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