greatest environmental disasters in world history.  I’ve been spending some time thinking about the long term environmental consequences of the spill, the potential social and political consequences regarding energy policy, and what elements of my personal life and professional life are likely ... More

I was NOT, I truly was NOT on the prowl for Martyr Figurines when I found this image today. I do not know if it is a “generated” image, as a colleague of mine once put it, or if the lamp HAS a figure of the “Touchdown Jesus” inside it, or if an Act of God simply caused the Touchdown Jesus to form from hot wax.

However, it was not hard to find this image, once I had clicked on the news that the Monroe, Ohio “Touchdown Jesus” statue burned to the ground last night, after being hit by lightening. One report rea... More

Hey everyone, I’d like to take a moment to welcome three new columnists to Open Space for the summer-into-fall season. Til now we’ve been running a five-person cohort of columnists, with a new group starting every four months or so. Now, we’re going to try staggering our groups, so that they have some overlap between them, adding three here, two there, and one again, etc.

Brandon Brown is a poet, translator and curator. He’s written for Open Space before, back in the long-ago summer days of June Alexanderplatz, when a group of us spent a month watching Berlin Alexanderplatz, the “Mount Everest of Modern Cinema” and talking about it online. Brandon writes critical prose about contemporary rap at http://brandonbrown.blogspot.com.

Brion Nuda Rosch is an artist, curator, and educator. Many of you will already be familiar with his curatorial projects Hallway Bathroom Gallery (now Hallway Projects), Paper Awesome!, which he organized last February for Baer R... More

Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Every month I invite someone to organize a mini-exhibition from our collection works online. Today’s guest is Bay Area artist Jessica Tully, whose work has included underwater performance, site-specific synchronized Bobcat Skid-steer Loader ballet, and many other fantastic things. Welcome, Jessica!

Water, Women and Power: Digging in the SFMOMA Crates with Jessica Tully

Ten years ago, I found myself relearning to walk after a bicycle accident. I did this in water: the mysterious gravity-defying ele... More

My research on contemporary martyr figurines has not turned up much yet, but I will post what I can, when I find more. In the meantime, I’ve found myself in some very strange and interesting places on the internet. In a search for “Gazan martyrs,” I came across this beautiful graphic, illustrating an article by the emminent journalist Rami Khouri on PalestineThinkTank.com, which reminds me of a Mark Grotjahn painting. nb: I like Grotjahn’s paintings a LOT and I hope he and his other fans will not take offense at the comp... More

We’re breaking a pattern here on the blog and writing—directly and unabashedly (ok, maybe more directly and unabashedly than usual)—about one of our own projects. We recently finished designing, fabricating and installing a miniature park, in the parking lane of 22nd Street at Bartlett in the Mission District. The site for this “parklet” ... More

I started out the day today wishing I had cable so I could watch Bravo’s new show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Then I read some news,  and now my mind is wrapped around the idea of martyr figurines, and the stakes involved in a kind of social sculpture we simply aren’t ever going to see on that tv show. I’m concerned about the woeful fate of the 40 factory women mass-producing statuettes of Neda Agha-Soltan in Northern Iran. The factory responsible for the statuette of Agha-Soltan as well as others who were killed du... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests.  Sasha Wizansky lives in San Francisco and is editor-in-chief and art director of Meatpaper magazine.  Meatpaper, launched in 2007,  is the world’s only quarterly print magazine about the culture of meat.  For our new Now Playing Thursday evenings Meatpaper has been collaborating with Blue... More

Carrie Pilto is SFMOMA Project Assistant Curator on The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and The Parisian Avant-Garde, opening May 21, 2011. More on Matisse, with links to many of SFMOMA’s multimedia features on the artist, here.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during ... More

I head over to SFMOMA for one last visit before I write this, my final post in my 8-part memoir based on items in the museum’s permanent collection. In the park at Yerba Buena Center, two young women with German-ish accents stop me and ask if they might take their photo with me. It’s for a school project; they’re to have their photo taken with a variety of people they meet on the street. I agree, and they ask a guy who’s sitting on a nearby bench to snap the picture. The women stand on either side of me and we smile. Click. They s... More

FOR-SITE’s Presidio Habitats is a unique year-long site-based exhibition that invited 25 artists and designers to propose custom-designed habitats for animals that lived or once lived in San Francisco’s Presidio. The national park being an urban oasis with strange interweaving of natural and social histories (people have lived and worked on the grounds even after its designation as a national park in 1944), to my mind the show has two ostensible and very interesting audiences: animals who used to call the Presidio home, and us humans, who may or may not have been a factor in their leaving but are certainly playing a role in ongoing restoration efforts.

Eleven of the proposed pieces were actually realized and are now scattered throughout the park (although all 25 proposals are on display in the Exhibition Pavilion). The broad conceptual task of the artists being to propose custom-designed habitats for animals that live or once lived in the park, the results vary a great dea... More

This spring SFMOMA was lucky to be the recipient of a gift of five pictures by San Francisco-based artist Doug Hall. Hall studied anthropology at Harvard University and received an MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute of Art. He is known for his multimedia installations, films, and photographs and is repr... More

Tony Stone a.k.a itonys took this colorful shot of the Kerry James Marshall murals reflecting off of the usually somber granite of the SFMOMA Atrium.

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA”. You tag too!

[part one is here---ed.]
Curious to see exactly what Moholy-Nagy was feeding my noncritical, unsophisticated high school self in late 60s Hammond, Indiana, I find my copy of Vision and Motion, which Kevin gave to me for my birthday ten or so years ago. It’s a coffee table-sized book, 372 pages, an inch and a quarter thick, its cover a textured lineny beige (“wheat-colored buckram,” according to used book dealers), “vision in motion” in brown script on the front and spine. The illustrations, which are interspersed throughout, are ama... More

The BUCKY Cycle plays this Thurs @7p.m. on a program including other film and video works by Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, Reece Camp Carter, and Robert Morris in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater.

Surely every San Franciscan’s been there a hundred thousand or so times. You’ve stepped out of your apartment, walked a pace or two to th... More

More Kota. [I am a huge fan of] Jeff Koons.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks—7.5 minutes or less!—on a single collection work of their ch... More

From the SFMOMA multimedia vaults: the legendary, much beloved, much admired artist on becoming a sculptor. On geometric forms. On gender roles. As it happens, SFMOMA will be showing Brigitte Cornand’s Louise Bourgeois Trilogy on three consecutive Thursdays in August, something to look forward to. Rest in peace.

B. Ruby Rich is a film critic, festival programmer, and cultural theorist. More Edward Weston.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks—7.5 minut... More