On Saturday, December 3rd, I attended the Mission district neighborhood march for housing rights, where I heard Sara Powell speak at a rally in front of the 24th Street BART station. Powell is a longtime activist and artist who opened the neighborhood community art and education space Kaleidoscope Free Speech Zone in 2009. Located near the corner ... More

The Artist Bloc No. 1 zine is in circulation! This publication takes up the question of whether or not art is labor, and considers the contribution of artists to the current Occupy movement and social justice movements in general. It features contributions from Christian L. Frock, Joseph del Pesco (Open Space columnist), Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mary Christmas, Elizabeth Sims, Adrienne Skye Roberts, The Beehive Collective, Welly Fletcher, Morgan R. Levy, Hannah Gustavvson, Paulina M. Nowicka, Zeph Fishlyn, Leslie Dryer, and the Art Workers’ C... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in... More

Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Each month we invite someone to organize a mini-“exhibition” from our collection works online. Today, please welcome artist and critic Bruno Fazzolari.

Hey, what do you think of our new look? I have to say, I’m awful pleased with what we’re looking at — however, I’m not the only one who needs to be happy here, and we’re in a beta frame of mind about this, so I hope some of you will give us feedback on the new look and the new functionality. Our main goals were to make it easier to access the FABULOUS CONTENT our writers have been producing over the last four years, and to better highlight those writers and contributors. We also wanted a cleaner, lighter, more, uh, “open” look. Spend some time clicking around to see what’s different. Details on some of the new features:

Recent Contributors: We’ll still have our rotating cohort of columnists each season. Rather than a static display of just those columnists, however, our Contributors widget will now float ... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant i... More

Images have always had as much to do with the hand as with the eye. This photograph is elegant proof of image-making as an inherently physical, haptic act.

Although, is this what we call an image? It’s not the result of someone holding her hand in front of a camera for an exposure. “Digital effluvia” comes from pressing — the hand of the attributed photographer’s relative, in this case — into the toxic gelatin silver of the wet negative paper or plate. “Effluvia” meaning an invisible emanation, a lightless image made rather than... More

Commodified Cinema: Art, Advertising, and Commodities in Film, plays at noon on December 6 as the free Tuesday program. Museum and program admission are free.

Some years ago, I tipsily cornered Peter Kubelka at a small gathering being held in his honor. Here was my opportunity to grill him regarding his stunning Schwechater, surely the greatest one... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, and the exhibition — now on view — examines the workers’ activities during their time off from production. SFMOMA is also distributing Lockhart’s newspaper, The Lunch Break Tim... More

This morning, SFMOMA unveiled new design details of the expanded building project. The expansion, as you likely know by now, is being designed by architectural firm Snøhetta in collaboration with SFMOMA, and this morning Craig Dykers, one of the principals of the firm, talked SFMOMA staff through a presentation of the new designs. There will b... More

Click image for larger view and better detail of the individual photographs.

Faced with the totally administered, a sort of mysticism becomes a last resort, a line of flight from countless mundane tyrannies of the contemporary soul. In Matt Mullican’s Bulletin Boards series, the existence of everyday objects — a lamp, a sewer grate, a telephone, the banister of a staircase — is rendered both generic and numinous. Photographs of interior spaces (windows, doorframes, hallways) redouble the mental experience of looking. There is no whole, ju... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, and the exhibition — now on view — examines the workers’ activities during their time off from production. SFMOMA is also distributing Lockhart’s newspaper, The Lunch Break Tim... More

Today from 1pm-5pm we’re streaming The Air We Breathe – Marriage Equality: Status Update, a series of public discussions looking at the state of the campaign for marriage equality. More information on the program is here. Please join us for discussion in the chat box below the video. I’ll be moderating comments there, and when possible will relay your questions to the panelists. If you’d like to chime in via Twitter, use the hashtag #TAWB. UPDATE: I’ll post all the video of the day’s discussions here on Monday.

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. For this iteration I sat down with London-born, Berlin-based artist Simon Fujiwara. Tonight at 8 p.m. he performs The Boy Who Cried Wolf, in which he tracks his own identity and sexuality through three sites (the bar, the wedding, and the mirror). There is also a rotating stage.]

Do you collect anything?

I collect a lot of things. Every winter I go to Mexico, and I generally arrive with nothing and send a container of objects and artifacts back to Europe. My studio basically looks like a pro... More

People always clap for the wrong things. — Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, in Chapter 12

Although I am living in New York I still follow the news on SFGate, KQED, KGO, and other news outlets. What has surprised me is how completely wrong Bay Area media has been about the Occupy Wall Street movement, its motivations, its strategy... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008) she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in ... More

After observing a rehearsal, I am writing to protest the “entertainment” about to be provided by Marina Abramović at the upcoming donor gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where a number of young people’s live heads will be rotating as decorative centerpieces at diners’ tables and others — all women — will be required to lie perfectly still in the nude for over three hours under fake skeletons, also as centerpieces surrounded by diners.

On the face of it the above description might strike one as reminiscent of Salo, Pasolini’s controversial film of 1975 that dealt with sadism and sexual abuse of a group of adolescents at the hands of a bunch of postwar fascists. Though it is hard to watch, Pasolini’s film has a socially credible justification tied to the cause of anti-fascism. Abramović and MoCA have no such credibility — and I am speaking of this event itself, not of Abramović’s work in general — only a questionable personal rationale about the beauty of e... More

In the exhibition (and book) titled The Air We Breathe, currently on view on SFMOMA’s second floor, artists and poets were invited to respond to the fight for marriage equality. This Friday afternoon we’re hosting a series of public discussions looking at the state of the campaign.

Discussions will cover political and cultural representations of marriage equality, the origins of activism around this cause, and the relationship between the legal, cultural, and political dimensions, among other issues.

For those who can’t at... More

Our One on One series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome media artist and writer Abigail Child.

Postscript:

I write the piece below and am reminded by a friend that Lux’s photographs verge on kitsch... More

We’re testing live video streaming from SFMOMA’s Wattis Theater, in advance of next Friday’s symposium The Air We Breathe – Marriage Equality: Status Update, which we hope to stream. If everything is going well today, you should see something in the video player around 2:30 p.m. I’m also trying out an embeddable live chat player, below the video. Anyone should be able to log in and chat–I’ll moderate comments as they’re sent in. Let us know what you think!

brightcove.createExperiences();Live Streaming / Live Chatting Test

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER FORECAST. STAY TUNED FOR RESCHEDULED TIME!

We are artists and art workers of the 99%. We are struggling to survive and sustain our creative practice in an economy that does not value us as workers, that privatizes cultural institutions and that continuously defunds art programs–from public education to government grants. We are putting our creative efforts towards this movement and considering our role in the fight for economic and social justice.

Join us for the Artists Bloc day at Occu... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in... More

Did you hear about the Wall Street rioting over the weekend? If you are outside of New York, you probably didn’t. For some reason there was a media blackout. Early Sunday morning people reportedly heard gunshots and explosions. Then there was talk of guns and tear gas. Police clashed with masked men. Eye witnesses even reported seeing angry mobs of people trying to kidnap what looked like bankers and Wall Street executives. Hundreds of people dressed in black were seen fighting police in the street near the Stock Exchange.

Early reports said Occupy Wall Street protesters were to blame — their camp over at Zuccotti Park is just two blocks away — and so some were confused as to what exactly started the skirmish. But surveillance footage confirmed one thing: that it was not the angry mobs at Occupy Wall Street, but actually it was a number of scenes being shot for the new Christopher Nolan film, The Dark Knight Rises.

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From Tanya Zimbardo, SFMOMA assistant curator of media arts:

If you had visited the waiting area of the directors’ offices at SFMOMA between 1975 and 1978, you would have encountered an exhibition not advertised on the museum’s official schedule: one of the 23 shows organized by Alberta Mayo under the auspices of the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art (MMOFA). Mayo, then assistant to Director Henry Hopkins and Deputy Director Michael McCone, directed her own museum within “the other museum,” turning her administrative space into the venue for... More

On this past Wednesday, November 2nd, Oakland continued its historical legacy by organizing the first General Strike in the United States since 1946 — the last one was also in Oakland. Fifty thousand people (or more) took to the streets and participated in many of the workshops, break-out groups, and strike blocs as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in defense of a city under attack by its police force and mayor. Solidarity marches were held in cities throughout the country, banks were closed in Oakland, the port was shut down, chil... More

Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated for centuries in Great Britain, but it only became popular in the United States after the graphic novel V for Vendetta was made into a movie. In V for Vendetta (by Alan Moore), the main character is a masked anarchist who seeks to topple the fascist government ruling the Great Britain of the near future. The mask he wears is purported to be the face of Guy Fawkes. In the film, the masked avenger, named V, methodically assassinates and/or bombs his way through the key figures in the regime, hoping to inspire oth... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, and the exhibition — now on view — examines the workers’ activities during their time off from production. SFMOMA is also distributing Lockhart’s newspaper, The Lunch Break Times, which relates stories about labor and lunch breaks. Every Wednesday, at NOON, we’re posting one of the articles here.………………………….

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A REAL BREAK FOR A MEAL BREAK ~ ~

Maryellen Herringer

Workers’ rights to lunch breaks are the subject of intense debate in the courts. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed, a... More

The Art Workers’ Coalition was an organization of artists formed in 1969 to demand artists’ rights, museum reform, representation of women and artists of color in museums, and for museums to take a moral stance on the Vietnam War. As we consider artists’ stake in the current Occupy Wall Street movements, the Art Workers’ Coalition provides necessary historical context. Copied below is the Art Workers’ Coalition’s Statement of Demands made in November 1970 in New York City. How relevant are these demands toda... More

SFMOMA <3s Halloween

What a dandy lion (that’s me)!

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The exhibition Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams is on view at the museum through February 20, 2012.

It is hard for me to focus on much regarding the Occupy movement other than the two consecutive nights of police raids and brutality at the Occupy Oakland camp. However, the artists bloc of the Wall Street West movement is slowly coalescing, and plans are in the works for events, workshops, and discussions regarding the stake of artists in this mo... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, and the exhibition — now on view — examines the workers’ activities during their time off from production. SFMOMA is also distributing Lockhart’s newspaper, The Lunch Break Times, which relates stories about labor and lunch breaks. Every Wednesday, at NOON, we’re posting one of the articles here.………………………….

~ ~ SAN FRANCISCO TREATS ~ ~

For many staffers at the Lunch Break Times, lunch is the highlight of the day. Sure, we enjoy dining out. We especially love the grilled skirt steak sandwich at Naked Lunch (504 Broadway), the banh mi at Saigon Sandwich ... More

After a terrific run at SFMOMA this past summer, during which we welcomed more than 350,000 visitors, The Steins Collect has now moved on to Paris, where it opened October 5 as Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso … L’aventure des Stein. Part of what I heard again and again about our exhibition is its appeal had as much to do with the stories as... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Today I spoke with Ann Magnuson, artist, singer, performer extraordinaire. She will be performing a David Bowie– and Jobriath-inspired piece, The Rock Star as Witch Doctor, Myth Maker, and Ritual Sacrifice, on Thursday as part of Now Playing.]

What would I find in your refrigerator right now?

The most incredible organic eggs from Landers, which is this little desert town just north of Joshua Tree. There is a lady there who feeds her chickens all organic vegetables, and she nurtures them q... More

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Artist Sharon Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor through film, photography, and printed matter. For Lunch Break (2008), she spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, and the exhibition — now on view — examines the workers’ activities during their time off from production. SFMOMA is also distributing Lockhart’s newspaper, The Lunch Break Times, which relates stories about labor and lunch breaks. Every Wednesday, at NOON, we’re posting one of the articles here.………&... More

A Collection Rotation–style post, from one of our curators who really does rotate the collection. Please welcome Assistant Curator of Photography Erin O’Toole.

Soon after the invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839, Paris was overtaken by a fever for photography dubbed “daguerreotypomania.” Made the following year, this well-known lithograph (above) illustrates the excitement with which the new technology was immediately embraced. Seemingly everybody was taking pictures of everything from every mode of modern transportation: train, steamship, and even hot air balloon.

While the fervor for photography may have died down a bit in subsequent years, Paris remained one of the most important world capitals of the medium. From Louis Daguerre to Charles Marville, Eugène Atget to Brassaï, and Man Ray to Henri Cartier-Bresson, some of the biggest names in photography have found the city’s openness to diverse forms of personal expression and its great physical beauty ... More

Over the past month I have witnessed and participated in the local contingent of the now-global movement known as Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together. The goal of this nonviolent movement, fueled by people in 1,497 cities throughout the world, is to challenge capitalism by protesting major banks, corporations, and the top 1% of people who benefit from our country’s current economic system. Through taking over public space, consensus-based general assemblies, demonstrations, direct actions, workshops, teach-ins, defense against police bruta... More

On a visit to SFMOMA back in 2007, I turned a corner on the second floor and found myself sharing the gallery space with a heaping blue mountain. I walked the perimeter slowly, curious, tentative, dwarfed. As I came to the front of the blue mass, I saw a wooden table, and seated at this table, a live human figure hunched over a book, hard at work.

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests.  Michael Namkung is a San Francisco artist who uses movement to create his work. He'll be at the museum on Sunday for Yerba Buena Family Day, during which he will perform one of his Wall Sit drawings and families will be able to take part in drawing gym activities. Free!]

If you weren’t an arti... More

Since neither of the artists was able to be here for the opening of the current New Work exhibition, I made these videos to introduce SFMOMA’s audiences to Tiago Carneiro da Cunha (Brazil) and Klara Kristalova (Sweden). Generally, we interview artists when they come into town, but I thought that a Skype video chat would be a great workaround. I was delighted that both artists agreed to essentially invite me into their homes for a conversation.

Interviewing artists is my favorite part of my job, hands down. Having gotten to know them through the objects they make, I find it priceless to be able to spend an hour or so talking through their ideas with them. Most of the interviews that we conduct are very formal — a talking head in front of a neutral gray background with a classic three-point lighting setup. Part of this is because when we started producing video content in the 1990s, the only people who made interview videos were professionals, TV people, and documentarians. Time... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Today we hear from Dominic Angerame, a filmmaker and the executive director of Canyon Cinema. Tonight Dominic is joined by filmmaker and Canyon Cinema cofounder Bruce Baillie for a screening of his film Quick Billy in the museum's Wattis Theater.]

Do you collect anything?

I am a collector of many ... More

I’m sure some of you have noticed that a fair portion of my examples illustrating these “comedies” can best be described as harmless doodles — one-offs by bored adolescents, digital “folk” art by people otherwise preoccupied with their day jobs as graphic designers or computer engineers, or forays into digital text by artists whose main... More

Please welcome curator John Zarobell on Images in Dialogue, currently on view.

Paul Klee has long been known as an artist’s artist. Though he was a seminal figure in modern art, he has never had the name recognition of a Picasso or Matisse. But he worked prodigiously (the catalogue raisonné of his work is nine volumes), inventing more worlds tha... More

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Canyon Cinema, and the recent release of Quick Billy on DVD, Bruce Baillie and Canyon Cinema present the restored version of QUICK BILLY in all its four-reel, 16mm glory at 7 p.m. this Thursday, Sept. 29, in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater, followed by a reception. For more information, incl... More

A LEAF, treeless
for Bertolt Brecht:

What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime
because it includes
so much made explicit?

(Paul Celan, quoted in ACTS, A Journal of New Writing, eds. David Levi Strauss & Benjamin Hollander, Issue 5, 1986. Thanks to John Sakkis for sending.)

If big banks, credit card companies, and Wall Street firms can get hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and loan forgiveness, why can’t the students of America? Or more precisely, the art students of America? The way I see it is that the most creative people in the country are waiting tables, slaving away as secretaries, and doing menial jobs because their art degrees haven’t translated into earning potential. As a consequence, possibly tens of thousands — or maybe hundreds of thousands — of creative people around the country have given up their art and switched to non-art activities in order to pay the rent. So in 2009 (most recent year for census data), out of the 89,140 BFAs, 14,918 MFAs, and 1,569 PhDs granted in fine arts, just how many of those people are really making a living in the arts? My guess is: not many.

Does that seem fair? When the housing bubble popped and the economic crisis began, politicians never expected the bankers and Wall Street traders to give ... More

Accolades for smart, creative people are rarely as glamorous or lucrative as the MacArthurs. I always get a little thrill when the annual “genius awards” are announced, as the idea of an artist getting five hundred grand is a wonderful thing, something akin to winning Best Picture at the Oscars. There’s pleasure even in begrudging a ... More

David Clark’s major internet works — including “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played by left hand),” “Sign After the X,” and “A Is for Apple” — are dense, encyclopedic Flash pieces that are replete with imagery, sounds, graphics, voiceover narration. Clark’s visual sensibility is probably closest to that of a graphic... More

Encryption is the age-old practice of taking a message, commonly known as a “plaintext,” and enciphering it to make it illegible to the unpracticed eye — this new text is known as the “ciphertext.” Prior to the use of ciphers, messages could be conveyed secretly by simply hiding them — shaving a messenger’s head, for example, and letting the hair grow back before sending him on his way, only to have it be revealed after a drastic haircut on the other end. Invisible ink was another common practice. A very basic form of encryption i... More

Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Each month I invite someone to organize a mini-“exhibition” from our collection works online. Today, please welcome artist Gina Osterloh.

(I was not able to see this installation — part of Project, Transform, Erase — but I imagine there are similarities to Line Describing a Cone, which I experienced in Frankfurt. As one enters the room there is uncertainty about what one sees, what one perceives. There is a collapse of two- and three-dimensionality, physicality, the ephemeral, and optics. Famil... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Today we hear from Satomi Matsuzaki, singer from Deerhoof. They perform TONIGHT as part of Now Playing.]

Do you collect anything?

For the past five years, I haven’t been collecting anything. I am fond of lightness and neatness. I like getting clothes, but then my closet gets full so I give ... More

The very prolific J. R. Carpenter seems, more than most writers of electronic literature, most keen on bridging the worlds between the digital and the social, creating a middle ground in her pieces where nature, community, geography, and politics can intermingle with the play of algorithm and the range of image-making abilities computers afford. Two major recent pieces, collected in the Electronic Literature Organization‘s second grouping of key works, aptly demonstrate her interests. “Entre Ville” is a project that investigat... More

The comedy of automation is present in all electronic literature works that dynamically generate “literary” content without the work of a writer; we can see it in any number of works in the previous posts, particularly in the comedies of dysfunction, recursion, exhaustion, and association. I decided to create this additional category specifical... More

I think Julia Margaret Cameron understood that a photograph cannot present a clear distinction between a sleeping child and a dead one. In a photograph there is no motion to indicate breath: no warm arm to touch, no murmur or cry. The connection of an infant to its own life is barely established, and for most of human history, tenuous.

A sleeping i... More

Daniel C. Howe, like joerg piringer and Erik Loyer, can be described as both an artist and a researcher. His homepage lists a number of projects, many in progress, some merely sketches, but he doesn’t make any clear division between research and art, not surprising given his array of degrees and residencies. An early project involved developing a series of 3-D fonts, which puts him in a tradition of experimental font makers including the previously mentioned Paul Chan, who replaced individual letters with words, scribbles, or abstract sha... More

The SFMOMA “summer of Stein” comes to an end this evening, when we say farewell to The Steins Collect, closing today. In this second of his two Collection Rotation–style summer posts, loosely adjacent to the exhibition, Steve Evans offers a Steinian twist on SFMOMA’s collection. (Steve’s first post is here.) Enjoy!

For thi... More

François Mori/AP

Libyans wave national flags in Tripoli’s Green Square, renamed Martyr’s Square, during morning prayers Wednesday on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Libyans are also celebrating the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi.

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“The children are drawing pictures of the new Libyan flag, something that would have gotten them arrested only two weeks ago.” (National Public Radio, 31 August 2011)

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The first time I ever heard of Tripoli was when, as a child, in a school classroom, our music teacher taug... More

This summer we enjoyed a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honored writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gave a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwork on view.... More

This next comedy might be the one most associated with electronic literature, as it corrals work in both hypertext and computer-generated writing. I describe hypertext a bit in the first blog post in this series; it is basically the association of different text blocks, called “lexia,” through links embedded in the text itself, commonplace on the web but still exotic in the 1990s. Important early works in hypertext include Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” (1995), Stuart Moulthrop’s “Victory Garden” (199... More

I do in fact have a job with fabulous perks: yesterday’s three-hour meeting-by-requirement was to attend a compelling set of presentations, in a closed-door session, by a fantastic group of artists from six cities around the globe. These artists have been instrumental in building artist organizations or collectives that continue to make dynam... More

In celebration of our landmark exhibition The Steins Collect, Open Space is pleased to present a special two-part feature from essayist, cultural critic, and poet Wayne Koestenbaum. For this year’s Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture, SFMOMA commissioned Wayne to write and perform a new work related to the exhibition. His topic: painting and writing. The result: “The Desire to Write.” Enjoy. (Part one is here.)

The Desire to Write about André Derain

Matisse’s 1905 portrait of André Derain attracts me because thick paint ... More

Thanks to the marvelous readers of SFWeekly, who have nominated Open Space for a 2011 Web Award for Best Arts Blog! We’re honored and excited to be in a stellar group of Bay Area nominees (which includes some of our fantastic collaborators).

You can help vote Open Space into the finals from now through August 30, when the online voting close... More