OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

While investigating various histories relevant to the Pickpocket Almanack program, Renny Pritikin pointed me to a rare publication surveying SFAI’s brave departure from business as usual, organized by Tom Marioni. It was a year-long series of weekly projects called The Annual or Annual Space. The series involved institutional partnerships and off-site locations including two at SFMOMA.

I can tell you a bit about Ariel Schrag because I spent the last 4 weeks introducing her every night on the Sister Spit tour. Ariel grew up in the Bay Area, and did she waste her high school years drinking too much at the Rocky Horror Picture show and falling in love with bisexual witches named Perry? No she did not. Ariel, who went to Berkeley High, began documenting her experience as an out queer in the form of comics. They were ultimately compiled into 4 graphic novels – Awkward and Definition (9th and 10th grade, published in one volume), Potential, and Definition. Potential is getting made into a film by Killer Films, the badasses who brought us Boys Don’t Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Scarlett Johansson is not really going to play Ariel, that is just a bad joke I made to help Ariel sell her Potential t-shirts at our shows. Ariel used to write for The L-Word, where she tried to get the staff to let her put the annoying main character Jenny on tour with Sister Spit, which is so meta. Like I said on stage every night for 28 nights, it was way better to have Ariel Schrag in the van than Jenny. Every night she would show slides from her comics and narrate them, setting them to music (Aimee Mann, Dead or Alive, Kate Bush, the soundtrack from Rent) and doing the voices, perfectly switching between the frazzled speaking-in-tongues of a crazy man on a park bench, the hysterical pitch of a type-A party-planning lesbian, the timid lilt of her gentle mother, or the bored snarl of a troublemaking girlfriend. She did all this, plus ran the tech every night. Ariel Schrag is a total hero, and storytelling genius whose comics are full of inky life and angst and honesty and hilarity. Her timing for letting a moment hit you is superb, and her nuances are sort of wicked and totally clever. The Contemporary Jewish Museum has brought her around to teach a graphic novel workshop today, November 5th, here in San Francisco, much to the delight of all the Bay Area Sister Spitters who miss their new best friend so much.  Get the details at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/event.php?eid=154764438589&ref=mf

And now here’s a tiny interview:

Michelle: Did your mom name you after the Sylvia Plath book?

Ariel: Nope, the Shakespeare play The Tempest

Michelle: You totally get the great trick of writing (or drawing) memoir is to expose all the stupid or weird things YOU do. But then how do you deal with having shown the world all your weirdness? Are you in denial? I am.

Ariel: The way I see it is there are two goals: to make something funny and/or to make something relatable. So if you take some really embarrassing or painful experience but you make it funny or express it in such a way that other people sympathize or empathize it’s like everything is OK.  It’s only when people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t get what you’re talking about at all – what does this even mean??” that it sucks.

It is a little weird though for people to know all this private information about me that I probably would not otherwise have shared so soon. That I try not to think about.  So yeah, denial works.

Michelle: Does the world look to you like a series of panels, like storyboarded? When you feel inspired to document an experience is it laid out like that or is it something totally different?

Ariel: When I’m currently working on a comic this phenomenon happens pretty regularly. Events, both current and in the past (or future even) will flash across my mind in black and white comic panels. Never color! If I’m working on a prose thing, though, I find myself describing events in my head in my narrator’s voice. So basically whatever creative project I’m working on tries to take over my general life.

Michelle: Can you talk about the Potential movie, where it’s at right now?

Ariel: It’s moving along! We just got a great new producer, Jamin O’Brien. Rose Troche is directing and she’s amazing. I love working with her. We’re hoping to shoot this spring.

Michelle: What part of the Sister Spit tour would have made the best comic?

Ariel: If I was going to write a comic about tour it would really have to be the whole thing. How everyone got to know each other, switching off between scenes in the van and all the crazy different shows. I can say that astrology would have a very heavy presence.

Michelle: What are you going to teach in your workshop at the Contemporary Jewish Museum?

Ariel: The joys of comics! My lecture is basically just me talking about all the different amazing things you can do with the medium of comics and showing examples from my favorite books. I also have fun exercises to go along with different topics. I really love teaching comics. They’re endlessly fascinating to me.

Michelle: One night on tour I had this crazy dream about goats and it was because of the panels you showed about your own crazy goat dreams. What is the most recent dream you remember?

Ariel: I recently dreamed that I was back on tour and had done my laundry at a hotel but left it in the machine and we’d driven three hours away! I think my laundry represented the tour itself, and it was a dream about being sad that tour was over.

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

[Part two of a conversation, keyed to our One on One series, between Michelle Barger, deputy head of conservation, and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, on Robert Overby's Hall painting, first floor.]

Michelle Barger: How did you come to chose Hall painting, first floor for your One on One talk? Were you familiar with Overby’s work as a commercial designer prior to becoming an artist, and did this play into your decision?

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher: In 2000, I was working at the UCLA Hammer Museum as the curatorial assistant when Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969 was exhibited, so I have been familiar with all the various strains of his work since then, including the graphic design. However, this was before switching from a curatorial interest in contemporary art to architecture. When I was combing through the permanent collection database recently in search of works for an exhibition proposal, I was thrilled to discover that SFMOMA had one of the Barclay House casts.

Even though Hall painting, first floor is in the Painting +  Sculpture collection (and not Architecture + Design), I think it brings up interesting issues related to capturing and displaying architecture. I abandoned the exhibition proposal once I learned that it was on view in Vincent Fecteau’s show, but I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time thinking about this work and how it relates to Architecture.

As you know, an A+D department in an art museum is always working with secondary materials. We can never exhibit a building, only representations of a building. Of course, everyone experiences architecture every day, especially how it defines space and program. Hall Painting, first floor offers an impression of a familiar piece of architecture—a house—using a method I’ve never seen in the field. By creating a cast of a detail from the house—the hall where a painting was on the first floor—one is given a very personal view of an interior. This impression captures details that a photograph cannot—the paint from the walls and pieces of the burnt wood, which reveal an intriguing history of the house.

MB: Doorways and architectural passageways are represented in other early works by Overby, bringing up the relationship between the body and points of access. Can you talk about this relationship in Hall painting, first floor?

JDF: I hadn’t really thought about the door represented in this piece, because I consider this work a fragment of the larger project of capturing the whole Barclay House. But, of course, you are right that most of the other casts are only of doors or windows, and he also did concrete casts of doors. As you mentioned, it also relates to Overby’s other works and interestingly, even the later paintings of (mostly) female body parts with rubber S&M apparel, where the orifices are either covered by latex or are the only body part revealed. I’ve always considered the rubber casts as images of spaces special to Overby;  however, writer David Rimanelli wrote that Overby considered the casts as process art, in which case the works stand as an index to the action. To get back to your question, I wonder about the bodily action in “masking” the house (and finding parts of the house’s skin—plaster, paint and burnt wood—embedded in the cast) as a pseudo sexual act.

I look forward to speaking about the notion of the work as an index a bit more during the One on One talk on Thursday, November 5th at 6:30pm.

Assistant curator of painting + sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio, on the Utah desert, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, and more. Part I is here.

In August I went to Utah for the first time to continue my art-mediated obsession with desert landscapes. I traveled to a portion of The Great Basin—famous home to the Great Salt Lake, the Mormon Church, the glorious Wasatch Mountains, and the Bingham Copper Pit. My purpose, however, was to see the Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson and the Sun Tunnels (1973 – 76) by Nancy Holt (two earthworks made by artists who were, incidentally, married), as well as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover base (active since 1996).

My journey began with a visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), where my friend and former colleague Jill Dawsey (now curator of contemporary art at UMFA) had organized the exhibition Desert Secrets, comprised of photographs from the museum’s collection. Trevor Paglen’s photos—about the geography of state secrecy—were of course already familiar to me. And although I was familiar with Richard Misrach’s work, I had never seen his stunning photograph Chrysler Newport, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah (1992), of an abandoned old car in the middle of the white, crackling desert, taken in an area in Utah renowned for being so flat and expansive that when you stand in it you can see the earth’s curvature. Misrach has been photographing desert landscapes for over 35 years, and has produced a large body of work referred to as the Desert Cantos, about which Reyner Banham has written, “Misrach’s images are important because they make us see with the eye of art this man-mauled desert that we try not to see in real life, and to see that it is beautiful.” Coming away from the exhibition, I was reminded again of the ominous presences the desert conceals: military bases, nuclear test sites, industrial wreckage. These harbingers of doom are of course interspersed with revelatory moments of natural wonder, making the desert a place rife with contradictions.

(more…)

When I paid a visit to “The Fountain Of Giant Teardrops,” Neil LeDoux’s solo show at Silverman Gallery last year, I had seen only a very rough reproduction of one of the paintings in a newspaper. Underneath it was a small story regarding the roots of these pieces.

“He recounted seeing a fountain in the thick Louisiana forests, the fountain’s beauty was so astonishing that he immediately wanted to share it with his friends and family but when he took them back to see it it was nowhere to be found.” This piqued my interest, as the story seemed to work simultaneously as a veil and an entrance. When I was finally inside the gallery facing the paintings, I was immediately impressed by their size and their dealing so deftly in dark brown. I liked being given a story for work that was decidedly abstract.

Neil recently had new work hanging in the nave at CCA. When I saw the first piece, I was immediately reminded of the cover to a book by the great Moroccan story teller Mohammed Mrabet titled Harmless Poisons Blameless Sins. Neil’s work is more refined and the canvas still very large compared to any of Mrabet’s work, but their paintings share a quality of having cut a live and unknown organism in half, its tendrils flailing about in a dark pool unleashing some further form of pointed magic. They seem older than time, as if they had waited very long to be discovered.

(more…)

In the mid-90s, on the block of South Van Ness bordered by 16th and 15th streets used to be a little art gallery called Bewegung. It was the brainchild of Heather Haynes, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Heather lived in the back and the gallery was in the front. Heather was my best friend for a bunch of that decade, when I was young and just moved to San Francisco. I would come over to the gallery and Heather would be giving the whole space a spiritual cleanse, mopping it with a solution of like cow’s milk and blue crumbly balls of something from a Botanica in the Haight plus flower petals and when she was done she’d go in the shower and give herself a spirtual cleanse as well, dumping this great-smelling potion over her shaved head. The whole space used to be a Chinese restaurant – Heather would find animal carcasses in the backyard while gardening – but now Heather had performance and art in the windowed storefront while she and a roommate lived in stilted wooden boxes in the back, like treehouses. I was always locking myself out of my own house and sleeping at Heather’s house, in her cloud bed made of piles of down comforters and tossed with throw pillows stuffed with vetiver. If it sounds magical it’s ’cause it was. I once even saw a ghost hanging out over Heather while she slept, but that is another story.

The best show I remember from Bewegung was Charles Herman-Wurmfled, the jack-of-all-trades who went on to make a bunch of movies, first Fancy’s Persuasion, a classic in which he cast Justin Bond as the mom a la’ John Waters’ choice of Divine as the matriarch in Hairspray. After that he did Kissing Jessica Stein and next, amazingingly, Legally Blonde 2, but I remember when he hung a bunch of art involving blue maribou on the walls of Bewegung and in front of it I go-go danced, topless and painted blue, wearing shitty cut-off jeans and combat boots, to the sound of Hole blasting through my Walkman, while balanced on a cinderblock. A few other ruffians were similarly Smurfed-up and stuck on a block to dance to the beat of their own Walkman, while off to the side a cellist played elegant music. It was kind of amazing.

Now Heather lives in Toronto, where she runs Toronto Free Gallery www.torontofreegalery.org  an art spaced dedicated to showing work that deals with social justice, cultural, urban and environmental issues. TFG is sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a Caribbean patti take-out joint, and the owners of the take-away place did a Caribbean  patti workshop as a part of the current exhibition curated by Maiko Tanaka, Tejpa Ajji and Chris Reed. It’s that sort of true community space. The current exhibition, Toronto Free Broadcasting currently has  an open call out for instructional videos and a bunch already received are up on their site, assisting with hands-on problems like How to Break Into a Hotel Room, as well as more conceptual issues like How to Become a Hot Chick or How to Ruin a Relationship. http://torontofreebroadcasting

Heather Haynes is also publishing the art, media + politics magazine Fuse, which has an awesome cover story on the art and career of Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of of Culture and the creator of all of the movement’s amazing graphics, an excellent mix of pre-punk folk art depicting yelling ladies and kids bearing protest signs, beaten pigs and of course Huey P. Newton with a gun. Some looks like zine art and some like  propaganda and all are so full of beautiful energy and dynamic gusto. They look like they could have been created yesterday and, in the words of the artist, “You’re talking about unemployment, decent housing, dealing with the prison industrial complex, and the disproportionate number of people of color dying in the military. All those things still exist today.”

When Sister Spit was just in Cleveland some local queers gave us the hard sell on their town and claimed it to be akin to San Francisco in the 60s or the East Village in the 80s. I don’t think this is true, but the rumors are coming in that this might be the case for Winnipeg. Writer Eileen Myles was just up there reading from her brilliant new book The Importance of Being Iceland (so brilliant it made me cry in the tour van three different times with three different emotions) and she said it’s like the coolest place ever, and an article in Fuse that talks about the scene also makes it sound like one of those beaten down cities that eventually produces some cracked-out cultural diamond. But my favorite part of the article is the bit about how someone vandalized a new and heinous luxury condo development with the tag BAYAREA! Ouch. The truth hurts. http://www.fusemagazine.org/

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. This week and next, Michelle Barger, SFMOMA deputy head of conservation, & Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, together take on Robert Overby's Hall painting, first floor.]

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher: I was so excited to learn that Robert Overby’s large latex rubber cast of Hall painting, first floor from 1971 would be on view, because I had been working on an exhibition proposal that would incorporate this work that, to my knowledge, had not been on view at SFMOMA since it was acquired in 2003. When the One on One opportunity came up, I knew I wanted to talk about this piece, but only recently noticed that Michelle Barger, Deputy Head of Conservation, has also selected this piece. As luck would have it, the talks were scheduled one week apart: a great opportunity to highlight on the blog the many different interpretations and voices within an institution on a single work of art.

Michelle, we know that Hall painting, first floor was a cast from the Barclay House, which was a recently burned and abandoned building in Los Angeles. As a conservator, what do you think of Overby’s attempt to preserve an imprint of house surely slated for demolition?

Michelle Barger: It’s interesting to explore Overby’s Barclay project as a sort of preservation project. I often think of the surfaces of Hall painting, first floor as topography maps—literally a one-to-one record of every hill and valley in the flaking paint and loose plaster. In the field of conservation, we are always attempting to document the life of a work of art: what are the materials, how did the artist manipulate them and create the work of art, what are the best display conditions, are those conditions variable, how will the materials age, and is this acceptable, etc. It’s interesting to think of Hall painting, first floor in the way one can think of documentation for performance art—a record that proves or confirms that an event existed and happened. It becomes a second-hand version of the real thing. But in this case, one can consider Overby’s documentation as the performance.

JDF: I imagine that the fashion for entropy in artworks from the 1960s and 70s can complicate a conservator’s role in preserving a work that is supposed to “fade away’ eventually, especially if it is a valuable work in a museum collection. In contrast, Overby appears to be attempting to capture the house before its demise, yet the material—latex rubber—used for the casts must be particularly hard to maintain, especially as it is embedded with bits from the house—the paint, plaster and even charred wood. How do you treat such a piece? Are the artist’s intentions taken into consideration, even when there is no documented conservation plan from the artist?

MB: The conservation staff here is very committed to understanding artists’ intent for their work; we consider this information to be an integral part of developing a preservation plan for works in the collection. Yet, as you note, we don’t always have the luxury of knowing an artist’s thoughts for how a work should age over time, particularly when the artist is no longer alive. In such cases, we may work with our curators, colleagues at other institutions who are familiar with the artist’s work, and family members and studio assistants to better comprehend the best course for treatment.

On the subject of Overby’s material specifically, we were fortunate to have spent many hours studying and examining the work of Eva Hesse—so much of her later sculptural work incorporated latex rubber—in preparation for our 2002 retrospective of her work. During the subsequent tour of the exhibit to Wiesbaden, Germany, and London, I had the wonderful privilege of handling and installing her work, and observing the qualities and limits of aged latex rubber. One very basic thing I learned is that you can extend the life of an artwork made with rubber by simply storing it in the exact configuration in which it is displayed. In other words, rubber will eventually become hardened and brittle, causing the work to “freeze” in whatever position it happens to be in at that point in time. Many of Overby’s rubber wall paintings from the Barclay House are so large that they must be stored rolled on a cylinder—in much the same way that large tapestries or rugs are stored. Luckily, Hall painting, first floor is small enough that we can store it completely flat and still fit the crate into our freight elevator, through gallery doorways, and into storage.

As for the bits of paint, plaster, charred wood—and even a telephone wire—in this work, they are remarkably well-adhered to the rubber surface. Flexing of the work during handling and installation could compromise this, especially as the rubber continues to become more brittle. But we’ve worked out an excellent system where the storage crate also serves as a tray to support the work when moving it from a horizontal to vertical position.

I’ll be speaking about Hall painting, first floor in a One on One talk this Thursday the 29th at 6:30, and will specifically address the challenges we face in preserving works made from latex rubber. I’ll bring some show-and-tell items—including some samples of rubber and cheesecloth panels—so please come on by!

Drinking the most anemic, milked-down coffee at a breakfast joint in Providence, Rhode Island, I so wish I was back in Cristy Road’s lightless, ornamented punk rock palace. The walls are covered, like totally covered, with Cristy’s illustrations, inky and graphic and punk and female, girls breaking down or falling in love or both at the same time while crowd surfing with octopus at a punk show. Cristy is often asked to create art for the bands and businesses who, at a glance, know they share the same political aesthetic as Cristy. She did the T-Shirts for the feminist book store Women and Children First in Chicago, she did the cover of the 3-wave feminist anthology We Don’t Need Another Wave, she made Sister Spit’s 2009 graphics and she created an awesome burning cop car for a show about queer street protest I curated this summer. The cop car was blown up and submitted to the art director of the Green Day musical happening in Berkeley, who was soliciting art to plaster across the stage’s backdrop. This is super perfect for Cristy because her name was lifted from the lyrics of a Green Day song and she is so obsessed with the band her first artistic offering was Greenzine, a true fan-zine, and her current work in progress is an illustrated novel about her love for the band. After the publication of her last illustrated punk rock roman a clef, Bad Habits, Green Day’s Billy Joe sent Cristy a hand-written fan letter, calling her a miracle. The real Christie Road is a street in the East Bay, with a sign that is regularly stolen by mad Green Day fans. Cristy has one hung above her work station. She told me they’re really hard to steal now cause the workers hang it way high, out of the reach of thieving Green day fanatics.

The rest of the room half-plastered in Cristy’s artwork is wallpapered with various posters of glamorous women, mostly Madonna, as Cristy’s roommates are a gaggle of punked-out fags not too punk to love Madonna. They are, after all, drag queens as well as punks and on my visit one, a fashion designer, was holding white denim vest tricked-out crusty-style in patches and studs, under the kitchen sink, dying it sepia with tea. The other were sprawled in the cavernous living room, stoned and eating coffee cake and giving themselves clay masks and watching The Golden Girls amidst the decor – a live iguana, clown dolls, a crazy mannequin named Pompeii, a gun vase stuffed with glittery fake flowers. Diana Ross posters hang on walls, Hole, too. Perpetually exhausted as the endless tour rolls into its seventh week, I had tugged my luggage through the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood Cristy lives in, and she rewarded me by making me a giant cup of Cuban style coffee like her grandmother makes, in a metal espresso pot thick with sugar and cream. Even though this tour has given me a caffeine tolerance that has rendered Red Bull useless, I sip the Cuban coffee respectfully, knowing that it has the power to Fuck Me Up.

(more…)

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests.]

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?

K: Katherine, Tampa, Florida. I am an elementary school media specialist. Hobby: reading! What a surprise.

A: My name is Andy, Tampa Florida is our town. I’m an environmental consultant and my hobby is politics.

K: Not the same politics, sadly.

Do you collect anything?

K: Yes, I do. We collect sea shells since we live in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. We have a lot of beautiful sea shells. I collect tea cups myself. I have a lot of cute little tea cup things. Not creepy tea cup stuff but nice tea cup stuff.

A: I collect rocks, minerals and shells. Not many, but just really nice samples. Things like that.

If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?

K: I would pick Mary Cassatt. I just love her work: French Impressionism, it’s just amazing. And she’s from Philadelphia too.

A: I’d say Jackson Pollock. We saw the movie and really liked the way Ed Harris played him. I loved the art and the way it was presented.

K: He has a nice print in his office.

A: Yes, I find it very inspirational.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?

A: I wouldn’t do it.

K: I tell ya, I wouldn’t steal it either. Hypothetically, maybe something by Vincent Van Gogh. Obviously I wouldn’t steal the work. Starry Night? Or the Sunflowers?

A: I saw some sketches that Picasso did at the Guggenheim that I thought were amazing. I’d like to have that collection just to look at.

What’s your favorite tool?

K: My KitchenAid mixer. I’m a big cook, a big time cook.

A: I have a lot of different tools. My 6 foot stick tape. I use it for work. You can use it to do some rough surveying too and a lot of site stuff.

K: Not a very romantic answer.

A: Plus my garden edger is really nice.

K: That is a good garden edger, that’s true. EBay, we got a good buy on that one too. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling.]

Do only fans truly understand pop culture? Anyone who has been a fan of one of our global pop stars knows it is the fans that make the star. Candice Breitz has explored—in four different parts of the world—how fans “become” their beloved idol, be it Bob Marley in Kingston; Madonna in Milan; Michael Jackson in Berlin; or, finally, John Lennon in Newcastle, England. I saw Candice Breitz’s Lennon-portrait-as-working class hero three years ago, when it was first shown in Vienna. Today, installed in the Media Art galleries on SFMOMA’s 4th floor, I’m still struck by the way twenty-five ardent Lennon fans have taken on the challenge to sing every single song of his first solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The record was released in 1970, the same year the Beatles split up; Lennon was deeply involved in global politics at the time, and working through the traumatic loss of his mother. Breitz’s impassioned “chorus” sings for 39 minutes and 55 seconds (the exact length of the album). Displayed on twenty-five individual screens, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006), synchronizes the fans’ performances in off-kilter harmony; the album’s first song “Mother” linking this piece of collaborative acapella performance to Breitz’s second work on view, entitled precisely Mother (2005). For this second exploration of pop culture iconography Breitz edited film performances by Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Meryl Streep, creating a revealing composite of the Hollywood cliché of the difficult mother.

While our series of One-on-One talks is typically hosted by a curator “only”, I’m happy to be able to invite you to join me and the artist Candice Breitz in a conversation dedicated to her show “On View: Candice Breitz” before we embark on a more extended panel discussion. The One on One talk starts in the Haas Atrium at 6:30 p.m. At7 p.m. please join us for “More on Pictures, or Appropriation Now” in the Wattis Theater.

(more…)

My first encounter with Letitia Inyang Ntofon’s paintings was in The Black Dot Café located at 1195 Pine Street in deep West Oakland’s Black cultural district known as The Village Bottoms. I have known her for several years but mostly as a poet and writer. Her paintings, especially as they were arranged and installed on the wall in this location gave them an elusive narrative quality that grew the more that I looked at them. They felt like a story without a specific plot that contained many inscrutable details. Of the seven pieces at least two of them are self-portraits and that underlines the aura of autobiographical narrative in the paintings. They are made of found materials in irregular sizes that range from plywood to furniture fragments.
(more…)

Sara Seinberg sits in front of me in the Sister Spit van, wearing a red flannel, her leonine hair piled atop her head, putting together this evening’s opening slide show on her computer. Seinberg does this every day in the van – assembles what has become a sort of opening credit to our nightly show, brightly moving pictures we project onto a screen or a curtain or in the case of last night, the back of some signage from a realtor’s office. We were performing in what was essentially an unused hallway of the office, a narrow room fashioned into a sort of bar (though one that does not serve alcohol since this is all going down in Salt Lake City), one that has a stunning amount of Sponge Bob Square Pants merchandise where bottles of whiskey and tequila should stand, a space that was donated to us for the night and otherwise functions as a meeting room for Salt Lake City gays and the site of a monthly women’s comedy jam. Anyways. Every night on this tour we sort of don’t know what’s going to happen – what our venue will be like, how many people will show up, if it will be a rowdy audience that gives us energy or a passive, silent crowd quietly withering our self-esteem with their inscrutable stares. And so Seinberg’s slide show is the perfect way to open each performance, as it too is a explosive, colorful unknown: what photos will she present, in what free-associative order, which of the photos will be of YOU, which photos of YOU will have been taken, um, earlier that day, when you weren’t noticing that Seinberg was aiming her lens at you while you were texting or reading a magazine or doing Pilates stretches outside a rest stop in Nebraska. And, since all the songs are set to music, our nightly theme song is a surprise as well, meaning, in no small way the sort of opening vibe of the show is in Seinberg’s hands, and unknown to us until we hit play on the computer and watch the opening images flash across the screen – close up of light bulbs reminiscent of Jack Pierson, taken outside the Guggenheim during the Catherine Opie retrospective. And we’re off.

(more…)

Of the dozen or so art blogs I know of, Vvork is the one I most frequently recommend and regularly visit. It has become a familiar resource, a routine stop for informal research. Vvork is curated/edited by a team of four (spread across three cities) who “think of the site as an exhibition space…updated daily.” It mimics a physical  exhibition venue in that it collects and displays artworks accompanied only by title, year, artist (like labels in a gallery) and a link to related websites for additional/interpretive text about the artist. It’s different from a gallery exhibition in that there is no fixed ending or spatial limits, only a series of beginnings with entries that stretch back into time. “A logical consequence of this claim [that Vvork is an exhibition space rather than a blog] is that the artworks shown are not reproductions but legitimate experiences.” (see Malraux’s Museum Without Walls via Crimp)

(more…)

When I went to see Todd Bura’s show “Misfits” at Triple Base Gallery back in 2008 I was in the middle of writing a poem titled “Dream.” It was almost done, but there was a central line that I knew would eventually be crossed out in favor of something stronger, a proclamation. When I left the show I was impressed by the extreme stillness it brought about in me. I was trying to figure out how work so pared down could be so overwhelming. I had heard that Bura insisted that the gallery’s office door be kept closed, believing this was extremely important to the presentation of the paintings and the sculpture. I went ahead and closed it (to the annoyance of the gallery worker), and all the pieces linked up. I said, “His sensitivity creates technique,” and I knew then it was the line to bolster and finally finish the poem.

(more…)

Dear Open Space Diary, (from here on out to be referred to lovingly as “OSD”)

Well, here I am in jolly old London. Hal-lo!!! I touched down earlier this afternoon and the plane ride was pretty good because it was a direct flight from San Francisco to Heathrow. Wow, it makes such a difference to have no stopovers! But honestly the airplane food really sucked. Oh well. The good thing is that the time difference of 9 hours seems like a thing of the past already. I am officially feeling like I can convert to UK time in a flash! Thank god, because from here on out it’s gonna be all about work, work, work. Sigh.

OSD, where do I even begin? I’m on the first leg of a two week journey of exhibitions, bouncing from the Frieze Art Fair in London to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, and then back to hometown San Francisco. It’s exhilarating and also kind of nerve-wracking, actually. Great because I get to travel and go places and show artwork. But hard because it’s like being thrust in new contexts and new people and places at every turn. Dude. It’s, like, INTERNATIONAL and stuff. So, here’s the deal: I’m in London for the next nine days to present my Frieze Project commission “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone.” And, like, I know this isn’t my own personal blog but you, OSD, are such an artworld-related thingamabobbie that somehow it makes sense to try to report back from these far-flung art arenas in some way. Or at least try to do so from a personalized artist perspective.

(more…)

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests.]

Name / Place of residence / Occupation / Hobby?

My name is Raelle. I live in San Francisco in the SOMA district and I am the Artistic Director of Brava! For Women in the Arts in the Mission district in San Francisco. My biggest hobby is laughing, which I know sounds dumb but I like going to comedy clubs; I like when my friends can make me laugh because the stress of running an arts non-profit is so stressful you want to be surrounded by laughter. So that’s what I do, I try to giggle as much as possible and it keeps me from being cranky.

Do you collect anything?

I collect a lot of my friends’ art. I have some rules with friends and family that Christmas presents have to be made and so I have a lot of—not trinkets—I see it as true visual art. I have some great photos. A couple of years ago I got a great photograph from Costa Rica that a friend of mine took, Jason Selman. I like a lot of old print material, \ I love old jazz posters, I love jazz albums. I probably collect a lot of jazz stuff.

If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?

That is one of the most difficult questions ever given to a person. Honestly, if I was going to invite an artist to dinner it would be Josephine Baker. Because you’re talking about someone that came up in the South and left the United States to then discover her heritage to a certain extent and then discover what her possibilities were. Particularly now that so much has changed historically and politically, it would be great to sit down with her, as another African American woman, and say, “Can you believe what’s different?”

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?

It would be Three Musicians by Picasso. For sure. I’m obsessed with that painting. I think the first time I tried to write a play—I was about 11 or 12—I had seen some old Picasso book that someone had thrown out in the trash, and it had a picture of Three Musicians in it. I looked at all the cubes and the squares that make up the eyelashes and I started thinking, “Wow, what I want to do is write plays and I’ll base my first play on this piece.” That would be the piece I want hanging in my house.

What’s your favorite tool?

I think my greatest resource is honestly my managing director right now, Hetal Patel. She’s come in as this young, vibrant, aggressive woman and is serious about allowing Brava! to really grow and do diverse work, to be able to create collaborations with SFMOMA, or with Precarious Theater—she’s really open to that. She’s allowing space for me to do my job. It’s a great pairing.

—

[Brava! For Women in the Arts  is one of our partners in the upcoming LiveArt/Performa 09 weekend of programs Metal + Machine + Manifesto = Futurism's First 100 years.  Brava will be screening Futurist films & staging short plays on October 18.]

It is 10:56am and we, Sister Spit, have been on the road since about 11pm last night. I made it as co-pilot and navigator until around 5am, drinking the very tallest, fattest cans of Red Bull, sugar free. I learned on past tours that sugar free Red Bulls do not crack one out as hard core as the sugared-up cans. So I got my sugar elsewhere – a six-pack of powdered sugar Donettes, a bag of almond Hershey’s Kisses, a sour apple Blow Pop and a thing of Ding Dongs. I tried to keep the driver alert and entertained by reading her Facebook statuses off my new Google phone, until a series of hallucinations (most disturbingly, seeing myself somehow sitting on the hood of the van like a gremlin on the wing of a plane, though this gremlin was wearing a black bobbed wig) forced me to cfawl into a back seat and attempt to sleep on a pile of coats. I came to somewhere in Oregon, at a rest stop where some nice Lutherans were handing out free coffee and cookies. I’m still wearing my outfit from the show last night, a teeny tiny Spandex-y dress made by local designer Chelsea Starr; a pair of seamed stockings, the seam wound round to the front of my leg, and shiny stiletto shoes. Watching me teeter-totter up the landscaped incline to the rest stop bathrooms, Beth Lisick, one of many hilarious writers in the van, observes that I look like the group has maybe kidnapped me and is allowing me to hit the restroom under their watchful gaze. Loaded up with free, Christian coffee and pastries we return to the road, a This American Life episode playing off someone’s iPod.

If I wasn’t performing in the pacific northwest with Sister Spit this weekend I’d be going to Open Studios, specifically to Art Explosion, the one at 744 Alabama Street. The writer and artist Ali Liebegott is going to be showing a bunch of new work and I love Ali Liebegott’s work. Her books are on my bookshelves and her art is hung on the walls in my bedroom and office. Ali’s books – the book length road poem The Beautifully Worthless and the darkly hilarious alcoholic pancake waitress novel The IHOP Papers – do a wild trick of mixing real, intricate, complicated poetry with plainspoken smart-assed and vibrant prose, mashing up the emotional experience in the process, hurling the reader between uncanny heartache and absurd humor, touching on one page and the next a gross-out, vulnerable and tough and really truly unique, a singular literary voice unafraid to follow her writerly obsession to the next illogical conclusion.

(more…)

I have been waiting all summer long for the Mantles’ debut album. They had the party/performance October 1st at the Eagle Tavern, sharing the bill with Grass Widow and Yellow Fever. It is a vinyl-only release with a download card tucked inside. I love this, as it seems that music has gone so far away from being something we can hold onto and consult (like a map). There is some music that I think of foremost as mystical object: the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, Pharoah Sanders’ Live At the East, and anything by Thee Oh Sees. The Mantles’ LP has an inner sleeve graced with a beautiful drawing by Colter Jacobsen. As for their sound, I always think of race horses bucking around in their stalls just before the gun sounds and the doors burst open. I am typing this from Vancouver. I attended this show the night before I left and played the record as much as I could the next morning before taking off. I can’t wait to come home to it. Please do not sleep on the Mantles.

Thirty years ago this fall the artist Jim Pomeroy and SFMOMA curator Suzanne Foley were corresponding about his proposal to include his text “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” in her survey of 1970s Bay Area conceptual and performance practices, Space/Time/Sound.  In light of recent discussions on Open Space about the New Langton Arts crisis and the role of nonprofit arts organizations, Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, here revisits Pomeroy’s analysis of modern art museums vs. artists’ spaces. Wonderfully, we are also able to present for the first time a downloadable PDF of his original text and images of their letters.

“To what extent does a larger organization, in absorbing new artistic practices, need to support or point to the smaller institutions that pioneered them?”

In the midst of the debate in August surrounding the pending closure of the San Francisco-based nonprofit New Langton Arts (NLA) writer and curator Patricia Maloney posed this question as part of a larger comment on the perhaps inevitable comparison between NLA and SFMOMA as our blog brought increased visibility to the latter’s predicament. Open Space became a forum for the community to evaluate the struggling institution and speculate on its tactical errors, opening up space for criticism of both organizations.

This end-of-an-era reflection on the blog made me think back to the perceived paradoxes and inherent tensions surrounding SFMOMA’s own attempts, through a two-phase exhibition initiative held thirty years ago, to ‘support or point to the smaller institutions’ that had fostered the breadth of activity associated with Bay Area Conceptual art. In reading Julian Myers’s series of discussion threads on the NLA crisis and the political ethos that generated the emergence of the alternative visual arts space movement in the 1970s, I’ve kept returning to that moment. Specifically, to a text-based piece by the artist Jim Pomeroy (1945–1992) featured in the major SFMOMA survey Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (December 21, 1979–February 13, 1980). The work was in itself predicated on dialogues about the fundamental differences between collecting institutions and the parallel system of artist-run spaces. Entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, the piece consisted of enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with the exhibition’s curator, the late Suzanne Foley (at SFMOMA 1968–81) and Pomeroy’s paper, of the same title, written for The New Arts Space conference in Santa Monica organized by LAICA in 1978. It is worth noting here that Pomeroy lived upstairs from 80 Langton Street (what later became NLA) and as co-founder, had been instrumental in formulating its mission and goals. Back in 1978 Langton described itself as a “forum for art work, which requires a more flexible, responsive context and more direct critical/supportive feedback than traditional institutions can provide.”

Space/Time/Sound represented twenty-one of the more prominent artists/artist groups of the time, highlighting the work that came out of sculptural concerns—performance actions, installations, video art, slide projections—rather than the sculpture (objects), drawings, photography, etc. that we also associate with a number of the same artists and the broader scope of the movement. Pomeroy had performed as part of Foley’s Exchange DFW/SFO (1975-1976) at Fort Worth Museum of Art and at SFMOMA. Several of the artists on the Space/Time/Sound checklist had either been in that or other SFMOMA group presentations, and in certain cases had been given solo shows at the museum. Taken together, Space/Time/Sound was trying to tell a story of how often temporal or site-specific work produced in the Bay Area had inhabited a full range of other arts organizations and non-art spaces—university museums, temporary storefronts, alternative spaces, galleries, studios, streets.

Foley’s colleague Rolando Castellón (SFMOMA curator 1972–81, co-founder of Galería de la Raza) had the overall vision for a Bay Area-centric exhibition series that would include Foley’s presentation and would begin in 1978 with a more direct acknowledgement of the achievements of alternative spaces.  He invited the artist-directors of three prominent San Francisco-based alternative spaces—The Floating Museum (Lynn Hershman), Museum of Conceptual Art (Tom Marioni), La Mamelle, Inc. (Carl Loeffler)—to program at the museum, highlighting their roles as producer, promoter, and publisher. Each exhibition touched on a signature aspect of their respective projects including live events, while activating the transformed gallery space(s)—from a zine library of correspondence art to the social function of a simulated bar environment.

(more…)

I keep being on tour with Sister Spit, and we keep rolling into these art spaces to do our show and the art spaces keep having these pieces on the wall that are really alive on the wall, coming off the wall, escaping, bursting through the plaster like the Kool-Aid man if the Kool-Aid man was maybe female, sort of lumpy and luscious and labial. Pillowy and tactile and pink. I guess right now I mean Liesa Lietzke’s Polypsis, currently straining through the wall at The Lab on 16^th Street, a bulbous mass of conjoined fabrics, Red Hots, strawberry Nerds, and other sweet debris. Things swept the floor of a little girl’s bedroom, the sort of little girl who has a sugar problem and lives her life in tutus and maybe isn’t even all that little. But Polypsis is, like, a tumor, right? So now I wonder why I see something so totally vaginal when I look at it. Artsy representations of female genitalia tend towards, you know, holes. Polypsis is creating the hole, all that unruly pinkness smashing through, the crazed pink head of a baby alien drag queen crowning  – wait, that’s vaginal again, I can’t help it, it just looks like the most aroused pussy ever tearing through its panties. How is femaleness like a polyp? I’m thinking of the mutant, monstrous femaleness of high femmes, the female body just falling out of itself, its clothes, how easy a female body can be inappropriate,, because it’s a trans female body or because its fat or overtly sexual.

(more…)

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

.

After an absence of almost three decades, conceptual sculptor and California native Robert Kinmont started making work again in 2005.  Marking his reemergence, yet inextricably linked to his early practice involving earthy materials and koan-like gestures, is Kinmont’s current solo exhibition at Alexander and Bonin in New York, surveying works from 1964 to 1975 and from 2005 to 2009.

The image to the left is the first in a series titled, 8 Natural Handstands, 1969. In her essay for the exhibition, Julie Ault responds to the action: “His straight graceful form appears effortless, despite being inches away from a substantial plunge. The image… elicited contradictory impressions of gravity and airiness, serenity and adventure…” More than forty years later, it’s also warmly nostalgic.

Kinmont’s action brings to mind two other works of the same era: Piero Manzoni’s Socle du Monde, 1961 and the Untitled, 1973 photograph of Charles Ray, bound to a tree branch. Kinmont is neither framing all the world as his art, nor staging an act of endurance in the landscape. Yet, if we step back from this one gesture to consider the language of his artistic practice in general, both start to make sense.

(more…)

Ryan Coffey asked me to read for the closing night of his 2008 show at Adobe Books. At the bar afterward he presented me with a collage that centered on an egg made of gold leaf. Floating above it there was a small red stain like an accidental Chinese ideogram — Ryan assured me that this was blood, that it was human, and I began to feel so at home talking with him. I remember that there was a well- rendered graphite portrait of the poet Philip Whalen hanging high in that show.

(more…)

In lieu of a robust travel budget, there’s no better way to experience foreign lands than through their cinema offerings. I’m repeatedly stunned by the range of cultures I’m exposed to by attending just a handful of the many films that screen over the course of a year at the multitude of local festivals and cultural institutions that include ATA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, and the Pacific Film Archive. Some countries, though, still have difficulty finding U.S. distribution for their filmmakers despite all these potential outlets.

Enter the Global Film Initiative. GFI’s mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema, and since 2004 has offered up its annual Global Lens film series that travels the world, both to fixed locales such as the MoMA in New York, and (as I pleasantly discovered on a recent flight) more fluid distribution channels such as Virgin Airlines and the LinkTV cable channel. This past Friday, Global Lens 2009 arrived the Bay Area, kicking off a two week stay at the Rafael Theater in San Rafael. Iran, Brazil, Macedonia, Mozambique, and Kazakhstan are just some of the countries represented. When was the last time you saw a film from Mozambique?

I’ve screened two of the GL2009 films so far—Possible Lives from Argentina, and Those Three from Iran—and they both quickly challenge one’s stereotypes of these countries by setting them both not in a steamy, bustling metropolis or sweltering desert, but barren winter wastelands. Lives starts out as a simple man-gone-missing story but then evolves into a meditative, Borgesian puzzle. Those Three takes a more Kaftkaesque approach as it follows the doomed journey of three Irani soldiers gone AWOL. While the language and certain cultural details might feel alien, both films pursue narrative and themes that are familiar (if not universal) and thus bring these characters closer to us as viewers. That’s the wonder of foreign film and this series—we are reminded of the common links between disparate peoples, rather than the differences that politics and news media often purport.

The Rafael’s screening of Global Lens 2009 continues through October 7.

One of our current collection exhibitions, The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography presents a number of pictures from that turbulent moment in Japanese history. After the devastation of World War II, Japan entered a period of American military occupation and modernization. Photographers reacted to the drastic sociocultural changes taking place by forging a new visual language that broke with tradition while it memorialized the old culture and recorded the new. SFMOMA began collecting this work in the 1970s, under curators John Humphrey and Van Deren Coke, but the bulk of the collection has been built by senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips over the last two decades. Here, she joins in conversation with poet, essayist, and translator W.S. Di Piero, an avid fan of postwar Japanese photography.

Sandra Phillips: Simone, what intrigues you most about postwar Japanese photography?

W.S. Di Piero : I’m interested in it for two reasons: it has the archival memorializing street photography does, and it’s archival memorializing that’s taking place in one of the most critical periods of Japanese history—that time from1945 to roughly the late 1960s, when the American presence was felt first in a terrifying way, and then later in a very different way during the occupation. And all of that was experienced and taken in by these photographers. I think Daido Moriyama was seven or eight years old when they dropped the bomb. He was young, but he was of consciousness when that happened.

SP: Shomei Tomatsu talks about being a kid of, I think, eleven, when he would not go down into the bomb shelters. Instead, he stayed upstairs in his room and looked at the bombs exploding, as though they were fireworks. He was both terrified and fascinated by them. I think that’s the whole key to his work, frankly, being terrified and fascinated by what’s happened. These photographers who experienced the war as children grew up and were—like the Japanese people as a whole—trying to deal with the fact that the Americans were still there, on all these military bases.

(more…)

As a guest columnist for the next four months, I am now taking submissions for a new blogging series entitled “Who This?” consisting of images of contemporary artworks posted by collectors who have forgotten who the makers are. Face it, what art lover hasn’t picked up a work from a local nonprofit auction only to realize a while later that they’ve lost the darn piece of paper that lists the artist’s name? And, heavens, the artist didn’t sign it in the first place, relegating themselves to unending obscurity. Or maybe your roommate moved out and left behind something that they had collected but neglected to fill you in on the details about. So now you sit, stumped, wondering… “Who this?”

That work sits anonymously in your possession, like a lost soul. Is it famous? Is it minor? Who knows? Come out from the shadows and let the rest of us, a savvy viewing public, help you in identifying who the heck made it. Collectively we are a smart bunch. I’m sure we can figure it out. Think of this as a very minor contemporary version of Antiques Roadshow.

Let US help YOU help YOURSELF in knowing just what you own.

To submit to “Who This?” please email me a clear image of the work in question (stephaniesyjuco at gmail.com), and any supplemental info you may have on it: what auction or situation did you get it from? around what time? any distinguishing markings? etc. This will be posted in the next installment of “Who This?” You, however, must be the owner or acquirer of the work and be in a real dilemma as to knowing who the artist is. We, the readership, will offer you the service of putting our heads to it. Please, no jokesters in the vein of submitting non-goth photos to the website “Goth or Not?” In other words, don’t try to fake us out with fake art or something. This is real and sincere and we seek to help you.

Thank you.

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

.

In the spirit of this being a blog connected to an art museum, this post inaugurates a new series of sorts: individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…

(thank you Lilledeshan Bose for sending me the image)

I used to crowd into the back room of Edinburgh Castle each Monday night to watch new films by David Enos. This must have been circa 2005-6. I think of Light My Fire as his first true classic. It is the story of the Doors told in perfectly painted slips of paper with a revolving soundtrack: “He put his books on…He put his boots on…He put his boots on…” It was followed by The Dennis Wilson Story, In Service of the Waxen Moon, Joke Night, Leonard Cohen in Alberta, and Ringo. These are just the favorites I’m remembering now, not to even mention his many collaborations that were first shown at Edinburgh. Those with Glenn Wait and the fabulous Sarah Enid Hagey stand out in my memory.

I think of David as I do Jack Smith and George and Mike Kuchar, anything he makes is of interest to me, it has never been drab or without humor. This past year Margaret Tedesco showed David’s films as well as works on paper at [2nd Floor Projects]. These paintings and drawings were part of a series he was doing on different Jims, namely Jim Jones, Jim Henson, and Jim Morrison. Below I have reproduced two letters and some of the gifts David sent with them, lots of comics and cards and a cut away film. The first letter must date from early 2008. The second was sent a month or two ago. (more…)

There’s nothing worse than being sick on tour and that’s where I’m at right now. Blowing snot into a ragged gas station napkin while my tourmates discreetly look the other way. Being on tour, on the road in a van with other performers, is like living in the tiniest studio apartment eve, for one month, with six roommates. The tour is Sister Spit, I started it in the 90s with the poet Sini Anderson, first as a weekly open mic for girls only, an alternative to the boy-heavy open mics that raged through San Francisco at the start of the last decade. The free event ran for two years until slowly the poets stopped coming, replaced by girls with acoustic guitars doing Ani DiFranco covers. We called it a day. Two years is a long time to run a free, weekly poetry open mic. After that we got jealous of all our friends whose shitty punk bands managed to embark on cross-country tours. They didn’t make much money but they had adventures. None of the writers I knew had any money anyway and we all craved adventure, so Sini and I took Sister Spit on the road in 1997. Twelve years later I’m zooming through Europe, bringing the show with its ever-changing lineup of novelists, performance artists, zinesters and poets into a new foreign land each night. It’s our first time outside North America and our first time reading to an audience of non-native English speakers. We’re a spoken word show, we talk. Some people suggested this might be a bad idea but so far it’s been excellent. Last night in Munich the crowd called us back for three encores. This has never happened to us anywhere. I think we could have even kept going, but like I said I’m sick and was anxious to crawl into my sleeping bag on a mattress the nice German event promoters had arranged for us in one of the venue’s spare rooms.

Today our highway is flanked by forest that Kat Marie Yoas, the performer sitting beside me, observes is like completely fairy tale forestland. And it really is. Isn’t this where fairy tales were born? Nightmares, too.. Yesterday I read an article about the holocaust in Harper’s while crossing from Austria into Germany, and as sickening as it always is to read about the holocaust, reading about it in Germany is more disturbing. What happened in these woods? How old are the trees?

(more…)

A Haitian visual artist named Florencia Pierre visited San Francisco this weekend and blessed the ground of a public park with her drawings. She is a priestess of the sacred practice of vodou. What may look at first glance like an outdoor scene from some rural part of Haiti actually happened in San Francisco’s Mission District Sunday, September 19th at about one O’clock in the Afternoon. That day I had the pleasure of experiencing a casually ingenious, seamlessly organic blend of dance, visual art, narrative and ritual theater in the form of sacred worship. The ritual veve installation was the highlight of the Haitian Dance and Drum Conference, which began Friday, September 18th in Oakland and ended in San Francisco on Sunday with this ceremony. A veve is a ritual ground drawing done in Haitian vodou ceremonies to invite the presence of divine spirits. It is a deeply African ceremony comprised of Yoruba and Kongo practices. The ritual engaged all of my senses at once. I smelled the Florida water and Rum sprayed into the air and tasted fresh fruits from an altar that was virtually glowing with primary colors in mid-day summer light. As I watched Mambo Florencia sprinkle corn meal on the ground to deftly create ideograms that represent the presence of African spirits, I swayed to the sound of drums and felt the presence of the Loas (spirits) that represent Love, War and the Ocean. She was drawing down spirits.
(more…)

With all the talk today swirling around issues of the economy and its impact on the artworld (Commercial gallery implosions! No sales! Museums slashing budgets! Art department layoffs!), I am heartened by creative projects that address in some way this depression/recession/whatever-you-want-to-call-it — especially those that are not necessarily offering up utopian solutions but scrutinizing how and why we create value in art and commodities in the first place.

Illinois-based artist Conrad Bakker’s “Untitled Project: eBay/DEPRESSION GLASS“ consists of an auction of nine paintings of 1930’s-era glass, all up for offer on that famous online site of value and exchange. The intimately-scaled works, each around 7″ × 9″, are painted from jpg images Bakker has culled from other eBay sellers. As he states on his project site:

“Beginning Friday, September 18, 2009, each of these paintings will be auctioned on eBay in the [Pottery & Glass > Glass > Glassware > Depression] category and the profits will be donated to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank, a local charitable organization whose goal is to alleviate hunger in eastern Illinois by providing a reliable source of food for the hungry through cooperation with a network of food pantries and agencies.”

I’ve been an avid fan of Bakker and his work, which smartly pokes at the ties that bind art with consumerism, and at how objects inhabit our imagined space of value. While other artists have also played within the weird and wonderful world of eBay, Bakker strikes me as being more interested in utilizing it as an arena for social dialogue as opposed to simply a marketplace or ironic online outlet for wares. As the bids come in and the price of each painting rises, more money gets channeled toward the Foodbank. What began as an image of a collectible tchotchke  ripe with historical allusion (Depression glass) becomes an artwork representing our already-historicized present (our “Great Recession”), which then goes on to fund an immediate, tangible need. The flow of object to image to object and back to reality traces a system of desire, production, consumption, and (re)valuation.

(more…)

On September 7th, I posted a blog entitled, “Wonderland: A world turned upside down” in regards to Lance Fung’s multi-site public art exhibition occurring in the Tenderloin in mid-October. The response to this post was overwhelming: there are currently fifteen comments posted, the majority of which are almost as long as the article itself. The commenters included participating artists, interns, former collaborators of Fung’s, social workers and educators in the Tenderloin, those outside the San Francisco art scene and those within it. These thorough and often heated responses communicated to myself and the larger public that people are eager to discuss the issues surrounding Wonderland and that it remains a highly complex and controversial exhibition. I am pleased that the SFMOMA blog Open Space provided a forum for this discussion and hope that the conversation will continue during Wonderland’s symposium on October 18th. While it would be exhaustive to address each comment individually, I would like to take the opportunity to respond to some concerns and outline the two general sentiments I noticed in the comments.

I appreciated, very much, the responses from the artists and those currently or previously involved in Fung’s projects. Clearly, the experiences of the participating artists provide a nuanced perspective into the project and I am glad to know that many have and continue to carefully consider their position within the Tenderloin neighborhood and Wonderland show. These comments, as well as many conversations I have had with participants, assures me that many of the individual artists are aware of the potential problematics of designating the Tenderloin as a “wonderland.” As I acknowledged on September 7th, many projects will benefit the community members of the Tenderloin and provide them with creative opportunities they might otherwise not have. As the artists’ investments prove, Wonderland will undoubtedly have a positive social impact in the Tenderloin, particularly in comparison to other exhibitions that take place within museums and do not directly engage with the public. I appreciated the opportunity to think more deeply about these individual projects.

(more…)

An official first welcome to our fantastic new crew of columnist-bloggers, who are already well underway this week with the posting, and for which I thank them. Your fall hosts on Open Space are:

MICHELLE TEA!, writer, poet, and founder of RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit; DUANE DETERVILLE!,  artist, writer and cofounder of the Sankofa Cultural Institute; the visual artist STEPHANIE SYJUCO!;   JOSEPH DEL PESCO!, independent curator, art journalist and web-media producer; and the poet CEDAR SIGO!

I a little overdo it with the all-caps & punctuation, it’s true. However, I’m quite delighted to be working with so extraordinary a company of contributors and am so so curious to see what they will do; I expect we have an interesting season ahead of us. As before, and as always, our columnists are writing in an EDITORIAL FREE ZONE, about all things ‘visual culture’ (a phrase Kevin Killian’s given me no small grief over) in the Bay Area and beyond. Welcome, onward, hi, hello, let’s go—

With this first entry I’m not only introducing myself and demonstrating the unapologetically Africanist lens that I often use for experiencing visual culture, but also inviting my readers to share their personal way of experiencing and interpreting art. The story of my trip to New York this past July might just do both. I was invited to show my artwork in a show called “Negritude” by writer/curator/musician Greg Tate. While I was there I had the pleasure of being guided and toured by scholar/curator/photographer/researcher/professor C. Daniel Dawson. Danny Dawson has worked as a curator and educator for well established institutions like the Studio Museum of Harlem, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Caribbean Cultural Center and Columbia University just to name a few. He specializes in African Diasporic cultural expression. Danny invited me to come with him and his friends Robert O’Meally, the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia and Adam Rudolph, a Jazz musician that has worked with Herbie Hancock and Yusef Lateef amongst others, in a car trip up to Yale to visit the great scholar of African Art and Philosophy Robert Farris Thompson. The trip to Yale gave me the unexpected opportunity to view an art masterpiece.

We all have a personalized method of looking at art and often times we don’t trust our method when we encounter an Artwork with a capital “A.” You know, one of those canonized masterpieces that are written about for over half a century or more.
(more…)

For the past year artist Anthony Discenza has been installing, without permission, a series of street signs attached to sidewalk poles on Minna Street, near SFMOMA. Last month I emailed him a few questions about the ongoing project:

Let’s start with some stats on the The Street Signs Project. How many signs have you installed? How many have been confiscated vs. stolen? When did you start the project?

I started the project a little over a year ago, back in May or June of 2008.  To date, I think I’ve put up 14 signs; of those, 6 have been removed—I know the city took down at least 2 of them and 2 were stolen. Of course, I’m not counting the 3 signs I put up in San Jose as part of the Rejection show at the SJICA. Those signs had a slightly different agenda, as they were made specifically around the idea of rejection. San Jose made us take those down as well, but they didn’t confiscate them.

With The Street Signs Project you’ve stepped away from the densely layered image-rich video work you’ve become known for into text. It seems your long relationship with Science Fiction narratives, which have ostensibly inspired much of the video work, plays a role here too. Signs like “Transported into a Realm of Remote and Delicate metaphor, Will we see Angels?” suggest an abstract landscape of fiction (if not of drug use). Other signs like “Coming Up: Greater Horrors” are more situational, as if placed there to speak in an uncanny way directly to the reader. Can you talk about how science fiction has influenced the language of these signs?

The Street Signs Project does seem like quite a departure from the video work, but they actually emerge from a tradition of working with text that goes way back in my practice, and in fact predates much of my video work.  For years I’ve played with fragmentary pieces of text that I either found or wrote myself. I think of this activity as kind of shadow practice, one that has been deeply tied up with my having worked in office environments my whole adult life.  Over the years I’ve accumulated entire drawers full of text-derived pieces, most of them printed or Xeroxed on 8 ½ x 11 paper, or scribbled on lined yellow legal pads. In many ways I think I’m influenced by things I encounter in language and literature more than purely visual things, and I’ve always been a big fan of text-based art, from Ed Ruscha up through David Shrigley.  I love the way that language can be an object, and the way that a small, enigmatic fragment can somehow invoke something much larger in the mind.

(more…)

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests. Harry Parr and Sam Bompas  are jellymongers who will be giving a performance this Thursday, in conjunction with the exhibition Sensate: Bodies and Design. Bompas & Parr claim to spend so much time together that they have become psychic, so for this interview Harry answered for Sam and Sam answered for Harry.]

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?

Harry: Sam Bompas, London, jellymonger, and his hobby is shopping for bowties.

Sam: How did you know? Wow, you are psychic. Harry Parr, London. He lives in Bermondsey actually, opposite a rather attractive pub. He is an architectural food-smith. His hobby is – I’m tempted to mention something about the razzmatazz trousers because Harry has the most extraordinary collection of brightly colored trousers I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I guess it’s the job though, really. In Harry’s studio he has a rather improbable collection of industrial machinery, ranging from vast industrial humidifying equipment to Vac Formers.

Do you collect anything?

Harry: He collects bow ties which I think I mentioned. He collects books as well. He’s got a very large collection of books about food, about the history of food and also lots of very intellectual literature, which I don’t understand but he does read and tells tales from it but it’s beyond me.

Sam: Again, the natty trousers. Like Congo Natty. I like to think of Harry as a collector of experience and life experience.

Harry: That’s really funny. That is what I would say that I collect.

Sam: Well that’s because we are psychic, Harry. That’s the only reason we’re able to determine these things. So it’s not so much about the object itself but a collector of life.

(more…)

I was very taken with the few pages devoted to John Altoon in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle (D.A.P., 2005). I mentioned my interest to the poet and scholar Duncan McNaughton, and he informed me that Altoon’s estate was owned by Braunstein/Quay Gallery, and suggested I pay a visit to see more of his works in person.

Ruth Braunstein is sitting at a desk and receives me very casually. She has a pile of small catalogs that have accompanied John Altoon’s shows over the years. She hands me each one, mentioning the dates and galleries. Duncan had loaned me a few of these, including the only one Ruth couldn’t find: a catalog for Altoon’s 1964 show at the San Francisco Museum Of Art. There is one catalogue larger than the rest, printed last year for a show at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Ruth says the show sold quite well, it’s nice to suddenly feel less alone in my obsession with John Altoon. She begins by stressing how sudden John’s death was. He had overcome years of psychological problems with the help of a doctor, Marvin Wexler. He had just remarried and purchased a new building in which to work. He seemed to be on the mend and looking forward. So when he died of a massive heart attack in 1969 it was a brutal and shocking loss to his many friends.

(more…)

When the woman taking our admission into the Yoko Ono show in Venice called Brittney ‘bambino’ it confirmed a growing suspicion: everyone everywhere is reading my girlfriend as a boy, and a young boy at that, like maybe a fourteen-year-old, which makes me, a visible thirty-something hanging all over her/him on the vaporettos and in the streets, something of a creep, and this is why wherever we go we are met with stares, many of them scornful. And so it is with the relief of an annoying mystery now solved that we enter the show at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, a two-story gallery in Dorsoduro, outside a canal where during the week produce-bearing gondolas dock forming a floating, bobbing farmers’ market.

I love Yoko Ono. We have the same birthday for starters, which gives me hope that when I am in my seventies I too will be able to rock a micro-mini, stilettos and a massive pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Her song Revelations, with Cat Power, is my most favorite song even though it is not so much a song as a prayer. In Yoko I see the positive notes of Aquarius exalted — the constant hum of optimism, an embrace of humanity, of oddness, a certain poetic spaciness, a need for group participation, collaboration, a desire to make the mundane movements of a day the gestures of an ongoing performance work in progress. Take her book Grapefruit. Each page bears a little cube of text telling you to do something, haiku-like instructions that don’t demand or implore but airily suggest you engage in certain activities, like coughing or laughing or smoking (I really love that she included smoking) or cutting things or lying upon them. Brushing your hair. Sitting on each other. It’s whimsical but its also all sort of boring, which is part of the Aquarius gift I think, finding the deeper meaning or stupid joy in the everyday. Whenever I have a lover who suggests we collaborate on an art project the first thing I think of is Yoko and John’s Bed-In, the ultimate romantic art collaboration I think. I’ve never actually done my own spin on it, though I think my best idea was with a boyfriend with whom I fought constantly, that we record our quarrels, transcribe them and have a classically trained opera singer sing them back to us while we sit together in bed in our underwear in an art gallery. Wouldn’t that be awesome? I never shared the idea with him because it just would have triggered another fight..

(more…)

This afternoon, SFMOMA is hosting a special memorial service honoring Bay Area sculptor and conceptual artist David Ireland, who passed away last spring. Ireland was a central figure in conceptual art in the Bay Area and beyond. From the 1970s until his death, he produced a highly idiosyncratic body of work concerned with the creation and function of art within everyday life. In place of the blog’s usual mid-month “Collection Rotation”, today we also pay tribute, with a collection of contributions from younger artists, organized by SF artist and musician Scott Hewicker.

My home, my work, my artistic and musical practices—essentially my whole life—co-exist on a steady fault line between David Ireland’s two Capp Street houses in San Francisco’s Mission District. 65 Capp Street was the site of the first Capp Street Project, and 500 Capp St, Ireland’s former home and studio, is now also, to my mind, his greatest lasting artwork. The two houses seem at times like two footprints of a standing giant, and he was a giant to me and to many. Fearlessly beginning his career late in life, David’s essential concern was the Zen-like observance of, and dedication to, the ever-lasting present. Using common, readily available materials such as concrete, found wood, and other debris, with the lightest of touch. David could make dirt sing, rewarding our acceptance of his work, but never asking for it. “You can’t make art by making art”, he often said, and you can see in some of the contributions below how many artists have taken that simple but profound idea to heart. I didn’t know him well, but his work and the ideas inherent in their making have always deeply resonated with me, as with others. David’s refusal of personal attachment to the works he made gave me the courage when I left art school to discard all my old work and start over again from scratch.

His passing last May, though expected for a long time, nevertheless struck slow and deep. I was surprised by what seemed to me a muted media response, or in the case of the art world outside the Bay Area, what felt like too little response at all. I never considered David Ireland “just” a San Francisco or West Coast artist. We were lucky to have him here and lucky he wanted to be here, and his ideas and creative spirit seem embedded in the foundation of a working artists’ community here. From spontaneous street sculpture to DIY art spaces, David helped you appreciate the beauty inherent in everyday things, and in happenings outside the sphere of marketable art. News of his death I thought should have rung out through the streets like the death of Victor Hugo in Paris. He touched so many people, so many artists.

I see echoes of David Ireland’s work in many artists, and wondered what it would look like to ask a cross-section of people here, or who used to be here, to select a work of David’s and a work of their own to engage in a kind of visual interplay that reflects how they’ve felt David’s impact on their own work or lives. Some have also contributed memories and personal insights. A tribute like this one couldn’t begin to be representative of everyone Ireland touched. I hope we can take this tiny part to indicate a much greater whole.

—Scott Hewicker

———————————————

Left: Portrait of David Ireland in the basement of 500 Capp St. Right: Allison Shields, #500, 2005.

From the basement to the roof, I had many favorite spots in David’s house. He used to have me stay there to look after it when he was away – sometimes for only a couple of days and sometimes for weeks on end. I explored every corner of that place a million times over and never tired of it. I always came across some new aspect of it that would blow my mind. Through it, I came to understand and love David Ireland. He was a good artist and a good friend and I miss him. —Allison Shields

Left: Nayland Blake, What the Sun Says, What the Whiskey is Saying, 2008, Matthew Marks Gallery. Right: David Ireland 500 capp street (interior view with Broom Collection and woven chairs, San Francisco, 1985; Copyright © 1985 Abe Frajndlich

When I first moved to San Francisco in the early 80s, one of the first artists I heard about was David Ireland. His easy humor, warm intelligence, and deep courtesy were common knowledge even then. After a couple of years I had the chance to be the custodian of an installation at Capp Street Project, and got to know David a bit better and experience those qualities firsthand. He displayed genuine interest in the work of younger artists, and the more I experienced his work the more it impressed me. A couple of years ago I got rid of the studio I was renting in Greenpoint and started making work out of my home. I returned to David’s work as a model of how to live with objects and think through them. I made a show of things I assembled from castoffs from around my neighborhood. It seems to me that the example of David’s broom piece was in the back of my mind. Many artists make a great show of erasing boundaries between art and life, but David did it with a matter-of-factness that is a shining model. His work never looks down on anyone, and instead stands as a record of intelligent inquiry, and diligent craft. Both in his personal affect and artistic practice, he is someone I would always hope to emulate. —Nayland Blake

Left: David Ireland, A Portion of: From the Year of Doing the Same Work Each Day II, 1975; Courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco Right: John Zurier, Rosendals, 2006; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

Changing our point of view, transforming our awareness of life and seeing reality as it is, if only for a moment, was why I feel David Ireland believed “you can’t make art by making art.” Like most simple things, it sounds like the easiest thing in the world: it’s not. He made it look effortless. —John Zurier

Left:  David Ireland, Folded Paper Landscape, 1973 Right: Cliff Hengst, Untitled (Paper Bag Drawing), 2009

I took a class with David at the Art Institute way back in the late 80’s. He wasn’t into any of the performances I was doing at the time (a lot of loud autobiographical stuff I would NEVER do now). But he taught me a lot about formalism and presentation, and to appreciate a handmade materialist aesthetic I still use to this day. —Cliff Hengst

Left:  David Ireland, Sidewalk Repair, 500 Capp Street, San Franisco, 1976 Right: Tony Labat, BULK 2007, Installation View Queens Nails Annex

Top : David Ireland, Dumbball Action, 1986.  Bottom: Gay Outlaw, Pencil Balls, 1996

One of my favorite works of David’s were his “Dumbballs.” I love the mundane material and the conundrum that he presents in their making: the concrete must be kept in motion in order to find its form. David was in service of the sculpture until it was complete. As a young artist, I found that idea to be an inspiration. —Gay Outlaw

Top: David Ireland, Dumbball Action, 1986 (photo reversed) Bottom: Guy Overfelt, Untitled 021 (crespi parking lot), 1998 – 2009

a mindless act yields a complex conundrum. its repetition informs a meditative mind yet its outcome is always different. —Guy Overfelt

Left: Veronica De Jesus, David Ireland Memorial Drawing, 2009 Right: Veronica De Jesus, David Ireland’s Performance of El Nino, 1998; recalled by VDJ 2009

David comes out wearing an oversized rain jacket or heavy coat. He proceeds to enter and he stands on something-at first I thought it was something more formal like a podium, but in writing this to you I think he just used a chair that was by chance there to stand on. He started to take off his coat, then another and another, allowing his coats to just flop down on the floor forming this mass of piles of jacket. It was really ridiculous, surprising, funny and an insightful analog of the devastating account of El Nino. Getting to know David Ireland’s approach to his life and to his art I will always remember this 2 – 3 minute performance as a highlight, and in the same way I enjoy his dumb balls: funny, and on point. —Veronica De Jesus

Left: David Ireland Installation at Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME, detail, 1997 Right: Keith Evans, Migrations and Lady Beetle Constellations, 2009; Picture from GJ Art Center, Grand Junction CO, May 2009

David Ireland’s playfulness generously let place and things have their own private lives. An offering and an idea. Architecture and Ecology may potentially be similar, if not interchangeable, contemplative devices when one enters with wonder and in a spirit of close attention, like in the inspiring life and work of David Ireland. —Keith Evans

Left: David Ireland: School of Chairs, 1988; courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Ben Blackwell. Right: Nina Zurier: Stockholm 155, 2007; photograph; courtesy George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco.

In 1988 I was working at the Berkeley Art Museum, and worked with David on his Matrix show. We went to UC Salvage together to look for the chairs that became School of Chairs, one of several installation/ sculptures in the exhibition. In 2007 I was traveling in Sweden and Finland and ended up taking a lot of photographs of chairs. This was the first, and I was thinking of School of Chairs when I shot it. One of the things I appreciate most about David’s work is the way he used simple, actions and things. It’s stuck with me, so that I end up seeing things (more or less) through his eyes. —Nina Zurier

Left: David Ireland: Untitled, nd  Right: Vince Fecteau: Untitled, 1996

Left: David Ireland, Newgate, 1986-87 Right: Charles Goldman, Spacefiller, 2009

In 2001 I curated a show at Apex Art called Making the Making. The exhibition included objects made by artists in order to help make them make their work. David was represented by a Dumb Ball and a pair of rubber gloves. When the show was over, David generously gave me the Dumb Ball. It is one of my most prized possessions. —Charles Goldman

Left: David Ireland, Cast Concrete Head With Dumbball, 1993 (no longer extant) Right: Bob Linder, Everything went black!, 2008

I first met David in 1996. David hired Will Rogan and I to help build a big chair at Gallery Paule Anglim. We didn’t know what we were doing but David had complete faith in us. I continued to work for DI and take care of 500 Capp. I stayed there while David was out of town so it always looked like someone was home. Some of my fondest memories are of dinner at David’s, I feel lucky I had the opportunity to spend as much time as I did at 500 Capp Street. David lived in a world where repairing a home could make it a sculpture and a sculpture could be a bent wire above your head, concrete on the floor or a wet dollar bill left to dry above the sink. David was both an inspiring artist and a friend, I will miss him very much. —Bob Linder

Left: David Ireland, Elephant stool with shade, 1978 – 1991 Right: Ella Tideman, Improvised microphone stand, 2009

ELEPHANT STOOL Story has it, David Ireland began making art because of an elephant stool. A seat, made from the taxidermied foot of an elephant, was for sale in his shop and caught the eye of a young artist who needed it for a piece. Ever-curious Ireland allowed him to borrow it and attended the show. Here he first glimpsed the world of contemporary art and determined wholeheartedly to join in. Many will scoff at conceptual art as they suffer neither desire for possession nor awe of craftsmanship. Ireland’s own drive to delight was independent from desire. He considered the works of man, without judgment, from a point of view generally reserved for the appreciation of nature. This blithe benevolence should not be confused with lack of sophistication; to me, it is proof of his rare and pure vision. —Ella Tideman

Left: David Ireland, Untitled (Capillary Action), 1995; Berkeley Museum of Art collection Right: Kathryn Spence, Work in progress in studio, 2009

Left: David Ireland, 500 Capp Street (interior Hallway View), San Francisco, 1986; Copyright ©1986 Abe Frajndlich Right: Jesse Schlesinger, 100 ton line, 2008

“If you have a regard for light- its gentleness and the subtleness and intensities on different days- you can only treat what the light illuminates with the same kind of regard” David Ireland (from Jesse Schlesinger)

Left: David Ireland, Air Where You Are, ca. 1990 Right: Moira Murdoch, Collected Measurements: 914 Douglass Street, 2008

Left: Chris Sollars, Untitled, 2009 Right: David Ireland, Broom Collection With Boom, 1978/88

I live within three blocks of David’s 500 Capp St. House, and have been making sculptures directly with ready-made-trash and debris I find on streets of our neighborhood. His home has a presence in our neighborhood which has influenced many of the artists’ projects that have happened at my home at 667Shotwell. David’s home sculptures carry the residue of history that came before. This sculpture was made on 20th St, just down the street from Capp St House. —Chris Sollars

Left: David Ireland, collage of images from 500 Capp Street; Copyright ©1986 Abe Frajndlich. Right: Megan Wilson, collage of images from Home, 1996-2008

David Ireland’s home at 500 Capp Street was one of the inspirations for my site-specific installation/environment Home 1996 – 2008. I loved how David integrated his work so directly into his everyday life and living environment, challengingthe definition of what constitutes “art”, and using materials and practices that weren’t necessarily popular or accepted by the standards of the art world at the time. I’m very grateful to David for the different perspective and the delight he provided in experiencing life and art. His work lives on in the work of those of us he inspired. —Megan Wilson

Impediments are stars here Purpose feeds On a missing leg Come in, mind the empty mason jar Ration time, fog and will The winter’s sail won’t be still —Rebecca Goldfarb, from SOLIDIFY, for David Ireland

Left: Kevin Killian, Adrienne Skye Roberts, Eric Heiman.  Right: Anu Vikram. MIA: Julian Myers

You can see they weren’t a thousand percent keen on having me take their picture when we all got together the first time to meet that pretty afternoon last April, but hopefully I will be forgiven for posting these now.  I want to say a million times THANK YOU,  & offer  STANDING OVATION to our fantastic first group of columnist-bloggers, whose official term now comes to a close: KEVIN KILLIAN! JULIAN MYERS! ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS! ERIC HEIMAN!  ANURADHA VIKRAM!

We couldn’t have been sure—I mean we, my colleagues and I  @ SFMOMA—what would happen if we brought in outside writers, asked them to write about  the Bay Area, and then more or less handed over the keys to the machinery. Museums just aren’t normally in the business of such figure-it-out-on-the-fly, and while I had a good idea of a brief for the columnists when we started, none of us—not the writers, not the museum—knew exactly what would fly & what might sink. The result—various, vigorous, intelligent, and dynamic conversation, including the many contributions of an ever-growing readership (thank you)—has been better than I could have imagined or hoped. I am very grateful to all the writers not only for their  fierce,  often funny, and always smart & deeply engaged writing, but also their grace & good humor while we hammered out some kinks technological and philosophical. I’d also like to thank my colleagues at the museum for like grace under pressure and for supporting the project so thoroughly.  (Probably more bumps in the road ahead. Just so you know.)

And I hope this isn’t the last we hear from these writers, either, and expect that it isn’t: the guest-columnists program is by rotation, and we’ll bring in a new group every few months, but alumni are encouraged to continue  writing if and as or when they wish, on into the future, as they see fit.

At any rate, onward! I’ll introduce you to the new columnists next week.

xxoo

SS

[New series. The same five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests.  Let's see what happens with these over time. Enjoy!]

Name/ Place of residence/ Occupation/ Hobby?

My name is John, I live in San Francisco, California. I am a full-time film student and I’m a full-time cyclist too.

Do you collect anything?

I collect Vonnegut books. I have quite a few now, a whole shelf full.

If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?

I would love to have dinner with Miranda July. She seems really adventurous and really full of life and I’d love to have a conversation with her.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?

It would be Boy with Pipe by Picasso. I know at one point it was the most expensive painting in the world. I’m just saying that for reference. But I think it’s a beautiful painting.

What’s your favorite tool?

Camera.

—————————-

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?

My name is Bonnie. I live in Berkeley, California. I’m the research manager in the fundraising department at SFMOMA. My hobby is organization.

Do you collect anything?

Yes, way too much stuff. I collect things with owls on them, things with turtles on them, teddy bears, ugly dolls, things that are blue… I collect too much.

If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?

Oh, man, that’s tough. I think I would invite Gustave Baumann. He was around the turn of the century or a little bit later and he lived in New Mexico and he did these beautiful, colorful woodblock prints. But he also made puppets. He was busy 24/7 with stuff and I’d like to know how he did that.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?

I really liked Martin Puryear’s blue circle. I don’t remember the name of it. But that I would love to have.

What’s your favorite tool?

Sewing machine.

———————

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?

My name is Sue. I live in Castro Valley. I’m a graphic artist and my hobby is acting and singing.

Do you collect anything?

I do collect art, to a minor extent. I collect paintings and sculpture, both abstract and representational. The way I determine whether I’m going to buy a work of art by if it won’t let me leave the gallery or store without it. It really speaks to me and I don’t ever buy art because it goes with a chair or anything like that.

If you could invite any artist to dinner, who would it be and why?

Oh my goodness. Well, just having seen her work, I think probably Georgia O’Keeffe. I just think she’s a fascinating person with a rich history. I love her art and she’s a woman and very independent, successful woman artist.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your house, what would it be?

It would probably be a post-impressionist, like a Van Gogh or a Cezanne or a Gauguin. Something like that.

What’s your favorite tool?

Any kind of tool? Oh my gosh, my Macintosh. I’m a graphic artist and it’s a very important tool in my profession. Plus, it’s fun and I’m definitely a Mac person as opposed to a PC person.

I sat down with Andy Vogt recently to talk about his work, including the “Sustained Decay” installation he created with Joshua Churchill at Adobe Books last month. (My post about this piece can be read here.)

(more…)

Wonderland: a land of wonder, curiosities and marvels.

Wonder: something strange and surprising. A cause of astonishment.

In the popular novel, Alice and her Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a young girl follows a rabbit down its rabbit hole to find herself in a place that, from her perspective, is full of nonsense and chaos. In Wonderland Alice meets a cast of characters, anthropomorphic plants and animals and travels through a fantasy land that is far from the hum-drum bore of the world she just left behind.

The Wonderland that curator Lance Fung refers to in his upcoming public, collaborative project is far from the fantastical space of Carroll’s novel. Fung’s Wonderland is the Tenderloin. Tucked between wealthy neighborhoods like Nob Hill and Union Square, the Tenderloin is a small, densely populated neighborhood. The Tenderloin, like many urban areas, is a difficult place to describe and categorize. The Tenderloin has the highest percentage of families, children and immigrants living in any area of San Francisco. Its residents are largely low-income people who are marginalized due to class, citizenship status, race, gender and sexuality, many of whom do not get the social services they need.

Fung has curated ten collaborative groups to create projects in multiple sites throughout this neighborhood including public venues and community organizations. The project features forty-six artists, including those currently living in San Francisco, and other artists both nationally and internationally located. Wonderland began as a graduate level course taught by Fung at the San Francisco Art Institute. According to the press release, Wonderland is “born of and responds to” the diversities of the Tenderloin. The show’s primary audience is cited as those who live or work in the Tenderloin. Later the press release states that it will transform the Tenderloin into a destination for tourists, opening on October 17th with a block party in Boedekker Park, the projects will remain open for one month. Wonderland is sponsored by the North of Market Community Benefit District and several galleries in the area including the 1AM Gallery and Ever Gold Gallery.

Those are the facts: the title, the neighborhood and the project. To be honest, my research about Wonderland has raised a lot of complicated feelings and concerns for me—many of which are difficult to articulate and relate to many broader issues I have attempted to address here on Open Space; questions related to public art, to socially engaged art practices, to gentrification and  specifically to San Francisco’s uneven economic and social landscape.

(more…)

I’ve seen a few things over the past few weeks that don’t warrant their own post, but certainly have heated argument potential. What follows is an attempt to make this post more of a forum for discussion. Any thoughts? Just keep reading…

(more…)

Try as we might to get away from the museum, it always lures us in with something bright. This summer in San Francisco, we had the Richard Avedon exhibition and the show which matched Georgia O Keeffe and Ansel Adams (as some wags call it, Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm.) Then there’s “Not New Work,” curated by SFMOMA’s Apsara Di Quinzio and selected by Vincent Fecteau from the museum’s own hoard of antiquity.

(more…)

I’m in Linz, Austria, at Ars Electronica. The festival, now in its 30th year, remains the definitive art and technology gathering, although that status is being challenged by newer events such as Transmediale in Berlin and our own Zero1 in San Jose. Though its practitioners come from nearly every continent, the field of media art remains quite small. Ars Electronica definitely has a hint of insider-y love-fest about it. At the same time, it sometimes feels like a desolate outpost on the contemporary art map.

(more…)

When I was an architecture student in Pittsburgh 20 years ago, one of the first vanity monographs I bought was about Morphosis, the Los Angeles firm started by Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi (who moved on  to found Roto Architects in 1991). Their fractured forms, rendered in meticulously inked drawings and gritty models, were eye-opening to us budding designers studying in a city not known for its architectural adventurousness.

This memory came back to me as I toured—with fellow columnist, Adrienne Skye Roberts (see her related post) and Open Space editor-in-chief, Suzanne Stein—the Morphosis-designed United States Federal Building that looms large over the South of Market neighborhood like a giant, modern-day aerie of government regality. As an architecture school graduate and brief practitioner, I admire the building for its sheer creative chutzpah, especially considering the client is the federal government. The Morphosis tics, that two decades earlier rarely expanded beyond southern California and the scale of a modest private home or restaurant interior, are now super-sized with this work. So while my architecture aficionado side can’t help but be thrilled, the American citizen in me is left a little uneasy.

(more…)

I’m old enough to remember the race between Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle for who would hit 60 homers in a single season, and the crushing disappointment I felt as a child when Maris won, and after that happens, nothing ever feels that bleak again, but also, nothing really interested me ever as much about baseball. But on the other hand my brother, Tim, is super into baseball and on a recent visit from his home in Cooperstown, New York, came to town and we went on a tour of the hidden treasures of the ballpark here in San Francisco. I kept one eye cocked for examples of visual culture in the Bay Area.

My sister Nancy was there too and I took this picture of the two of them at the entrance to the park, they call it Willie Mays Plaza. This statue is by William Behrends (b. 1956) and is probably the most photographed work of art in the Bay Area. Because Mays’ number was 24, they have completely fetishized the number down at AT&T Park, and there are subtle reminders of “24” everywhere.

(more…)

While I was traveling earlier this month, I was thinking about a conversation that transpired on this blog between Adrienne Skye Roberts and Julian Myers. It was sparked by Adrienne’s post about the Federal Building in San Francisco, and  a question I asked her about humanizing green architecture. By “humanizing,” I mean creating spaces that are scaled to promote human social interactions. The Federal Building’s public areas fail to do this because their design encourages rapid passage through them, rather than prolonged engagement or interaction.

What are some better models for public green spaces that encourage visitors to engage with one another and with the natural world? One that comes to mind is the museum garden, where art and botany are presented side-by-side. SFMOMA’s Rooftop Garden is a great place to escape the noise of the city and sneak in a few quiet moments of contemplation. It’s not exactly an example of green building itself, but like green architecture, it is concerned with integrating nature into urban life, and with promoting a more thoughtful consideration of the spaces in which we live and work.

(more…)

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast four years ago, on August 29, 2005 Lewis Watts was two thousand miles away in his home in Richmond, California. He was a few days shy of beginning a residency at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans where he planned to continue an eleven year project of photographing the city and its residents. Needless to say, his plans for a residency were interrupted and Watts, like many of us, observed the natural disaster of the storm and political disaster of the governments failure to respond through the mediation of television sets and news broadcasts.

Watts’ relationship to the South began as an informed visitor and has, over time, evolved into a participant, witness and documentarian. Watts was born in Little Rock though he was raised in Seattle, Washington and for the past forty years has lived in the Bay Area. As a child his summers were spent in his grandparents’ houses in Georgia and Arkansas. In 1994 Watts was hired as a photographer to document community youth organizing in Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. It was through this job that Watts first arrived in New Orleans, an experience he describes as love at first sight. Since his initial trip in 1994, has returned to New Orleans numerous times. Through these extended visits Watts has developed relationships with local artists including John Oneal, Eric Waters and the late John Scott, lifelong residents of New Orleans who have provided him with access to aspects of the culture and traditions of the city that would have otherwise remained invisible to him. While his relationship to New Orleans is as an outsider, Watts’ photography embodies a sustained and humble presence.

New Orleans is one location of many that Watts has gravitated towards throughout his career. His ouerve consists of photographs from Harlem, New Orleans, Oakland and Richmond, urban neighborhoods that hold rich and complex histories as African-American communities.  In 2005 Watts’ collaborated with Elizabeth Pepin to create the book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era which documents the brief yet flourishing jazz scene in the Fillmore District during the 1940s and 1950s with historical accounts and archival photographs. Watts’ documentation of black communities across the United States focuses on the effect of their presence on the environments in which they live and what evidence of their lives are visible in the cultural and environmental landscape. Spanning geographical distance and time, Watts work draws’ connections between these neighborhoods and the people who reside within them. In designating himself as a witness, Watts implies his own relationship within the black community of Richmond, as well as his family’s history in the South. In New Orleans, Watts documents quintessential cultural traditions such as Mardi Gras, 2nd Line Processions, jazz funerals and street musicians, as well as quotidian events: families gathered on front porches and children entertaining each other on sidewalks. His photographs express a particular interest in Treme, a neighborhood known as the oldest African community in the United States. Over the years his camera has captured public demonstrations against gentrification, popular neighborhood haunts such as the Treme Bar, and the longtime residents of this neighborhood, as well as the damage suffered after Katrina.

(more…)

Earlier this summer Miriam Bale asked if I might contribute to a weeklong compendium of comedy criticism under the title Comedy v. Criticism—this leading towards a screening of Elaine May’s film Ishtar at DCTV in New York on August 31st. (Richard Brody’s blurb on it here.) Miriam and I have talked about May for years, and this seemed a good moment to say something more. Knowing that Jill Dawsey had also done some thinking about comedy—at the end of Rachel Harrison’s lecture at SFMOMA in 2004, she screened a section of Blazing Saddles (1976)—I asked her to talk through May’s career with me. We watched Ishtar and The Heartbreak Kid, listened to recordings of her comedy duo with Mike Nichols, and read some reviews—in particular, a few by Pauline Kael. What follows is our exchange. Jill is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Art; from 2003-2006 she was curatorial associate in Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA.

JM: Some history first. Mike Nichols and Elaine May meet at the University of Chicago, two young American Jews who “loathed each other on sight.” Both studied the Stanislavski Method, and were part of The Compass, a nightclub group that pioneered sketch improv comedy in the mid-1950s. (The Compass would later become The Second City, a crucible for many of the actors on Saturday Night Live, Strangers with Candy, The Daily Show etc.) In 1957 Nichols and May split off and become immensely successful, quickly getting spots on TV and then on Broadway, releasing records, and so on. Then in 1962 they break up. And there is an ambition, on both of their parts, to bring their style of comedy to Hollywood. Nichols makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which wins awards, and The Graduate (1967), which is a huge commercial success. May writes plays and enters cinema a bit later, as a writer and actress. She’s perhaps less instantly successful, but eventually starts directing too; her films are A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and the notorious Ishtar (1987). For her part, critic Pauline Kael deplores the influence their style of comedy has on movies in the late 1960s. “Nichols-and-May” becomes a kind of shorthand for her, for a “crackling, whacking style [that] is always telling you that things are funnier than you see them to be.” (from Reeling, 1976)

(more…)

When last I was in New York, the artist Fia Backström and I had a conversation about Sherrie Levine, by way of both “The Pictures Generation, 1974-84″ — an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, of the early practice of Cindy Sherman,  Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth and others — and some thinking I’d done on some of Levine’s works. I planned to return to New York the following month, and we promised to re-engage our converstion then. But my plans changed. So around the date when I’d intended to be in New York, Fia wrote: “Since you are not here, I had to respond this way below. A very strange form of conversation.”  This “strange form” worked between the lines, arguing with,  questioning, and affirming aspects of the original text (in a way I read at times as mock-educational). The result, posted below, is maybe a better or more interesting text than the original: disrupted in an almost collage-like way, so that it creates a different, doubled picture.

But what if we read them instead as central, foundational? They might allow us to think of Sherrie Levine’s productions more generally in their relation to collage – to imagine that she works in and against collage’s formal-conceptual operations.

collage is of course the image smasher per se. whereas she figured out another way, not through violence, but in some kind of Annie Get Your Gun spirit – “I can do anything better than you can,” doing the same but upping it…

…think out my ideas first in pictures, experimentally moving reproductions into sequences and constellations, relationships of similarity or opposition. What follows, then, attempts to retain the experimental quality of images in stacks, rows and piles – even as I want to show what it is about collage that Levine aims to work against.

sequences carry meaning by order before after grouping, as my artforum series, to form and content… sequence as another form of destabilizing the meaning

The cacophony of the picture signifies, and dwells upon, the social disorder left in the wake of Germany’s failed left revolution in 1918-19.

Nice, I like this jump from formal breakdown into that political/economical breakdown of value

an appropriate figure for the dire circumstances Heartfield’s designs were meant to diagnose and attack.

sherrie levine in the prosperous 80s… not a collapse but a new kind of anti-ethic is emerging and a globalist world in total. William Turnbull – did he do the special effects for 2001?

(more…)

In May, Joseph Del Pesco and I posted a critical reading of the Art and Education Papers archive, which had then just been announced. In it, we contrasted that project with a site whose constitution we liked better, called AAAARG. AAAARG is many things, but is probably known best these days as a kind of digital library and radical public amenity, devoted to the history of art, architecture, theory, political writing, and pretty much whatever else its community’s members decide to scan and upload. Based in Los Angeles, artist Sean Dockray is the principal of AAAARG. What follows is a dialogue on the history and ideas behind the site, followed by links to several readings relevant to its origin.

JD: Can you say something about the history of AAAARG? When did it begin, and with what impulses or ideas in mind?

SD: Generally speaking, it has always been about sharing knowledge in the form of text. Currently the web address for AAAARG is a.aaaarg.org (2009); before that it was just aaaarg.org (2007) and before that it was aaarg.e-rat.org (2005, with Aaron Forrest). Before that, there were a couple more that didn’t even have any A’s in the title (beginning around 2001).

JD: Have there been significant changes in direction or shifts in concept?

SD: Originally it was kind of a proto-blog, with people able to write essays and have discussions through a message board and possible even work on projects together. I think the library part of it first started informally in 2004 because discussions and projects often referred to texts. Now most people see AAAARG purely as a library, which I’m not opposed to.

JD: So it began as something more discursive?

SD: I think it’s still discursive. If you’ve ever tried to get your friends to read or listen to something you know that that act of sharing is a kind of communication and it almost compels reciprocity – so I think there is still a discussion happening, but it’s not really in the words. Most people describe AAAARG as a “resource” and I think that’s appropriate. I find that I’ve spent a lot of time working on things (alongside AAAARG, The Public School, Distributed Gallery and Berlin; and some more bounded ones: Games for 5 Joysticks, The Fundraising Show, and Chung King Common) that might be described as infrastructures or resources. In a way, I think it is in the same spirit as that restaurant Food (started by Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in 1971), in that it provides something that we as progressive cultural producers need, while at the same time supporting the social generation of ideas. (more…)

This weekend I fell in love with San Francisco again. On Sunday I rode my bike from the sunny Mission District into the fog of the Inner Sunset for the San Francisco Zinefest. I joined a small crowd of independent press connoisseurs for the second day of an all weekend event that included workshops and panel discussions on all things related to zine-making and doing-it-yourself:  how to screen-print, bind books, and how to gouache paint. I meandered slowly through the tables, skimming zines and roaming back to the certain delicately crafted booklets that caught my attention—that I had to flip through at least six times before I made the decision to buy them. Among the booths were the local favorites in radical small press publishing, AK Press, Slingslot Collective, and independent press shops such as 1984 Printing, as well as lots of independent artists and writers with tables full of one of a kind or limited edition zines, pamphlets, crafts, t-shirts, buttons and on and on.

My first introduction to zines was in middle school. My friends and I hung out at a local, independent record store on the small downtown strip of our hometown that was next to a comic book store that specialized in baseball cards and across from the Planned Parenthood that quickly shut down. We would riffle through the free box pulling out advertising posters of our favorite punk bands and occasionally buy a CD or two. One afternoon, the infamous local punk, Mike handed us a small square of stapled paper. Mike was the real deal—he wore all black, had tattoos on his face, and he practically lived at the record store and knew every punk band and underground venue. On one side of the black and white xerox copied pages were drawings of jokers and a skull and crossbones, the other side was scribbled writing that attacked the prison industrial complex and urged everyone to go vegan. Unsure how these things related or what exactly I was suppose to do with this small stack of paper, but not wanting Mike, one of my idols, to think I was uncool, I accepted his offering. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally understood the importance of Mike’s gesture and started seeking out zines for dialogues about similar political messages that Mike, the hometown punk, was attempting to raise consciousness about years ago. Irregardless of content, (although many are politically progressive and critical in nature) zines are inherently political. They operate outside of any corporate business model, don’t require approval from editors or distributors or sponsors. All you need is scissors, a gluestick, a copy machine, something to say and people willing to listen.

(more…)

During the New Langton Arts debate a few weeks ago, Renny Pritikin, who with his wife Judy Moran directed the organization in its first decade and more, mentioned to me an essay he’d written that elaborated some of the early ideas behind the institution. I asked him to send it my way, and a week later it arrived by mail. Called “The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists’ Organizations,” the essay connects the student movements of the 1960s — in particular,  ideas of participatory democracy espoused by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 — with the impulses and modes that defined Langton’s founding and first decade. You can find the original essay here; what follows below is a dialogue about the essay in retrospect. Renny is Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis.

JM: So, thanks again for this document. It’s interesting, and I think the reading you put forward, of the origins of parallel institutions emerging from new practices and political commitments both, and not one or the other, has the feeling of a historical truth. It’s interesting to me how something like the Port Huron Statement seems almost to gesture towards an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint, well different in concept than, say, the other powerful Left ideas in play in that moment — say, Marx and Mao by way of the Black Panther Party, and Fidel Castro-style foco theory, rooted in a redirection or re-radicalization of Lenin.

RP: I agree, though I think the Panthers overlapped a bit with SDS in the participatory democracy idea.

JM: Right. Their platform drew on a lot of different Leftisms I guess. Given the ideas you mark out, Langton’s later embrace of support from the government, by way of the National Endowment for the Arts, would seem to have produced a sort of conceptual and constitutional conundrum, no?

RP: Yeah: anarchists on the dole. I’ve heard that all my life. Peter Schjeldahl once said to me that artists taking NEA grants was evil. It seemed such a stance of privilege. Leslie Scalapino responded, “Oh Peter, $5000 isn’t going to corrupt anyone…” My feelings were that it was a victory of political agitprop to make “them” pay for organizing something designed as resistant. Leftists are citizens too, and what we were getting was such a pittance compared to the funding going to the Right. We were reclaiming, in a post-McCarthy way, our rights. It just seemed Ivory Tower and unworldly to say that taking money was inherently corrupting or meant we were being bought off, if you could prove that what you were doing was important and uncompromised. The people at the NEA at that time — Jim Melchert, Leonard Hunter, et al. — were definitely radical thinkers themselves.

JM: I am trying to say something different, though. I am exploring the role of the state, amongst the various “Lefts” on offer in the 60s. In the 60s most of these “lefts” were, roughly speaking, communist or socialist, if they embraced any one ideology. After the 60s we’ve tended to see politics as a sort of Manichean relationship between state socialism, and capitalism or the free market. Anarchism, which was seen as a real third way in the early part of the 20th century, had by the 1960s basically been left behind or gone underground. So I’m interested to see a thread that is recognizable as anarchism in your third paragraph — that is, a highly informal organization, based in consensus: an essentially syndicalist sort of organization. And so what I am saying is not that artists’ organizations made a bargain with the capitalist devil in the 80s, but that you traded in something like an anarchist conception and structure for something much closer to the kinds of organizing and arts support that apply in state socialism. And so, while you remained resistant and on the Left, it’s a different Left. There may have been a subtle realignment in program and self-conception. (more…)

I went down to the Artists Shop at Right Window on Friday evening and bought two pictures by San Francisco painter Scott Hewicker. He is one of my favorites and oh! So cheap! The artists’ shop is a project of the video artist Karla Milosevich and runs this weekend and next down at 992 Valencia Street. Lots and lots of artists, everything very reasonable, and 100 per cent of the $$$ goes to the artists themselves.

First I bought this little piece which I call, “Red Sun.”

Then I fought off several other would-be buyers to lay my hands on this great picture (below). Can you see it or can you not see it? It is like that old etching of Vanity looking into her mirror and canny viewers see a big skull, Or like that old optical illusion Wittgenstein wrote about where it looks like a duck and it looks like a rabbit.  Well, look again, and you will see two black cats aping the viewer’s gaze and staring, like yourself, into the severely luscious weather conditions only Hewicker knows how to give us.

Can you see them yet? One’s called Tex, the other Tom. They’re on either side of the picture, ears cocked as though food or danger were in the offing.

(more…)

For the past seven months, a copy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s black and white print of a bird soaring through a cloud streaked sky has hung on the wall above my desk. This wall is opposite my bed which means that the print is usually one of the first things I see when I wake up in the morning. I took two copies of Gonzalez-Torres’s print from SFMOMA’s The Art of Participation exhibition last January, carefully rolling them and tucking them in my bag as I biked home. I tacked one above the various photographs, postcards, and notes that have gathered on the wall above my desk and the other I gave to a friend who had just moved into a new house.

During The Art of Participation these prints, known as Untitled 1992/1993, were placed one ontop of another in a stack placed on the floor of one of the galleries. The description of the print lists the printing method, offset lithograph on paper, and then includes this important detail in paranthesis: (endless copies). Visitors were encouraged to take a print home with them and as they did this sculptural stack of paper-thin prints would decrease in size and then would be replenished after hours, probably by a museum staff member, a ritual that will happen endlessly whenever this piece is on view.

The story of Gonzalez-Torres is well known. He immigrated to New York City from Cuba, gaining recognition as an artist in the late 1980s through his minimalist sculptures and installations that often referenced issues of public and private, accumulation and loss. The foundation on which the majority of his work was grounded was his relationship with his long-time partner, Ross Laycock. In 1989 he started exhibiting these stack pieces at MOMA, the Guggenheim and Andrea Rosen Gallery. It was during this time that Ross was dying of AIDS, and the stack pieces represented this process of letting go—they disappeared, yet unlike the inevitability of Ross’s death, the prints would return in their endless cycle of presence and absence. The prints themselves often depicted ephemeral moments; a bird flying or the texture of the surface of the water. These transient moments were captured on film and then in a sincere gesture, extended to others as a gift. Four years after Ross’s death, in an interview with Robert Storr for ArtPress, Gonzalez-Torres said, “When people say, ‘Who is your public?’ I honestly say, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.”

(more…)

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is actually a little bit two-on-one: Jill Sterrett, SFMOMA director of conservation and collections, & Sarah Roberts, associate curator of collections and research, who will be pinch-hitting for Jill's Thursday evening tour. ]

I have a memory from the 1960s. It’s an astronaut in a picture-pastiche in Life magazine that caught my eye. I came to learn later that this fold-out spread by Robert Rauschenberg was commissioned by Life to commemorate Dante’s 700th birthday. Back then, I didn’t know Rauschenberg, I hadn’t yet learned who Dante was, and I certainly missed the full impact of Rauschenberg’s references to a modern-day inferno. Still, the fresh forces of youthful curiosity and discovery in that unknowing moment seem to me quintessential Rauschenberg, and they are all present in Port of Entry (1998). (more…)

Jacob Dahlgren missed the 60s entirely (he was born in 1970) but some of it came with him as he was born, trailing wisps of glory, to judge by his efforts at Steven Wolf Gallery during his recent presentation there.

I met with the artist several weeks ago and asked him about the body of work up on view. First let me describe it to you, it looked like about forty of fifty small paintings nailed to sticks to form placards, the kind you see whenever the union goes on strike, only they seem made of stiff paper at best. Market Street was frozen for 30 minutes yesterday while hundred of members of Local 2—the waiters union—stormed the sidewalks and traffic lanes agitating with Jacob Dahlgren-esque posters. Half the crowd shouted, “We—are!” while the other half took up the refrain, “Local—Two!” I thought of Dahlgren’s colorful signs, stacked salon style against the far wall of Wolf’s welcoming and capacious gallery, many with their sticks (handles?) in the air, or tipped lightly against the white walls. Protestors on their heads, perhaps in a restorative yoga pose….

(more…)

Our monthly feature, Collection Rotation: some wonderful guest organizes a mini-exhibition from our collection works online. This month’s guest-curator is is SFMOMA’s very own Jefre Cantu, musician in life, and long-time operations tech and resident yoga instructor by SFMOMA day. Thanks Jefre!

———————————————————–
The artwork I chose for this rotation is made up mostly of things that I’ve seen in the galleries here at SFMOMA at some point over the last seven years. The musical accompaniments are not meant to be soundtracks per se, but are rather musical expressions that come to mind when I see the work. I hope  through the sound clips & links I have provided, if you hear anything interesting, you could lead yourself into further discovery.

Agnes Martin, Petal, 1964; © Estate of Agnes Martin

Eliane Radigue: Kyema, Intermediate States

Originally a student of musique concrete heavyweights Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, French composer Eliane Radigue created her first long form (what she describes as ‘unfolding’)drone work for a Buchla synthesizer while at NYU in 1970. Four years later, while performing under the invitation of Terry Riley at Mills Collage, Radigue was introduced to Tibetan Buddhism; she later converted and gave up music-making to study Buddhism full time. Lucky for us her guru urged her to drone again & since the early 70s she’s crafted a massive body of work for both synthesizer & acoustic instruments. Radigue’s music does not at all lend itself to the soundbite. It’s just enormous.

(more…)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about home. These thoughts travel from my recent curatorial endeavors, to my involvement with tenants rights in San Francisco, to my unrelenting personal investigation into my role as a young, white artist in the Mission District. Of course, the housing crisis and economic recession has everyone thinking about home and property; whose homes are valued and therefore protected, and consequently, who is valued. (There is much more to be said about this and recent local legislation that exposes the vulnerability of renters, however this may not be the place). To consider home as solely attached to the built structure of a house is a limiting definition. Home means to belong to a people as much as it does to place. It is the accumulations of actions and experiences in one place. It is also a contested site; a place many people must distance themselves from and a destination we are often searching for.

In this post I briefly discuss five artists—some internationally known and others local and emerging—whose work investigates home in one way or another. I refrained from discussing Rachel Whiteread’s  “House” or Gordon Matta Clark’s “building cuts” although both projects are important examples of site-specificity and architectural interventions that address issues related to home. Only one artist featured below speaks directly to today’s housing crisis, however they have all been influential for me in considering the multiple ways to define and understand home.

Josef Jacques:  Gateway to Yosemite

In his series Gateway to Yosemite, Josef Jacques photographs the city of Merced, located 50 miles from Yosemite National Park in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Merced was hit especially hard in the housing crisis. In 2005 it was considered prime real estate with the construction of the new University of California campus, however as the prices of homes dropped, investors, developers, and subsequently, many families left the area. Many subdivisions still await completion; some houses are lived in and others show signs of vacancy, such as dried up lawns and incomplete construction. Merced was a popular destination during the California Gold Rush and Depression era migrations—a history that makes Jacques’ documentation of the city in limbo all the more haunting, as it is a city that seems to still be waiting to fulfill its promise.

(more…)

These are some articles I’ve been reading as I think through the question of what, if any, responsibility for supporting local art practices ought to be borne by large, internationally-focused museums.

The Museum Bubble: Ben Davis points to some disturbing statistics that demonstrate the disproportionate resources going to the very biggest museums. I don’t always agree with his tone or with his conclusions, but I do think what he says regarding the concentration of resources in the field bears noting. We all acknowledge the fact that our treasured alternative spaces are struggling. Davis argues that many of the bigger institutions are equally mismanaged, but that disproportionate funding is propping them up nonetheless. If all of the funding is going to encyclopaedic, multi-national museums, how can any regional art scene survive?

(more…)

Hidden in the back of the San Francisco Mission neighborhood mainstay, Adobe Books, is “Sustained Decay,” a collaboration between Andy Vogt and Joshua Churchill. “Decay” revels in its cavernous setting, transforming the bookstore’s long-rotting back office into a glorious mausoleum. Vogt has been working with salvaged wood lath for years now, moving slowly from small to mural-sized trompe l’oeil assemblages. His 2007 piece, Barren Echelon, that was reinstalled this past March at Four Barrel Cafe, is a wonder of scale and meticulous craft that left me hoping that Vogt would continue to work big, both in size and ambition. “Decay” is a realization of my hopes and more.

(more…)

This October Performa 09 and SFMOMA will mark the centennial of the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, in many ways a defining document of a certain sort of modernism, with a number of different events: some critical, others celebratory.

Much as I’d like to see the re-created Luigi Russolo noisemakers, I won’t be joining in. My reasons are summed up, with ruthless verve, by items 9 and 10 of the Manifesto we’re now to consecrate.

9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

These aren’t anomalies amidst a larger field of raucous ideas. They’re principles, which are pursued by Marinetti and others into the 1920s with greater resolve. They describe the real ambitions of the dominant Futurism – which Marinetti never truly repudiated or gave up. Maybe the memory of the Bush years, where these edicts were embraced as policy, is too close for me to set them aside as mere provocations. Certainly we are living now in the brutal aftermath of a certain kind of Futurism.

Perhaps we might “celebrate” Marinetti by recalling him as cultural advisor and arse-licker of his “old comrade Benito Mussolini,“ (the link is to a site praising Oswald Mosley, antisemite and founder of the British Union of Fascists, for whom Marinetti was spiritual ally and hero); as the disruptor of Socialist rallies in 1919 and 1920; as the one who wrote in 1922 that “The coming to power of the Fascists constitutes the realization of the minimum Futurist program.”

The programming for the event includes some brilliant and gymnastic reframings. Not least of all the event scheduled for October 18, “Action! Futurism Projected + Performed,” which presents Futurist plays and films at Brava! for Women in the Arts, alongside a film by committed future-feminist Lynn Hershman Leeson among others. All due respect for my colleagues involved, but my allegiances lie elsewhere – with the “the foul tribe of pacifists” and “fervent adversaries of war” Marinetti decried in his asinine poem Guerra sola igiene del mundo: “War, The Sole Hygiene of the World.”

Count me in for 2016, when we can raise our glasses to the Cabaret Voltaire.

Chris Perez at Ratio 3 on Stevenson Street in San Francisco crafted the perfect summer show out of unwieldy materials—I’m glad I caught “Safe Word” before the controversial exhibit came down this past weekend. It’s not only that the subject was porn that made the show so difficult, but the particular fetish sort of porn it meditated on is always divisive and often combustible.

It was one of those shows that, I guess, just had to happen, ever since the extreme bondage studio Kink.com took over the San Francisco Armory around the corner from Ratio 3 on Mission and 14th. This Mission landmark has puzzled plenty for ages—a vast, cheerless ziggurat of a building, it hailed from an age in which people were seriously worried about getting the shit blown out of them by enemy bombs, or perhaps invasion of the sort that would call for a huge arms depository right smack in the middle of what was then a white collar Irish neighborhood. You look at the building and you feel a little quake of fear—atavistic perhaps. On my way to Ratio 3 this weekend I took some photos of its forbidding surface. It is like the castle of Saruman in Isengard in The Lord of the Rings! (more…)

I was walking down Market Street on Saturday just taking in the day with my sometime colleague Bradford Nordeen. He and I have co-authored a groundbreaking article on “The Cinema of Whitney Houston” that is supposed to appear in the October issue of L.A. based art and culture magazine Animal Shelter. So there we were fresh from shopping when we saw this classic car parked on Market Street. (Wait, I forgot to say that if you are interested in bargains, get yourself down to “Agnes B.” on the first block of Grant, they are going out of business and everything, everything is 70 per cent off!) It’s a shame they are going out of business but now their prices are sort of in the Ross Dress for Less category. Well back to the car.

Tourists from dozens of nations saw a photo op and brought out state of the art Leicas, Panasonics, Nikons to do it justice. (more…)

In response to my recent post “This land wasn’t made for you and me”, my fellow columnist, Anuradha Vikram asked me for examples of humanizing green building projects to compare to my critique of both the San Francisco’s Federal Building’s “public” plaza and the houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation (MIR) in New Orleans that I wrote about back in June. Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying hard to think of green building projects in the Bay Area that incorporate a functional shared public space.  Due to my lack of expertise in architecture, I’d like to open up Anu’s comment as a question for others to respond to:  What are good examples of humanizing green building projects in the Bay Area?

In contrast to building projects previously discussed, I’d like to briefly mention The Heidelberg Project started by Tyree Guyton in Detroit, Michigan. Back in 1986, East Detroit struggled to recover from the aftermath of the Detroit riots and faced a depleted economy and racially segregated neighborhoods. Guyton, a resident of Heidelberg Street since the age of 12, began cleaning up his increasingly abandoned and blighted neighborhood with an enclave of children who lived nearby. With the materials they gathered from the vacated residences and lots, Guyton and the neighborhood kids collaborated to create art environments and installations in the vacant lots, on street posts, and the facades of homes. The city of Detroit resisted, of course, demolishing a portion of the project in 1991 and then again in 1999.  However, The Heidelberg Project persisted and now operates as a non-profit arts organization, hosting a series of year round workshops and educational programs for schools and youth in the area.

Clearly, the context of The Heidelberg Project and the public plaza of the San Francisco Federal Building or MIR differ greatly and the comparison is a stretch, at best. However, I mention The Heidelberg Project as a way to push the possibilities of our collective spaces and as an example of a community-driven public art project that not only functions in the context of an urban neighborhood facing poverty and disenfranchisement, but employs the creative reuse of material and space—a thread that runs through many of my recent blog postings.

On that note, I look forward to hearing from Open Space readers about green building projects and public spaces in the Bay Area.

Julian Myers’ post on the recent turmoil at New Langton Arts gave rise to a robust and very necessary discussion about the state of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Looking beyond the immediate issues at Langton, I’d like to address the perceived conflict between the local and international art worlds. In the Bay Area, we have many world-class museums, universities and art colleges. We have the benefit of some of the world’s foremost artists, curators and critics, having chosen to work here. We have a wonderfully tight-knit and innovative arts community, full of experimentation and creative risk-taking. The smallness of our region allows for incubation of new ideas in an interdisciplinary context. Our location at the nexus of the East and the West gives us an unusually international perspective for such a small community. In theory, this should be the ideal place to be an arts worker. Yet there is an underlying tension here, too often expressed in buzzwords like “insularity,” “inferiority complex,” “inside” and “outside.” (more…)

Taking inspiration from Robert Frank, Damaso Reyes has spent the last few years documenting social changes in the European Union for his project, The Europeans. Reyes is an artist and photojournalist who studied photography at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, honing his craft as a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News and other major news publications. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Reyes grew up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

As a Spanish-speaking, first generation American and a black man, Reyes, like Frank, grew up feeling he was both part of and outside of his community. That ability to be both insider and outsider is what allows him to move freely with his camera through worlds most people never see. As immigrants, Reyes’ parents were able to find a sense of civic belonging in the United States which, he has observed, continues to elude immigrants to the European Union. For this reason, he has chosen to photograph asylum seekers, whose dignity and humanity he tries to bring across in his images. Reyes’ inability to speak local languages has also helped him, much as Frank’s poor English helped him, to gain access to places such as closed-door EU government meetings, where he photographs as a fly on the wall.

(more…)

Since opening in 2007, the San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Thomas Mayne of the Morphosis architectural firm, has been internationally renowned as a model for sustainable architecture and green design. Located on the corner of 7th and Mission Street in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood, the skeletal grey metal building is visible from blocks away and from ontop of the nearby highway overpass. It stands tall and abstruse, sticking out, literally and visually, from the smaller buildings and offices nearby. On our first official “blogging field-trip, ” Suzanne Stein, Eric Heiman, and myself conducted our own self-guided tour of the federal building to see what exactly all the hype is about.

(more…)

Last week, in response to an announcement from the institution and a semi-public letter of resignation from its director Sandra Percival,  I posted that New Langton Arts has found itself in “serious financial jeopardy.” A conversation followed in the comments box here, mourning Langton’s loss (perhaps prematurely), diagnosing its ailments and proposing potential cures—the very variety of responses speaking, at least in part, to certain gaps in our knowledge.

María del Carmen Carrión, a curator at Langton under Percival, posed to the board what were the most immediately relevant questions: “What do you imply when you ask us to help you secure NLA’s legacy? Are we talking about the institution itself and future programming? If so, of what sort? Are you asking for help to save the archive? To cover the current debt? Or are we trying to just pay respect to the legacy and propose a wake for what Langton once was?”

A response from the board this morning brings the situation into a bit more focus.

The New Langton Arts Board of Directors has been meeting around the clock to work through the critical issues and is in deep discussions about the future of the institution.  In the interim, before decisions regarding what form the institution will take, NLA is vacating its gallery and theater space on Folsom Street and safeguarding its archive.

The board would like the community to know that all of the questions raised on Open Space are being considered at this time through board processes as well as through continuing conversations with the arts community. These questions cannot be answered immediately, but they will be answered.

The board acknowledges that the call for a public town hall meeting was premature. Rather than host the public meeting, the board determined that it first needed to address urgent funding and space issues and so considered a virtual forum to be an appropriate venue to host a conversation with the public. The SFMOMA blog has served, and continues to serve, as a platform for this.

Thank you for your continuing interest and commitment to Langton.

NLA Board of Directors

The dispossession of its premises on Folsom is obviously an enormous blow to the institution; practical matters, in particular the organization and preservation of Langton’s archive, have taken precedence over conversations about the institution’s longer-term survival. As the outlines of the calamity begin to come into view, though, the rest of us might try to assess what exactly has been lost, and to think, together, “What next?”

Last week, I went to see Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In light of my ongoing ruminations on the economy’s effect on artists, one work especially stuck in my mind. In 1924, Duchamp proposed a project in which he invited investors to contribute to a fund, which he would use to play roulette in the casinos of Monte Carlo.

Monte Carlo Bond bears an image of the artist as the Roman god Mercury, photographed by Man Ray. His hair is whipped up with shaving lather to resemble the messenger god’s winged helmet. The print is designed to look like a roulette table. Along the right edge is a row of stamps, each denoting an investor in Duchamp’s gamble. The work is an overt comment on speculation in the art market, a phenomenon which benefited Duchamp both as speculator and as artist.

In the Bay Area, where the market for contemporary art is slow even at the best of times, artists have often turned to variants on Duchamp’s model. For example, Dan Nelson has recently initiated Make an Artist a Millionaire. Appropriating the philanthropic model of a non-profit organization, Nelson invites people to support him with donations of $1. He intends to solicit donations from 1 million individuals, which he will present as a bundle of cash as a work of sculpture. (Disclosure – I have donated to this project). Nelson’s art projects are frequently cumulative in nature, for example his artist book All Known Metal Bands which was a compendium of said bands alphabetized by title. Whereas earlier works were also research-based, this new project is entirely made by accumulation. (more…)

One of the country’s longest-running nonprofit arts centers has just announced that its “continued existence is in serious financial jeopardy.” While dispiriting announcements like this are common enough during the current economic recession, this loss promises to be particularly devastating. Founded in 1974, the organization has been a center of the San Francisco arts scene for the last three decades and more; it has served in that time as a vital laboratory for conceptual art, poetry, installation and performance – which practices found little purchase in mainstream institutions in the Bay Area in the Seventies and Eighties – as well as a crucial point of contact with the national and international artists who were shown there.

Recent years haven’t been easy. In a review I published in Frieze in late 2007, of an exhibition at Langton by the Mexican artist-collective Tercerunquinto (an interview by curator María del Carmen Carrión here, another review here), I put forward the idea that the institution was then already at a decisive moment. I wrote,

“For non-profit organizations such as New Langton, ‘economic uncertainty’ is inevitable. Founded in the 1970s to capitalize on new forms of federal funding in the USA, these institutions found themselves in trouble when that funding largely dried up around 1990. There are other kinds of uncertainty too: New Langton’s founding purpose was to foster forms of art practice not then supported by museums: performance art, Conceptual art, video, installation, improvised and electronic music, poetry and so on. Now these forms have faded from view or been incorporated into the larger and more established museums, leaving the non-profit just one exhibition space among many. In the present New Langton must do more than support itself – it must figure out why it should survive.”

I hoped then that the board, and director Sandra Percival, might see Tercerunquinto’s project (and my review) as a kind of challenge: not only to raise money, but to re-imagine Langton’s role in the arts community, to locate and support forms of practice not addressed or exhibited adequately by larger institutions like SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and to pursue new audiences and new roles for itself. It doesn’t seem from outside that these questions were engaged within the institution; certainly they were not engaged effectively enough. Indeed it sometimes seemed as if the institution was moving in a conservative direction, considering its history (less poetry, less community, less chaos). And by largely showing artists who had been recognized and legitimated by institutions elsewhere, Langton lived problematically in those institutions’ shadow. (more…)

Adjacent to the live/work loft building where our studio occupies the main storefront space is a large fenced-in parking lot used by the PG&E employees that work in the area. Last week I stepped out to take a personal phone call and noticed that the barricade facing Harrison had been tagged every 50 feet with small, orange metal plates emblazoned with the copy “Soon Obsolete: All fences, walls, and other impediments. Nonchalance Viability Survey O2C” and a phone number, credited to the Elsewhere Public Works Agency.

After concluding my own call, I dialed the 888 number and an answering service picked up, giving me the business hours for EPWA (11:57PM–4:38AM, Thursday–Sunday, third Tuesdays, and all lunar eclipses) and offering me more information on Survey o2C if I pressed 1. After doing so, the voice on the other end informed me that by November 2009 all tagged fences, et al, would be, indeed, obsolete. A quick Google search brings up a EPWA web site that is equally opaque with its old school BBS format that requires one to type in commands to reveal more content in a radical manifesto vein. Further investigation reveals a list of programs that one can’t be sure are real or not, including an “International Shoe Recycling Program” and “End Times Preparedness Classes.”

I’m a big fan of art and design that inserts itself into the public realm, more so when it makes a socio-political comment (as in the work of Rigo or the Billboard Liberation Front), and the contained parking lots that blight our urban centers are worthy targets. Only come November will we know for sure if these spaces are “rendered obsolete,” as EPWA says, but I’d wager that our neighboring PG&E employees will still be parking behind chain link after the Thanksgiving holiday. Only one placard remains on the fence today, not even 2 weeks after going up. The initiative did catch my attention and the issue it addresses is timely, but there is this nagging question—especially after spending time amidst the Rural Studio and Project M in rural Alabama: Does it really go far enough?

(more…)

Last week a friend, the poet Joshua Clover, asked me to be a call in guest on his radio program at UC Davis and read Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” as it was exactly 50 years ago that Billie Holiday died and O’Hara wrote his famous surprise elegy for her. In his poem O’Hara links fandom to, well, death in a luminous and memorable way. When you listened to Billie Holiday “live” (a telling term), he recalls, “Everyone and I stopped breathing.” Naturally this made me think of how we all heard about Michael Jackson’s death, and I offered that somebody somewhere is writing “The Day Michael Jackson Died,” and Clover asked why didn’t I write such a poem. Maybe this is it.

I flew out of SFO on the day Michael died (and Farrah Fawcett). I loved both of them probably for the same reason, they were both striking and glamorous stars who came to us cursed as though by jealous gods. At the Virgin America terminal, Virgin had transformed Gate 12 into a disco, the signage shook and glistened, while the stereo system boomed out “Scream,” “Beat It,” “Human Nature.” Next to the kiosk, the sign for Gate 12 announced Flight 945 for L.A. and beneath it read “Rest in Peace Michael and Farrah.” I actually didn’t want to get on the plane, it was more comforting to stay in that airport lounge and feel the community of people who Virgin thought would appreciate a greeting like “Rest in Peace Farrah and Michael.” That imaginary community Agamben predicted of people joined together by loss. (more…)

Back in April I posted a blog entitled Public Art and Redevelopment that looked at the new condominium building currently under construction on the corner of Valencia and 18th Street in the Mission District and more generally, raised the issue of the role of public art within the context of redevelopment. Today I’m focusing again on the Mission District and specifically, the impending public art project that is folded into one of the many city sponsored improvement plans.

The Valencia Streetscape Improvement Project was initiated and sponsored by the San Francisco Department of Public Works. In 2006, the Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) received an Environmental Justice Grant from Caltrans to create a Pedestrian Safety Plan for Valencia Street and for the past three years this plan has slowly been in the works to improve the commercial corridor between 15th and 19th Streets.  Improvements will include widening the sidewalks, removing the striped medians, creating curb extensions or “bulb-outs,” installing more bike racks, trees, kiosks, and art elements. Once component of the “art element” is a public artwork created by one artist and commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission.  Since April, the artist selection process has been underway juried by the San Francisco Arts Commission, along with a panel of Mission District residents and business owners.  A few weeks ago the four finalists were revealed, they are Ana Teresa Fernandez, Michael Arcega, Brian Goggin, and Misako Inaoka. (more…)

Prompted by my colleague Traci Vogel and her admiring review in SF Weekly I took myself down to Triple Base Gallery, deep in the heart of the Mission, to check out the concurrent exhibitions by Hilary Pecis and Elyse Malouk, artists new to me, sort of, except when I saw these shows I realized each must have been operating for some time, just under my radar. Hilary Pecis takes up most of the front room at Triple Base, with her “Intricacies of Phantom Content,” sizable collage-based works of mind-blowing complexity. (more…)

“I am always on the outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is constantly changing.” –Robert Frank

Two photography shows currently on view at SFMOMA provide an intriguing point of departure from which to consider the roles of insider and outsider. Robert Frank is an iconic example of the artist as outsider, looking in on society, as expressed by the quote above. His subjects are the everyday people whose lives comprise the American experience of the 1950s. Frank seeks out sites of exclusion in the culture he portrays. He looks most closely at poor people, white and black, whose circumstances give the lie to the promise of prosperity. A German Jew and Holocaust survivor, Frank understands America in the way only an immigrant, studiously engaged in a performance of belonging, can do. His influence is so widely felt that this work has come to represent ourselves to us – a record of our collective memories of a turbulent period.

I’ll consider Frank in greater depth with a special guest later this week, but for now, let’s turn to Richard Avedon. At first glance, Avedon would seem to be photography’s consummate insider. Glamour shots of Suzy Parker and Marilyn Monroe are his calling-card. His subjects include the powerful – Henry Kissinger, George HW Bush – and the famous – Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis. But Avedon’s camera has an equalizing power.
(more…)

[Alongside our weekly in-gallery curator "One on One" talks, we post regular ‘one on one' bits from curators & staff on a particular work or exhibition they're interested in. Today's post is from assistant curator of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio.]

I have a growing obsession for the desert; perhaps it is not even so much about the desert as it is about how art can activate it, both as a place and as a concept. This interest was set in motion while I was doing research on Mai-Thu Perret last summer. The genesis of her project involves a story she wrote called The Crystal Frontier, about a group of young women who abandon their rote, urban lives to form a utopian community in the desert of New Mexico they call New Ponderosa Year Zero. They do this to escape the constraints of capitalism in a phallocentric West. Shortly thereafter, I went to visit Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field from 1977 (an earthwork that informs Mai-Thu’s ideas) located very close to Ponderosa, New Mexico. There I witnessed how De Maria’s work yields to the sublime, shifting light of the desert and I listened to its engulfing silence. And dare I say it, I also carelessly swung around the stainless steel poles De Maria planted into the dry, crackling New Mexico earth to solicit lightening storms. During my brief stay I was hoping to catch a glimpse of a New Mexican Whiptail—an all-female species of lizard, indigenous to New Mexico and Arizona, that procreates parthenogenetically, laying complete female eggs. But, alas, I saw none. (more…)

Last month Joseph Del Pesco and I wrote about the new initiative by Artforum and e-flux (under their collaborative Art & Education site) which aims to serve as a database of scholarly essay on the history of art. Titled “Call for Art Historical Knowledge,” that post put forward speculations about the new archive, and mentioned that Joseph had sent to Art & Education a request for further clarifications about the editorial structure and economic model of the project.

In late June we received a response from Dawn Chan, an assistant editor at Artforum, who replied that the Papers archive is “an added service to the community,”  and “simply a venue whereby scholars can share their work.” It “yields no income.” She informed us that the goal of the project was to make worthwhile papers more easily available – which would supplement, rather than compete with, the venues where these articles might often appear. The few papers currently available seem to confirm this: they’re essays from gallery exhibitions whose catalogs are years old or relatively hard to access; translations, or studies which don’t seem to have been published before. The purview of the papers is wide, and the standards of writing are variable; the submissions are “given a cursory review by an editorial staff member, but are not edited. “All rights and permissions remain with the author. (more…)

[Charles Bernstein responds to recent discussions about his review "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?" in last winter's Parkett. --SS]

Suzanne Stein has asked me to make some comments on two posts on Open Space, one by Kevin Killian and then Julian Myers’s response (to which several responses were subsequently posted). Both Killian (whom I know for many years) and Myers (whose name is new to me) focused at least in part on a review I wrote for Parkett magazine of Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, titled “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?“. I wrote my review of Shaw’s book in December 2008 and it was published by Parkett this past winter.

In his post, Killian gently chides me for not giving the original source of my ironic title, which I guess I took for granted. But the sentiment has become a kind of received wisdom, removed from the specifics of Brion Gysin’s original remark:

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint . . . lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be “the very own words” of anyone else living or dead. You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.

Killian and I would both be sympathetic to Gysin’s point—and indeed my “experiments list” (based in part on Bernadette Mayer’s) is deeply indebted to Gysin. Gysin was arguing for a poetry that challenged the conventional norms of “official verse culture”—that would use cut-ups, visual display, parataxis, and appropriated language to create a new kind of poetry. (See William Burroughs/Brion Gysin, The Third Mind.) But it was never true that the actual practice of poetry was ahead or behind the visual arts. Gertrude Stein may get less respect in the mainstream than Pablo Picasso, but the one is neither ahead nor behind the other. Frank O’Hara is as significant in his poetry as Robert Rauschenberg in his art, to take an example from my review. And poetry has one advantage in the postwar period: its publication and criticism is not dominated by market values. (Of course, for the poète chétif this is hardly an advantage at all.) Certainly, naïve conceptions of representations, narrative continuity, and expression (what I once called “ideational mimesis”) have great credibility in official verse culture, but no more so than in the stylistically strait-jacketed critical writing (and enforced copyediting) of the major art magazines. (As I’ve said before: I don’t blame the writers but the market-driven focus of the editors/publishers.) (more…)

(Author’s note: While not required to parse or argue with the sentiments expressed therein, having a copy of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March at hand may help in the further enjoyment of this post. Since I feel ill-informed to really contribute to the discussion of Charles Bernstein’s Parkett piece initiated by Kevin and Julian, here is a light-hearted attempt at infusing some “poetry” into my criticism.)

I am a culture writer, Chicago bound—Chicago, that reborn city—and I go there as I have taught myself, freestyle, via the Metra train from the north suburbs, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, on the glass door of Renzo Piano’s new Modern Wing at the Art Institute, surrounded by the fauna and Frank Gehry of Millennium Park, not the first admitted (the museum already packed to the gills); sometimes an innocent knock, on the wing’s similarity to Piano’s scheme for the California Academy of Sciences (except that the restaurant sits atop instead of buried at the bottom), sometimes a not so innocent, such as my disdain for the color palettes at play in Cy Twombly’s new work. trying to locate the appeal in Frank Stella, or my weariness at seeing the same graphic design artifacts—Mau, 2wice, Emigre, the McCoys—under display glass. (Jealous bile? Yes, my friends, perhaps a little…) But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitis, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by the acoustical ring of my voice reciting Lawrence Weiner on the second floor wall, and Tricky’s voice, too, in Steve McQueen’s visceral film of the trip-hop pioneer in the recording studio, Girls, Tricky. No gloving my white knuckles (and one will marvel at how quickly they freckle in the Midwestern sun) in anticipation of the inevitable melee over my defense of the underrated Jim Nutt, whose work would have been as comfortable in an early issue of RAW as it is here.

(more…)

Another topic that’s been playing on all our minds is the economy. Artists and arts organizations are hard-pressed to make ends meet in the best of times. What are they doing to survive the current downturn? I’ll be looking for examples of innovative strategies as I travel to the East Coast this week. I hope to dig up some bright ideas that non-profits, for-profits, individual entrepreneurs, collectives and educators are hatching to survive the lean times. Meanwhile, I’d welcome any and all input in the comments.

A few weeks ago, a discussion began in the comments of my post about NIAD.   Though that conversation was specifically about mentally and physically disabled artists, it has prompted me to consider more broadly how the categories of “insider” and “outsider” might apply to the current climate for art and visual culture. Since there are many possible ways to approach this topic, I’m going to address it from different angles in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

Initially, I want to address the question of whether and how the disabled artists served by organizations like NIAD and Creative Growth are marginalized from the contemporary art establishment. Most are not represented by traditional art galleries or collected by art museums — though SFMOMA does have a work in its collection by the late Judith Scott, a Creative Growth artist with severe Down’s Syndrome. In fact, Creative Growth artists including Gerone Spruill and William Scott (no relation) have been fairly well represented within the contemporary art market, with exhibitions at commercial galleries including Rena Bransten in San Francisco and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. Creativity Explored artist John Patrick McKenzie — currently in the juried show “Bay Area Currents” at Pro Arts, which I mentioned in an earlier post — has likewise exhibited, both nationally and internationally, in galleries that do not traditionally show “outsider” artists.

(more…)

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 104857600 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3840 bytes) in /nfs/c01/h07/mnt/36158/domains/assets.blog.sfmoma.org/html/public/plugins/textile-2/class/Textile.php(3245) : runtime-created function on line 1

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 104857600 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /nfs/c01/h07/mnt/36158/domains/blog.sfmoma.org/html/wp/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 302