Positive Signs is a series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity and optimism.

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Next: Positive Signs #40–45, on the ontological status of the positive, plus Venn diagrams of subjective well-being and hope.
See all Positive Signs.

“From musical compositions to recipes to instruction pieces, people have been sharing their making, meaning, and authorship with others. When a pianist follows a score, a chef cooks a dish, or a person follows an instruction piece, variations and interpretations are made and shared. In this way a sound, a taste, or an idea is passed on, appreciated, and yet also changed by this new maker, perhaps with new instruments and ingredients and within a new context. Whether the others involved are an audience, those around the table, or visitors to a museum, this experience takes on a broader meaning due to its place in a progression, an atemporal community of makers connected through their consideration of a given idea. But by acknowledging these other composers, chefs, and artists who have worked with the idea before, we can see authorship as residing in a multitude of makers and participants, and perhaps from this loosening of the idea of the single author, we can better get to the co... More

Lisa J. Sutcliffe

Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories, which opened on Saturday, is the first solo exhibition of this important contemporary Japanese photographer in the United States. Drawn to landscapes in transition, Hatakeyama is known for large-scale color photographs that explore the collision of man and nature. His pictures examine the structu... More

Today we celebrate the 73rd birthday of Memphis, Tennessee, photographer William Eggleston. Mr. Eggleston has been photographing in the American South since the ’60s, and there are a number of his fantastic pictures in the SFMOMA collection. While I was searching for something special of his to share this afternoon, I was struck especially by... More

The documentary film Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present follows the artist in the months before and during her 2010 MoMA show of the same name, offering an addendum to the exhibition for those who saw it, and a fascinating secondhand glimpse into it for those who didn’t (like myself). With SFMOMA’s survey of theatricality in art and media... More

All summer long, as part of the exhibition Stage Presence, we’re hosting LIVE performances, in a specially commissioned fourth-floor performance space created by Tucker Nichols. Totally awesome artist line up, and we’re posting rehearsal pix plus performance videos every week.

Margaret Tedesco’s accessories:

All summer long, as part of the exhibition Stage Presence, we’re hosting LIVE performances, in a specially commissioned fourth-floor performance space created by Tucker Nichols. Totally awesome artist line up, and we’re posting rehearsal pix plus follow-up videos every week.

Highlights from last weekend’s performance — Shan... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Bernie Lubell and I were catching up the other day, talking about his recent work. I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about his 1980s-era exhibition cards. He clarified that those particular invitations for his sculpture shows in San Francisco were not just instruction-based, but could actually be assembled into paper mechanisms. These cards were the perfect format for an ... More

Some pictures from walking around Manhattan last week.

All summer long, as part of the exhibition Stage Presence, we’re hosting LIVE performances, in a specially commissioned fourth-floor performance space created by Tucker Nichols. Totally awesome artist lineup, and we’re posting rehearsal pix plus performance videos every week.

Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett rehearsing yesterday for Whis... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Marilyn Bogerd, Mike Roddy, and Alan B. Scarritt established Site (later Site, Cite, Sight, Inc.) in San Francisco “to support artists without regard to its commercial potential” (brochure). During the initial years the founders curated 32 single-artist shows and held two group shows. The process evolved into an “artists choosing artists” series in which those artis... More

After posting Positive Signs #1–33 last year, I completed drawings #34–60. To archive the entire series to Open Space, I’ll post the remaining drawings every other Tuesday through September.

Positive Signs is a series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism, with brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition. Positive Signs #34–60 include looks at flow, hope, subjective well-being, passion, and aesthetic experience.

References:

With thanks to the following authors.

Csik... More

*****

SHANA MOULTON AND NICK HALLETT

MARGARET TEDESCO

ANNE McGUIRE

CLIFF HENGST

MY BARBARIAN

D-L ALVAREZ AND KEVIN KILLIAN

RICHARD T. WALKER

*****

All summer long, as part of Rudolf Frieling‘s exhibition Stage Presence, Frank Smigiel is hosting LIVE performances by FANTASTIC artists in a specially commissioned fourth-floor perfo... More

The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, up through July 29

“The Bay Area has long attracted dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and although he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas have spawned many local experiments in technology, design, and sustainability. The fi... More

Frank Smigiel

Tonight marks the official opening event for Rudolf Frieling’s exhibition Stage Presence: Theatricality in Media and Art. It’s also our celebratory members’ party for this show and for Cindy Sherman, the traveling retrospective of one of the most important and innovative artists working today (it was organized by Eva Respini of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and installed here by our own Erin O’Toole).

Besides the many thematic links across both shows — like self-styling, staged identities, and the pose — eac... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

This poster marks the first public showing of the home of Bay Area artist David Ireland (1930–2009), which includes the video documentation by Tony Labat of the artist restoring 500 Capp Street over the year as an ongoing “maintenance action.” The house, and the site-specific installations and sculptures within it, would become Ireland’s best known artwork. The backsi... More

Jessica Brier

In 1966 Stewart Brand stood under UC Berkeley’s Sather Gate and sold buttons for 25 cents apiece that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” This provocation was inspired by one of Buckminster Fuller’s epic lectures, in which he insisted that the root of human problems was the common misconception of the Earth as flat and endless. Although the Earth’s shape was known in the abstract, it was not yet understood in any tangible way. Brand remembers sitting on a rooftop, floating on an acid trip, ... More

In early 2011 Wide White Space: The Way Beyond Art was on view at the Wattis Gallery in San Francisco. Curated by local designer Jon Sueda, the exhibition investigated “graphic design’s evolving relationship with the practice of exhibition-making as it intersects with the visual arts and the work of both artists and curators.” ... More

Excerpt from Robert Kramer’s Ice (1970, 130 min., 16mm) film within a film: False Consciousness.

“A pioneering work that blurred the boundaries between fictional and documentary styles, Ice was hailed by filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas as ‘the most original and most significant American narrative film’ of the ... More

1. Personal expression, not corporate expression.
2. Small-gauge cameras were almost everywhere and witnessed almost everything.
3. Cameras, extensions of hands and eyes, made fluid and often intimate records of daily life.
4. They often provide surprising and hitherto-unseen records of historically significant events.
5. They’re records of quotidian events that often escaped recording otherwise.
6. They document everyday rituals, ceremonies, and behavior; commonalities, but even more important, divergences.
7. Their ubiquity and sheer number (many millions) render them indistinguishable from the world they record.
8. No conventional film can ever be as unpredictable or violate received logic as much as a home movie.
9. Almost every one is a unique, unduplicated record of an unrepeatable moment. (Most exist as single copies.)
10. They present stories without the excessive narrativization plaguing feature films and current documentaries.
11. You think you’ve seen them before... More

Fun w/ ArtScope. Soundtrack to my July 4 selection hour: DJ Scott Hewicker’s solstice edition of his excellent KUSF-in-Exile radio show, “Mein 20th Century.”

SHADE COMPOSITIONS 2012

Rashaad Newsome (casting dir.-artist) is casting Shade Compositions 2012, a multisensory, live performance-art piece involving choreographed gestures and sounds associated with women of color to be performed at SFMOMA.

For more info, visit www.rashaadnewsome.com.

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Works by Bruce Conner (1933–2008) and Jean Conner (b. 1933) are currently on view in the “Dreams and Reverie” chapter of Selected Histories: 20th-Century Art from the SFMOMA Co... More

Dear Cindy,

I have watched you for a long time now. Electrified by the incomprehensible myriad revisions of your identity. Seduced by color and form dancing across your face and body, telling me another story of your wonder-filled world. Your skin glows hot and sticky in your photos, drawing from my soul things that were hidden far and in dark. Stopping me in full stride to pick you up off the street to glance at your face once again, I stare over and over till I feel like I am in hell on earth. Drawing me out, enough to distract me from alcoho... More