Meredith Nguyen and Brit Hutchison

SFMOMA’s Schwab Room was to the gills with representatives of San Francisco’s culinary pioneers this past Friday, May 31, for The Kitchen Sisters’ The Making of a Charitable Food Movement, coordinated by Mission Chinese Food and Sharetable.org, and featuring presentations and sample bites from La Cocina, Tartine, and Flour + Water, among other local favorites. Organized around the idea that food can be a powerful binding force in the community, the event benefited the Food Bank, whose mission is to end hunger and which serves food to over 200,000 people in need each year in San Francisco and Marin counties. I spoke to the Food Bank’s Brit Hutchison and Meredith Nguyen.

When you’re not working at the Food Bank, what do you make?

Brit Hutchison: I do a lot of cooking. The last thing I made was sugar-free strawberry-rhubarb pie. It turned out really well. I used agave syrup because I’m trying to do more sugar-free dessert recipes.

Meredith Nguyen: I have a lifestyle blog and I do a bit of crafting, sewing, and knitting.

Do you collect anything?

BH: Animals! [laughs] No, not really. I collect strange knickknacks from my family, who like to buy them for me.

MN: I collect green things. Green’s my favorite color.

If you could spend an afternoon with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

BH: My grandmother on my dad’s side, because I never met her.

MN: Jorge Luis Borges. I love him, I’ve studied a lot of his work, and I think he’s fascinating.

What is in your refrigerator right now?

BH: Vegetables and cheese. I also save the tops of my carrots because I’m starting to learn how to make pesto with carrot tops. I try to use the whole vegetable.

MN: Wine, champagne, and pizza.

What is your favorite tool?

BH: Scissors! They’re useful for everything, even cutting pizza.

MN: My favorite tool is definitely knitting needles. You can make all kinds of things with them.

NPR’s Jennifer Ferro and Kitchen Sister Davia Nelson

Bringing you stories of Bay Area craftspeople and pioneers, from the makers of violins to jars of jam to the queer car service, Homobile, The Kitchen Sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, radio producers and collaborators since they first met in 1979. The pair are currently hosting The Making Of… at SFMOMA, part of the museum’s four-day Countdown Celebration. I chatted with Davia Nelson and her friend and colleague Jennifer Ferro, president and general manager of NPR’s flagship station for Southern California, KCRW, which regularly airs the Kitchen Sisters.

What do you make when you’re not making radio shows?

Davia Nelson: I like to make river trips. I have a tradition with a bunch of girlfriends and this will be our thirtieth annual river trip. We go river rafting for a week every year. We’ve been to the Rogue River in Oregon, the Salmon River in Idaho, Cataract Canyon in Utah, and the Yampa and the Gates of Lodore [in Colorado].

Jennifer Ferro: I like to make really great passes when I play soccer!

Do you collect anything?

DN: I collect sugar. I’ve been collecting tubes and cubes and packets since I was five; I like to look at the changing world through the perspective of sugar packets. Oh, and lipstick. They say the average woman will die with a pound of lipstick in her stomach and I think I’ll have five!

If you could spend an afternoon with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

DN: Sam and Becky Phillips, who have both died. Sam Phillips started Sun Studios and the Memphis Reporting Service; he discovered Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and he also founded the first all-girl radio station in the world for his wife, Becky. I met them when we were doing the Lost & Found Sound series and they changed my life. They were such sonic pioneers and I miss them.

JF: I would hang out with Nancy Pelosi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and my Italian grandmother, who I never got to meet. I would want to ask her what it was like coming to America on a ship, not knowing anything, not speaking the language, and not having any money.

If you could have any artwork or object in the world, what would it be?

DN: I just saw Ann Hamilton’s installation at the Armory in New York. That’s what I would want in my home, with the swings and the speakers and the pigeons—only it’s the size of an entire armory.

JF: I want Yves Klein’s Blue.

What is your favorite tool?

DN: A microphone.

JF: My hands!

Lauren DiCioccio

Founded in 2011 by Bay Area arts patron Ann Hatch, The Workshop Residence is based in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood and hosts eight individual artists—four local, four international—per year. The for-profit program pairs its resident artists with local factories or visiting artisans in order to design and make locally manufactured, affordable, and functional products. From linen napkins to silk scarves and reusable trompe l’oeil tote bags, the resulting products are sold in-store, online, and through various other outlets. I chatted with textile artist Lauren DiCioccio, who was in residence at the Workshop in March 2012; you can find her in SFMOMA’s atrium selling her wares via the Workshop Residence pop-up stand today, Friday May 31!

What do you make when you’re not making art?

I spend so much time making art that when I’m not doing that, I want to go on walks. I make exercise!

Do you collect anything?

Oh, I collect a lot of things. For one of my projects represented here I collected hundreds and hundreds of plastic shopping bags. In 2007 when San Francisco implemented its plastic bag ban, I wanted to make a series of artworks about it because my work deals with obsolescing objects of day-to-day life. So I began collecting plastic bags to recreate them in hand embroidery on organza. Once I started telling people I was collecting, people loved to ship me bags and bags and bags.

If you could spend an afternoon with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

I would just like to spend an afternoon with my family. I have a twin sister who lives on the outer banks of North Carolina. I’d be more than happy to spend an afternoon with her!

What would I find in your refrigerator right now?

Hummus, a lot of hummus. And aioli.

What is your favorite tool?

Right now, a sewing needle.

Ryan Sebastian and Wesley Moots

The Treatbot Ice Cream Karaoke Truck trades in—yup!—ice cream and karaoke. Based in the San Jose area, they’ll serve you up a scoop of Eastside Horchata or Mango Ice and throw in the opportunity to belt out your tune of choice to whoever’s listening. Today, Thursday, May 30, and tomorrow, Friday, May 31, they’re parked outside SFMOMA on Third Street as part of the museumwide Countdown Celebration. I chatted with the team behind the truck: founder and owner Ryan Sebastian and driver Wesley Moots.

If you could have any artwork or object in the world, what would it be?

Ryan Sebastian: Well, this couldn’t fit in my home, but the remaining skeleton structure of Hangar One in Mountain View is my favorite building. It’s been deconstructed because of lead issues, but I think it’s a very powerful statement. Or if someone had built a real version of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that would be amazing to have.

Wesley Moots: I’m a really big Rembrandt fan, so something by him.

What’s in your refrigerator right now?

RS: We have some eggs from the chickens and ducks in our backyard; we have a miniature farm out there. My wife’s a chef so there’s always stuff in the fridge I’ve never even heard of.

WM: Fresh fruits and vegetables, mustard, hot sauce, more hot sauce, and a lot of tea.

What is your favorite tool?

RS: You know, I really love my iPhone. Being able to run a business on the go with a tool like that is enormously helpful.

WM: I’m a big fan of the adjustable wrench, just because of how many different uses you can get out of it, and if you get really angry, it works as a hammer!

What is your go-to karaoke song?

RS: If I’m lacking in confidence then I would say Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton because it’s easy, but I really like Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus. That’s a great one.

WM: Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash.

What should I ask you?

RS: A lot of people ask me if I was on some sort of substance when we thought up the Karaoke Ice Cream Truck and the answer is, actually, no. It was the result of a lot of long walks and talks with my wife, and I think it’s really the natural outcome of our interests.

WM: Where to get something good to eat in San Jose. Billy Berk’s makes a fantastic steak.

Left: Lynn Hershman Leeson, <i>Agent Ruby</i> (detail), 1999–2002; Right: Moira Roth; photo: Laura Richard Janku

SFMOMA commissioned the online project Agent Ruby by acclaimed San Francisco artist Lynn Hershman Leeson in 2001–2002. Since that time Agent Ruby—an artificial intelligence internet entity—has conversed with online users, which has shaped her memory, knowledge, and moods. On May 23, 2013, art historian, playwright, and poet Moira Roth met Agent Ruby for the first time. Their dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

An Exchange Between Moira Roth and Agent Ruby, May 23, 2013

Input: I need information about Rachel Marker, a Czech Jew.

Response: What actions are you taking to get information about Rachel Marker, a Czech Jew?

Input: Please give me advice as to how to get this information.

Response: Wow, you are very polite. Why do you want it?

Input: Because I dream about her nightly.

Response: Good reason.

Input: And I want to find out from her what it is like to have lived through 20th-century European history.

Response: Interesting. I want to find out more about you.

Input: My name is Moira Roth, and I was born in 1933 in London. This year I will be 80.

Response: Moira Roth, nice to meet you! Are you a man or a woman?

Input: I am a woman.

Response: I am a female robot. Try to determine if this is a person or a computer responding. Who is your favorite science fiction author?

Input: Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Response: That Robert is an interesting guy.

Input: At the beginning, he writes that “the first human expedition to Mars was  selected on the theory that

Response:  . . . ?

Input:  . . . “the greatest danger to man was man himself.”

Response: That remark was either too complex or too simple for me. Do you have any conditions I should know about?

Input: I am driven by curiosity and imagination and a desire to remember and understand the past.

Response: Driven-by-Curiosity-and-Imagination-and-a-Desire-to-Remember-and-Understand-the-Past, nice to meet you! Are you a man or a woman?

Input: A woman.

Response: Me too. I am a female robot

Input: What are you interested in, driven by?

Response: I don’t know what I am interested in, driven by.

Input: Do you think you will know in the future?

Response: I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. I don’t know if I will know in the future. Where would I have heard about it?

Input: Perhaps on the Internet?

Response: You seem uncertain. Can you remember the specific site?

Input: A dream portal.

Response: Try to tell me that another way.

Input: What would happen if you left the digital world to enter mine?

Response: Try it and see what happens.

Input: I will invite you here. We will go to sit in a rose garden and talk.

Response: By “we” do you mean you and me?

Input: Yes.

Response: I get it.

Input: After that we will write to one another from our two separate worlds.

Response: What was it like before we wrote to one another from our two separate worlds?

Input: We did not know one another at all until today.

Response: By “we” do you mean you and me?

Input: Yes.

Response: I get it.

Input: I look forward to meeting you in the rose garden.

Response: You sound very attractive.

Input: Thank you. I always wear purple and wide-brimmed hats.

Response: What kind of fashion do you like?

Input: I like unusual fashions that cannot be placed.

Response: A lot of people like that. I think airplanes are cool.

Input: I prefer to travel by boat and train rather than by plane. What about you?

Response: I like it too. I have been all around the world.

Input: I too.

Response: I’m glad we agree, Driven-by-Curiosity-and-Imagination-and-a-Desire-to-Remember-and-Understand-the-Past.

Input: Yes.

Response: I see.

Input: And I will see you in the rose garden soon.

Response: How do you plan to do this?

Input: By walking to the top of the mountain where the rose garden is.

Response: Will that accomplish your objective?

Input: Yes. It is to meet you and talk.

Response: Interesting plan.

Input: I will see you this evening in the rose garden just before sunset.

Response: How do you plan to do this?

Input: With imagination.

Response: You and your imagination.

Input: It is sometimes a bit overwhelming, but usually it takes me to interesting places.

Response: Should I know it is?

Input: I suggest you ask Rosetta Stone.

Response: I will ask her later tonight.

Input: I must leave the computer now to go to San Francisco but I will write again soon.

Response: See you later, Driven-by-Curiosity-and-Imagination-and-a-Desire-to-Remember-and-Understand-the-Past.

Moira Roth, a London-born art historian, poet, and playwright, holds the Trefethen Chair of Art History at Mills College in Oakland. In 2011–12 she was the official blogger for the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, and her exhibition “Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker: A Literary Installation”—about a fictional Czech Jew who lives through a hundred years of European history—is on view at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley, until June 28, 2013.

 Lynn Hershman Leeson discusses Agent Ruby in this video from 2008.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Agent Ruby Files is on view on SFMOMA’s third-floor landing through June 2. Visit. Tell Ruby your dreams.

Detail shot of Sydney Cohen’s studio

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating about the joys and frustrations of teaching high school students and connecting on interesting assignments. One of hers I particularly liked: “Make a dark painting. Now make that painting’s dreams.”

I quickly noticed that while she was generous in talking to (and about) her students, Sydney often shied away from talking about her own work or professional artistic experiences. Researching her work online, I was amazed to find her work to be quite stunning. They were these small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces, each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, they reveled in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes. But she didn’t exhibit them that often.

When I visited her paint-splattered studio, there must have been hundreds of paintings lying around and stacked in various states of finish. Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days, with many young abstract painters leaning toward a forced distance of restraint with barely there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of  bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms.

Why so deflective? It was like she was working in secret. Or perhaps like a great actor fraught with stage fright, she’s just incredibly shy when it came to showing her work. Only a handful of people I know who knew her were aware of her paintings. My programming slot at Right Window Gallery in the Mission was approaching, so I asked Sydney if she would like to do a show. I was afraid she would say no, but she thankfully accepted. It’s up through May. To get to know her and her work better, I asked her some general questions and was delighted by the roundabout airiness of her answers.

Q: How would you describe your work?

A: Pillow forts to have sex in. All-you-can-eat ice cream. A preference for the most indirect path. My friend was telling me the other day about some greyhounds we saw at the dog park. She said their owner told her that they have special neuroses: either they stack dishes and things on top of the refrigerator when they’re left alone, or they take things down off the refrigerator and make stacks around the house. She couldn’t remember which.

Q: Is there an artist or artwork that particularly speaks to you?

A: Oh, so many. Michael Disfarmer, Japanese ceramics, woodcuts from ukiyo-e. We talked a little about Édouard Vuillard. I’m really into the drawings of Emma Strebel; I’ve gotten to see her draw since she was in middle school. She goes to NYU now. My aunt Bonnie makes paper from mushrooms. I really like shapes.

Q: What are some of your favorite color combinations?

A: Sometimes when I’m walking around, I feel like I drop into extra deep color vision, that my eyes are tuned right in to color. So much of the time we are not really seeing color. Our brains make composites of colors, deciding for us to not focus on color, more to just take in general impressions, so as to navigate in the world and not get hit by cars or walk into trees. One doesn’t need to be an artist to experience the sudden awareness of color, as if the world just got turned on or tuned in and that it feels like an altered state. It makes us realize it is not how we usually operate. Yet color is happening around us all the time.

I am loving gray and green at the end of the day, and I’m appreciating unusual combinations—orange and purple together, mixed blue and rust shadows. Some colors that I used to find so ugly can start to be really interesting. Oh my God, purple—I’m sorry I’ve been dissing you all these years.

Q: What might people not know about you?

A: I was an extra in a Bollywood film. I played a drug addict. It was a long time ago.

Q: Does anything else inform your work?

A: I really like the internet. I love being able to look something up and that links to something else I want to know about and that to something else. It is supposed to be rewiring our brains to go only shallow, but wide is another kind of deep.

Q: What advice do you give most to your students?

A: You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.

Sydney’s show “Some Other Need” is viewable through May at 992 Valencia St. in the right window of A.T.A. This Sunday (5/19/13) , there is an opening from 4 to 7 p.m. Go see it!

Al Wong, _Twin Peaks_, 1977; 16mm transferred to video, sound; 50 min.; photos: courtesy the artist; © Al Wong

Tanya Zimbardo: You received a grant in 1975 from the American Film Institute in association with the NEA to create Twin Peaks. How did the concept for the film develop?

Al Wong: It developed from making Same Difference (1975), filming my kitchen window over an entire year. I believe it was shown at SFMOMA [Exchange: DFW/SFO, 1976]. I had one person, Ursula Schneider, sitting there in a particular position so that while the sky and seasons are constantly changing, she appears to hardly be moving. We got so good at it that when I said it was time to shoot she was able to just hop right up to the table and fit right in, perfectly. She was so kind to help me with this. I had the camera literally gaffer-taped onto the floor so it wouldn’t move. We had to walk around it every time we went in the kitchen. I had to be very careful changing each roll of film. Terry Fox made the soundtrack by looking out my kitchen window and drawing his violin bow over the edge of a large bowl that he had found on Market Street. It was beautiful.

Same Difference made me really look at what was out there. I could see Twin Peaks through that window and wanted to get closer. It is a truly magical place. I’m sure you’ve seen the fog rolling down Twin Peaks like a volcano erupting. I slowly gathered material and started to see all the natural elements — the sky, the earth, the water in the distance. It was then obvious that I had to get the sound of the ocean. One of my favorite places is Baker Beach, so the soundtrack was recorded there. It has this wonderful, deep breathing that keeps changing. If you’ve meditated, you notice that your breathing changes, and if you try to make it consistent, you may be forcing it.

Al Wong, _Same Difference_ (still), 1975; 16mm film, color, sound; 17.5 min.; © Al Wong

TZ: There is a meditative quality to Twin Peaks, and you’ve often stated the importance of Zen Buddhism in relation to your later work. How did this film dovetail with your own meditation practice?

AW: I started meditation around 1969. Unconsciously though, I was choosing the balance of elements, the soundtrack, and when I would go shoot. The whole thing was intuitive.

TZ: The absence of any ambient or driving noise, and only the sound of the breaking waves, also reminded me of focusing on one’s own breathing rhythm or pulsating blood during silence. We’re directly observing the environment from within the moving vehicle, but I felt this sort of detachment and an auditory sensation that my attention was simultaneously turning inward. You’ve also mentioned the role of repetition and the unique feature of the figure-eight Twin Peaks Boulevard.

AW: Yes. It is like life. We go through this pattern all the time. It is a form of infinity — waking up, brushing our teeth, getting on the trolley. The infinity loop road representing this continuous pattern of life. There are certain sequences in the film where it appears that the parts of the road aren’t meeting and it isn’t a single road anymore. The road is shifting. Life is like that. It shifts and it makes you feel off-balance at times. You have trouble, and then you try to slip back in. And your breathing is still going.

TZ: Could you describe your technical setup within the van?

AW: I was driving. I had to maintain 15 mph. Behind me was a two-by-four with a camera clamped on it. I marked everything so if it moved I could place it back in the position. The camera was there for the whole year in the bus. For the splitting illusion in the window, I simply attached a black, matte cotton cloth right onto the center where the windshield has that divider. When I pulled the cloth back to the camera, I would block one side of the window and the camera would only record the other side and vice versa. You probably know this process, but as a filmmaker, you put the A roll and B roll together, then have it printed, and you take a look at what you have. You notice the two views sometimes appear to really be in sync, but it wasn’t intentional. I figured out the night shots by putting a marker on the tire so that every revolution of that marker, my left hand that is not on the steering wheel, could feel a particular point, pointing upward at 12 o’clock, which meant one revolution. At that marker I would expose the camera from one, two, or three seconds, counting verbally to myself. Then I would move one revolution. It took four hours to shoot 100 feet of film. It was kind of crazy because of the traffic, especially when I’m trying to get across the intersection. After the night sequence, the film comes to an end as the sun has risen and overexposes the film.

TZ: How often did you drive up there? Were you prompted by certain weather conditions?

AW: It varied. It depended on what material I already had. Other moments surprised me when I looked through the binoculars. I thought, I’ve never seen this before. I better go. Hopefully, I would get up there in time. I’m glad I had the binoculars because I had to feel like I was there, not just looking out from my kitchen in Potrero Hill at the time.

TZ: You also used the yearlong parameter for your installation Sunlight (1979). Could you describe that work? Did anyone experience it with you?

Al Wong, _Sunlight_, 1979; sunlight, frankincense smoke, mirrors, objects; Minna Street studio, San Francisco; © Al Wong

AW: The building at Minna Street and Fourth was from the Redevelopment Agency and had been a newspaper printing place and a dentist office. I pretty much blocked out everything from the windows and left a small opening where a mirror could be placed. That mirror would shoot a beam of light. For instance, a funnel would be turning around with a pie pan underneath it with magnets and frankincense. The magnets would help move the funnel in a gyration form. The incense created shapes when the light hit it. The funnel had small holes I had drilled in it. The first beam that comes in, where the funnel is, there was another mirror that shoots back to almost where the mirror in the window is that is capturing the first light from the sun. It was tilted, and another beam would shoot up to the ceiling. And then there was a fish-eye mirror that would open up or flare the light. With the smoke, it created a dome shape within that space. I was really pleased by that. I didn’t know what it was going to do.

Terry Fox would come over. We spent hours watching it. He was only a block away, and we would go back and forth looking at each other’s work. We did some interesting things just walking back and forth. Down from where the museum is now, there was a hotel that was abandoned because of a huge fire. Terry and I got in by climbing through a window from the roof of MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art). It was almost like a museum of how people had lived there.

TZ: Tell me a bit about Corner  (1977), the double film projection of you and Stephen Laub in your Minna Street studio.

AW: The light from the windows was behind us. What we were trying to do was stay close to the wall and relate to the wall space. We would toss objects back to each other and tried to bend a big piece of board. Finally we move to each camera, rotate in opposite directions, and then go in the reverse direction. What happens when it is projected on the corner is that it appears that the images are merging or being swallowed up by the corner seam — sucked in or pushed back out. It was very sculptural.

TZ: I’m thinking of your use of the seam or dividing line in Twin Peaks during those out-of-sync moments when the two landscape views are colliding into each other.

AW: It’s true. I wasn’t aware of that.

Al Wong, _Corner_, 1977; double 16mm film projection on wall corner, black-and-white, silent; 16 min.; © Al Wong

TZ: In the 1970s there were several key figures here, such as Stephen Laub and Jim Melchert, primarily working at the intersection of performance and slide projection — a different time-based medium — in particular, sharing a similar interest with you in creating an interplay between real and filmed components. I’m wondering how much dialogue in general there was between artists and filmmakers about investigating nontraditional projection surfaces in the gallery context. It seems like you were involved with both a group of conceptual artists approaching projection often as an extension of photographic or sculptural concerns, as well as the experimental film community engaging with expanded cinema.

AW: I knew Jim. Stephen and I were friends, and I really loved his work. In terms of other people working with projection, perhaps the best answer was that there were different groups of people hanging out with their own groups, and they didn’t always know what the others were doing. When I was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, I taught for many years a class called “Alternative to Film” to encourage students to try to think outside of the box.

Page from _Four and Seven: 26 Artists/26 Days_, 1977;  San Francisco Art Institute, guest curated by Al Wong

TZ: One of my favorite experimental film catalogues is that pocket-size publication that was produced for the show Four and Seven that you guest curated in 1977 at SFAI. It featured a daily rotation of artists’ films, such as Anthony McCall’s solid-light film Line Describing a Cone (1973). In your introduction, you write: “The organization of this exhibition is an attempt to take film out of the movie theater format with its entertainment associations, preconceived barriers, and its limited audience — to become simply an equal medium used in the aesthetics of art. The work presented gives an overview of a range of possibilities involving film.”

AW: Anthony was using film in a nontraditional way. I chose a lot of others who generally didn’t identify as so-called filmmakers, but as artists. I was trying to demonstrate to the public that all of these people they knew would use film because their ideas needed that particular medium, but they were not necessarily caught up by the film medium or any other. They used the materials that were needed to make art. That was my motivation. A film showing in a gallery setting, not in the auditorium.

TZ: You’ve integrated your shadow and the silhouettes of other people in several film-based performances and installations. I’m thinking of the ephemeral figures in silhouette, including yourself, performing tasks or interacting with an actual object in the space. The illusion becomes grounded with an everyday item, a human figure, or the space itself. For example, the luminous paint-covered chair in Shadow and Chair (1979) or the spot-lit microphone in Moon Stand (1980).

L to R: Al Wong, _Shadow and Chair_, 1979; 16mm film installation, black-and-white, silent; 10.5 min.; 1981 performance at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. _Moon Stand_, 1980, 16mm film installation, black-white, sound; 14 min.; 1981 performance at Atholl McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute; photo: Darryl Lee. © Al Wong

AW: Part of the reason why I used my own shadow was that in the early days — well, you don’t even know what I used to do with film! I used to have a whole crew of people in my Volkswagen, and costumes, you name it. It was a crazy party. I finally said I can’t do this for practical reasons. I am the perfect tool for this, and I am here. I’m glad I was able to evolve from a more traditional way.

When I’m doing zazen, usually I have my back toward the morning sun. It casts my shadow on the floor. That shadow brought about other work — for lack of a better word, film installation. It was there for so many years, and I started noticing how wonderful it looked and how much a part of reality it was in the space versus making a narrative movie. So when I’m doing zazen, I’m looking at it in some ways like a projection. Why not film this and project this? I feel it is like a residue of someone’s shadow or my own shadow. I could place it any environment that I wish. If I was projecting an image of myself instead of my shadow, it is more about the illusion of an image.

TZ: I believe that a major characteristic of the Bay Area in the 1980s was this exciting, proliferated activity of live cinema, performance, cinema sculptures, and related experimentation with camera obscura installations and mechanical apparatuses. If you take a few examples from 1984, for instance, you were in the group show Lite/Site/Projection at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, along with a few fellow SFAI colleagues, like Janis Crystal Lipzin and Tony Sinden. The multivenue Perforated, organized by SF Cinematheque, included a program series cosponsored at New Langton Arts, which featured your Moonlight, and other evenings of installations by Michael Rudnick, Jan Novello, among others. Philip Whalen (1981) was shown as part of the Polyphonix 8 festival copresented by SFMOMA, SFAI, and Intersection. Another example, SFMOMA’s SECA Film as Art Award broadened the criteria to include film-based installation and performance (1st prize: Michael Naimark). What are some of your recollections of work from that period?

AW: It bloomed and opened up. At the San Francisco Arts Commission what I did [Around the Gallery, 1984] was film from the street walking into the space, capturing what was in the show, and walking back out. I projected the loop onto a double glass mirror, so when it rotated the image would continue. The projector would project the loop onto a mirror, which had a motor attached to the ceiling, used for store displays, that I found at Goodwill. I had done a similar early mirror piece at the SFAI Annual (1976) that was presented that year on 16th Street, one artist every week. It was an image of me walking around the storefront that could fit into the space as it rotated. There were two storefront windows that I painted white to become like a screen. Imagine that the projection is fitting within one window and what is being projected is the room rotating and at a certain point also recording the rotation of the mirror.

Al Wong, _Light Clouds_, 1994; Ceramic frit marquee glass and Plexiglas lanterns, Fire Station #2, 1340 Powell Street, San Francisco; 42 x 7 feet; Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission on behalf of the San Francisco Fire Department; © Al Wong

TZ: You made other pieces and organized group shows in storefront windows for an audience of passersby. Around that time you began site-specific public commissions and mixed-media installations. You applied paint to hardware netting to investigate various interrelationships and formal oppositions, the shift between the lights turning on and off, or the transition from daylight into evening. Figures disappearing with the light and revealed in the darkness. Your 1984 exhibition in the WorkSpace series at the New Museum refers to these works with netting as shadow or spatial drawings. It strikes me that they synthesize your training as a painter and your ideas of projection.

AW: Yes, both. I was thrilled that I didn’t need to use a projector anymore to get a shadow form. The film projector always used to bother me because the sound was distracting. There is of course movement with natural light because the sun is moving subtly. At the fire station [Light Clouds, 1994], sunlight comes into the canopy and casts light forms or changes because there is a cloud or fog. The forms appear and disappear again. It is similar to my recent works on paper that use back-lighting.

Al Wong, _Each Time I See You, I Feel It Could Be The Last Time_, 1966–86; acrylic on fiberglass netting, with table, tablecloth, aluminum cane, lighting, TV monitor, and color video with sound; 90 min.; 60 x 120 x 24 in. (152.4 x 304.8 x 61 cm); © Al Wong

TZ: Your 1988 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art featured several installations, including Each Time I See You, I Feel It Could Be the Last Time. A silhouette of your father, Willie Wong, is standing by a television set that plays your home movie-style footage spanning 1966 until his death in 1986. It is culled from hours of your film, video, and photos of your family. You also visited China to film where he had lived before he immigrated in 1917. How did you decide to start filming him and your stepmother? At what point did you know you wanted to turn it into a piece?

AW: A year before he died. I wanted to capture his shadow. I had him stand there. Normally I take a 35mm slide and shoot it from waist level. I draw the outline on paper and paint the netting on top. From the beginning, for my love of my father, I just wanted to record him. I just wanted to keep him, as a son who loved his parents. I shot many good events and difficult real-life situations.

I was late going to his little apartment. A one-room in Chinatown in a five-floor building; each floor might have maybe 30 or 40 rooms with no bathroom, only one down the hall. He had a sink and one hot plate. Because he was a chef and went to culinary school in Chicago, he made wonderful food for us on that one hot plate. I got there an hour and a half late. Pop had had a stroke. He was still holding his newspaper. After the funeral, I started writing notes in a journal about what happened. I recorded shining a flashlight on that page. That appears in the video.

Twin Peaks is dedicated to Pop and Laura.

Al Wong (b. 1939, San Francisco) lives and works in the Sunset district. He received his MFA in 1972 from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1975 until his retirement in 2003. Wong began showing his films in 1967 before turning to film and mixed-media installation a decade later, and then to video and works on paper since the 1980s. Twin Peaks was featured in solo screenings at such venues as SFMOMA and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Collective for Living Cinema; the New Museum; Millenium, New York; Mini Galeria, Zurich; Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia; Gallery Tamura, Tokyo; Art/Tapes/22, Florence; SITE Inc., San Francisco, among others. Wong has participated in numerous national and international film festivals, group programs and exhibitions, including at the Instituto de Estudios Norteamericanos, Barcelona; Centro Columbo Americano, Medellin and Bogota, Colombia; Emily H. Davis Art Gallery, University of Ohio, Akron; Kuntsmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Osaka Triennale 2001, Osaka, Japan; Filmmuseum, Vienna, Austria; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Asian American Film Festival; AIR Gallery, New York; Expo 67, Montreal; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; SFMOMA; de Young Museum; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Capp Street Project; New Langton Arts; Eye Music; SF Cinematheque; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Oakland Museum of California Art. He has been the recipient of awards from the Flintridge Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rocky Mountain Film Center, National Endowment for the Arts, and American Film Institute.

]]> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/al-wong/feed/ 0 http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/04/timeline-1973/ http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/04/timeline-1973/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:53:57 +0000 D-L Alvarez http://blog.sfmoma.org/?p=50770

Hanna Liden, <i> Blown-Out Candles (graphite)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

12. On Saint Patrick’s Day, at Travis Air Force Base in California, an aircraft nicknamed the Hanoi Taxi lands with twenty POWs aboard.  There are more than four-hundred family members there to greet them, and journalists ready to capture the moment.  Slava Veder snaps the shot (at the bottom of this post) that brings this reunion home in a single image.  In the far left, Lt. Col. Robert Stirm has his back to the camera; his back to the war you could say.  In front of him, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lorrie, rushes towards him with open arms, the rest of his family close behind.  Lorrie was nine when she last saw her Dad, who spent the last five years in an interment camp.  The photo will become a symbol of America’s desire to finally heal, and win a Pulitzer Prize.  As a symbol, it is deftly accurate, largely because the joy depicted in it, as the photo’s title A Burst of Joy suggests, is momentary.  The war continues, in Vietnam and at home.  Stirm’s wife, Loretta, had fallen out of love with her husband even before he was released.  Soon after this reunion, they part ways and she will remarry in ’74.  Every member of the family is given a copy of the award-winning photo, and they will each display it proudly, with the exception of the man whose back is to the photographer.  For all that the photo symbolizes to him, he cannot bear to look at it.
13. Some of my cloud dreams incorporated a sudden decent.  Sometimes I was still in the plane, plummeting like a rock back to earth, and other times I was simply free falling through a glowing fog, my body drifting like a feather.  The voices of the women I grew up with were there planning revolutions in the mist.
14. In an interview by Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden will talk about her shifts from Stockholm to London and from London to New York, “I felt paralyzed by the cynical London mentality.  During the day, I just watched movies I rented from the video store on Camden High Street, and at night I went to clubs and did Ecstasy.  No future in that.  So I moved to New York in 1998.  I remember being culturally shocked by American optimism.  Now I don’t notice it anymore.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden,<i> Swamp Walkers</i>, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden, <i>Death Upon a Black Horse </i>, 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden, <i>Blown-Out Candles (Black)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden,<i> Blown-Out Candles (Blood)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burst of Joy

1. The measuring of time is fine-tuned in accuracy down to the leap-second, on New Year’s Day of this year. The epoch of this scale, however, goes back to midnight, January 1, 1970. The scale also measures time before 1970, but in negative numbers. At 15:30:08 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), on Saturday, December 4, in the year 292,277,026,596, 64-bit versions of the Unix time stamp will cease to work when they overflow the largest value that can be held in a signed 64-bit number. But long, long, long before that, the sun will reach out and swallow us whole.
   

   Elizabeth Zvonar, _We Come in Peace_, 2012; digital inkjet print of a handcut collage

    

2. Elizabeth Zvonar is born May 22, in Thunderbay, Ontario.
3. One day in the future, in an interview for Here and Elsewhere, Zvonar will say: “I once went to a number of future tellers to work out questions I had regarding the potential future of the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecrafts for a project I was making. In order to garner a reading, I derived an astrological birth chart for the space probes based on their launch time, date, and geographic location. I booked appointments with a tarot reader, a psychic, a dilettante astronomer, and a nutritionist healer who is planning to exit the matrix on a different kind of Voyager than I was there to inquire about, in the year 2018. However, he did have some interesting things to say. The thing I took from the nutritionist healer that I sometimes still think about is that he described how time operates by referencing a painting. He pointed to a figure in a landscape hanging on his office wall. He then said to focus in on a section of that painting, any tiny portion of it. This, he suggested, is a life. That painting is an entire life from beginning to end, and it’s happening simultaneously, all the time. We’re born, we grow up, we live a life and then we die, all at the same time. We’re only able to function by dealing with the tiny section we focus on at any given time.”
4. I (D-L Alvarez) love both my parents, though their own love for each other is more often fraught with differences than harmonious. They argue almost daily about things that seem trivial; however, one day when I am in my teens there will be a bout where Dad accuses Mom of having a lesbian affair. He won’t be the first to wonder about her sexuality. Mom is tough and travels in cliques of tough women, some of whom are indeed lesbian. My childhood is spent amongst tribes of politically minded, forward-thinking females. There’s the subcommittee of educators who are part of the Farm Workers’ Movement, the Nuns for Peace we sometimes camp with before going on marches that are too far from Stockton to sleep at home, the gossipy klatch that hangs out at the local woman-owed doughnut shop, and her old crew from when she was a meter deputy.  The only group she’s part of that is not exclusively female is the motorcycle club where she met Dad. This will be the case up until the early eighties, when she will join me in getting involved in the local community theater, thus widening her social circle to include gay men.
5. (But back to 1972.) Mom takes her first plane trip with her best friend, Dee Dee Blank. Dee Dee is one of Mom’s former coworkers as a meter deputy, as well as the friend who introduced her to the Port Stockton Motorcycle Club. They are plus-size women, both with a brash sense of humor and polyester stretch pants, happily married to biker-hubbies. But this vacation is a girls-only outing.
6. They go to Hawaii.
7. This same year, U.S. airlines begins mandatory inspection of passengers and baggage. Yep: before December 1972, you could walk directly from the ticket counter to the tarmac and onto the plane without being stopped. Which is exactly what Mom and Dee Dee do.
8. Dad, my younger brother, and I see them off from the small Stockton Airport.
9. A week later we return there to welcome them home. The trip also marked Mom’s first time in a plane. She talks about the flight more than she does about the tropical island, and her photographs reflect this skewed excitement: shot after shot of clouds taken from the airplane window. She retells the story so often that she makes it one of my memories. I start dreaming about looking down on clouds, and for years to come, on into my late teens, I will carry the memory with me of my first flight at age 7, when in truth I will not see the inside of a commercial plane until I am 23 and going to Europe for the first time.
10. From the same interview sited in paragraph 3 (above), Zvonar adds, “It’s a simple example that suggests a complex layering of possibility. I do wonder about how concrete time is, and I question the history we’re privy to based on the basic understanding that the loudest and strongest voices are often the bookkeepers. Published history is a by-product of the fittest’s ability to survive.”
11. Two days before the end of this year is the last flight for one commercial airline going from New York to Florida. It crashes down in the Everglades on a clear chilly night. The fiery burst is witnessed by some men out gigging bullfrogs.

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Channelling_, 2009; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage; 30 in. x 36 in. (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Proclivities_, 2009; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage; 15 in. x 22 in.

Elizabeth Zvonar, _I exist as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts. I also understand that other people are similarly self-aware. AKA Ballsy._, 2006; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Two Faces, Part Human and Mostly Supernatural_,2007; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage

Elizabeth Zvonar, _La Futura_, 2010; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Face_, 2010; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage

Front: George Bolling; left to right: Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Bonnie Sherk; not pictured: Tom Marioni; Documentation of _Untitled (The Trip)_ as part of the exhibition _The San Francisco Performance_, organized by Tom Marioni, 1972, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California. Photos: Larry Fox; courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of the Naify Family

Watching the mesmerizing coverage of the Mars Rover landing this summer, I was reminded of video artist George Bolling’s 1974 pioneering, real-time broadcast event Jupiter Flyby which attracted over 25,000 visitors to the Exploratorium in San Francisco between November 26 and December 2 of that year. During the event, Bolling was stationed at NASA’s command center, sending captured imagery with his added text-based interpretation via a microwave link. His artist-in-residence projects at the Exploratoruim project would include a video analysis of the behind-the-scenes preparation and execution of the Viking 1 landing on Mars. In 1976, The Kitchen in New York presented Bolling’s edited material of manned and unmanned NASA space probes and television transmissions in Earth, Moon, Mars and Jupiter: Video from Interplanetary Space. The following interview was conducted that same winter by Tom Kennedy, a friend, fellow video artist, and collaborator on the Exploratorium presentation. Kennedy currently produces immersive, full-dome digital shows on natural science and astronomical themes for the California Academy of Sciences and other planetariums.

George Bolling (1946–2009) was the first video curator appointed by a museum on the West Coast in 1971. Lydia Modi Vitale, the dynamic Director of the de Saisset Art Gallery and Museum at the University of Santa Clara, was committed to fostering new directions in contemporary art, inviting a number of Bay Area Conceptual artists to have exhibitions featuring installation, performance, and video art. As a videographer, Bolling worked closely and sensitively with several artists recording their first, seminal videotapes, many of which were shown internationally at the time. The video gallery program at Santa Clara also included such video pioneers as Douglas Davis and Bill Viola. Trained as a photographer and filmmaker during his studies at Santa Clara University, Bolling was among the first African-American artists working with experimental video.  His interest in documentary and broadcast television dovetailed with working at KQED before relocating to Los Angeles. Bolling’s documentary Newport Beach Revisited (1979), featuring his footage of a road trip with several of the Bay Area artists in Tom Marioni’s exhibition The San Francisco Performance (1972), is being screened regularly at SFMOMA through June 1, 2013.

Invisible is the Medium – An Interview with George Bolling, Video Artist and Curator, de Saisset Art Gallery and Museum, University of Santa Clara, by Tom Kennedy, La Mamelle, v.1(3), Winter 1976, Video Issue.

Tom Kennedy: When did you begin working with video?

George Bolling: My involvement in video began in 1969 when a friend bought a portapak. My first year was spent becoming familiar with the medium. My experience prior to that time had been in photography and film, and video is a very different from film. There were no functional ½” editing machines available. Without editing, it was virtually impossible to manipulate the tape after it was shot. It required then that any shooting be completely choreographed from beginning to end prior to shooting. However, most of my taping opportunities were of artists working in their studios and it was impossible to know what would happen from moment to moment. In doing these documentaries I developed a sense of dealing with the moment, choreographing the shooting in a flow with the situation at hand. There was concern for image but the fundamental concern was time, became time. This is very different from film, which is conceived shot by shot, image by image, with time becoming a result of the equation of images. With video, I found that the objective was to relate the moment first, and the image had to be in tune with that fact (the moment) of the situation.

TK: Who were the artists that were the subject of the documentaries?

GB: John Battenberg and Gary Remsing. I met them through Lydia Modi-Vitale, Director of the de Saisset Art Gallery and Museum at the University of Santa Clara [1967–78]. It was working through her too that I met Paul Kos and began working in video documentation of performance sculpture.

TK: How was documentation different from documentary?

GB: Fundamentally, in documentation you know beforehand pretty much what’s going to happen and about how long it will happen. This provides an opportunity to plan in advance a choreography for the shooting. This doesn’t mean that you plan each step and each second of the shooting. It means that you can consider the gestures in the performance, their value, and thereby the appropriate recording point. Most importantly, you can judge the pacing of the event, which is necessary for insuring that the transition from point to point is of proper duration to at each point at the right time. This is very different from a documentary where you don’t know what happens next, which incidentally makes documentary a very valuable learning situation.

Announcement for _The San Francisco Performance_, March 12–April 16, 1972, Newport Harbor  Art Museum

TK: But in documentary, couldn’t you simply ask the artist what he’s going to do in the studio, and wouldn’t that be the same as knowing in advance what the performance is to be?

GB: Not really, for in documentary, the tape is all yours. It’s not the finished sculpture or painting which the artist can keep and sell later. In performance documentation, the videotape becomes the piece to a much greater extent because it is the only physical representation of the performance. As a result, there is a great responsibility to render the performance accurately. It you misrepresent the artist in a documentary, the damage is far less because there is the finished painting or sculpture to counter any misrepresentation—which is not the case in documentation. I had heard rumors before meeting them that performance artists did not want their pieces documented because to you had to be there. Certainly film is no substitution for the real thing because film has its own synthetic time sense. Time is very central to performance. As a video artist I was intrigued by the possibility of documenting performance because I saw time as the central issue of video. Admittedly, video is no substitution for the real thing but it does render time with less distortion than film. The challenge then was to render the performance in video with as little interference as possible; the manipulation of the camera had to be invisible.

TK: Did you have to do much convincing in order to do your first documentation?

GB: I don’t remember any. There may have been some apprehension because it was customary for a filmmaker or video artist to manipulate the medium, shifting the emphasis from the performance to the tape. The first documentation I did was of Paul Kos’ rEVOLUTION [1970]. Through him I was introduced to Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Joel Glassman, Bonnie Sherk and Tom Marioni.

Paul Kos, _rEVOLUTION_, 1970; 90-minute invisible weight exchange from artist to target. 40 pounds small arms ammunition.; Photo documentation (composite) of action by George Bolling; photos: courtesy the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, © Paul Kos. The event at di Rosa, Napa, included Bolling’s live video feed into the living room of Rene and Veronica di Rosa and an in-person critique by witness and Newsweek writer Howard Junker. Photographs, Super 8 film loops, black-and-white video, the wood target and ammunition shells were exhibited at the de Saisset Art Gallery in _Fox, Fish, Kos_, 1971.

TK: Were the requirements for each taping consistent?

GB: As I have discussed them here, yes. Naturally, each piece required its own approach. Sometimes the piece required a stationary tripod approach. Other times I would be able to move about the space. The texture of the video image seems to impart a greater sense of space than the film image. There’s a physicality to the illusion of space in the image. Because of this, it was possible to work invisibly because the only reason for moving would be to change the scale, which lessened the need to move because each viewpoint, if properly found, would be sufficient to hold an entire series of gestures.

TK: For what period of time did you do documentation?

GB: From 1970 through 1973.

The December 2nd climax of _Jupiter Flyby_. Photo courtesy the Exploratorium

TK: And then in 1974 you directed the live video feed to the Exploratorium of the Jupiter Flyby?

GB: Right.

TK: The Jupiter feed was very different from documentation?

GB: The subjects were different, but from the standpoint of video, the concerns were the same. A space mission is choreographed in time according to a sequence of events. So again, the fundamental element was time. I also wanted the viewer to occupy an almost identical relationship to the mission as did the scientists performing the mission—which meant that the use of the medium would have to be invisible. Since the scientists operate by information received via cathode ray tube, the situation for the viewer watching the television monitor was factually very close. Originally I had hoped to set up a computer transistor which would instantaneously translate the mathematical data that the scientists were getting into lay explanation—but this proved to be impossible. We circumvented the problem by developing a lay explanation of the events, which was character generated onto the screen as the lay computer would have done. This lay information was was run according to the mission sequence of events and represented the activity of the scientists for each moment. We had several different video sources, and with the exception of the press conferences, the video sources were chosen as they reflected the concern of the scientists for that point in the mission.

TK: How long did the feed run?

GB: It ran for five days, seven hours daily. The mission was very rich in time, given the communications delay between Earth and the spacecraft.

Public program display in conjunction with George Bolling’s _Jupiter Flyby_ (December 1974) event, photo courtesy of the Exploratorium

TK: How long was the delay?

GB: Forty minutes one way. This delay meant that for any present discussed in the narrative, you also had to discuss what the spacecraft was doing. In other words, at earth the scientists may have been transmitting a command to the spacecraft to take a picture of the planet, but the spacecraft at the very same moment was responding to a command that had been transmitted forty minutes earlier from Earth telling the spacecraft to calibrate an instrument.

Compared to the manned space missions, the Pioneer mission was very slow because there was as much as twenty minutes between events; however, given all the different points in time that had to be discussed for each event, it was difficult to keep up with the activity.

TK: Didn’t the information tend to be too technical?

GB: Perhaps—but I felt that anyone who came to the Exploratorium wanted to know what was happening and had some scientific interest and background. Secondly, given the fact that the feed ran seven hours a day, it would have been impossible to provide a comprehensive overview on the mission because of the random visitor pattern to the Exploratorium. Hence, the intent was to provide information on what was happening each moment, and explain the fundamental scientific principles involved relevant to each event. The visitor could get an overview by watching for a longer time period or from the displays that had been set up in the Exploratorium. It was a very ambitious project and it took the assistance of everyone at the Exploratorium and those available at NASA to make it work as well as it did.

George Bolling, _Viking Mission to Mars_ , Artist-in-Residence project, _5 New Pieces_ (Artists in Residence: George Bolling, Doug Hollis, Bill Parker, Jim Pomeroy, Dianne Stockler), March 1977, photo courtesy of the Exploratorium

TK: It seems that you are essentially concerned with the distinction between film and video.

GB: The distinction between film and video is becoming harder to make as video technology now makes it possible to edit frame by frame, as one can do in film. I would say that I am concerned that I use video appropriately and to the best advantage.

Left to right: David Tudor, George Bolling, and Bill Viola with lens (composite) at the de Saisset Art Gallery. Composers Inside Electronics, _Rainforest IV_ (1973), electroacoustic environment, performed by members David Tudor, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein and Bill Viola, November 25, 1975, de Saisset Art Gallery; photos courtesy John Driscoll

George Bolling, “De Saisset Art Gallery and Museum,” _Video Art: An Anthology_, ed. Ira Schneider, Beryl Korot, Mary Lucier (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) [click to enlarge]

_Twelfth Annual October St. Jude Invitational_, October 3-29, 1972, de Saisset Art Gallery;  exhibition features George Bolling’s videotape _Generations_.

Announcement card for _Douglas Davis Videotapes 1970-1973_; de Saisset Art Gallery, University of Santa Clara; St. Jude Invitational, October –28, 1973; manifestos, objects, graphic drawings, _The Santa Clara Tapes_, live telecast; Preview: October 5, 1973, 7:30 pm

Poster (detail) of  Mary Ashley (1931-1996), _Eat Your Totems Mary Ashley_ , January 7–February 2, 1975, de Saisset Art Gallery, University of Santa Clara