OPEN SPACE

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

*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…

Collection of Bill Berkson & Constance Lewallen

I Just returned from Jazz harpist Destiny Muhammad’s Birthday Celebration at the Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts in Oakland. Tonight Destiny hosted a group of musicians ranging from an extremely impressive youth jazz ensemble (youngest member 10 years old.) to a string trio featuring Vincent Tolliver and Tarika Lewis to internationally recognized artists such as Dwayne Wiggins of Toni! Tony! Tone!

Destiny Muhammad is a harpist in the tradition of Jazz innovators such as Dorothy Ashby and of course the legendary Alice Coltrane. Both John and Alice Coltrane were renown for music that was palpably buoyed along by their spiritual convictions but unburdened by religious dogma. In other words if you knew nothing of their religious perspectives you were likely to be moved anyway. Destiny’s music has this affect as well and she brings the extra-added skills of a trained songstress to her mix of gospel inflected sacred jazz. So it was no surprise when Bishop Franzo Wayne King of San Francisco’s Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church appeared at the climax of this celebration of Oakland’s community treasure. Bishop Franzo King delivered a short sermon on the musical “trinity” of rhythm, melody and harmony with the sounds of Coltrane’s classic “A Love Supreme” presenting his words like a gift to the audience turned congregation.

After the concert the artist Mark Dukes presented a reproduction of one of the Coltrane church’s painted icons to Destiny. Dukes’ work is unique in that he brings the Byzantine icon painting tradition into the 21st century by immortalizing revered modern figures such as John Coltrane. The icons of John Coltrane at the Saint John Coltrane Church in the Fillmore district are particularly striking and beautiful. Dukes is also a deacon at the church.

Seeing Destiny beaming with a glowing smile while holding the Coltrane icon was so special that I had to share it with the SF MOMA Open Space audience.

As one of the creative artists and culture workers in West Oakland I’m often times on Pine Street in deep west Oakland talking and interacting with the artists, writers and musicians there. Just last week I stopped in to pay a visit to painter Githinji WaMbire at his 1195 Pine street studio. Githinji is a Kenyan artist working in Oakland. I came to “chop it up” with him and get some healing vibe from his sanctuary. It didn’t take me long to realize that this space is also a stage that Githinji uses to perform the ritual theater of his creative juju. Sometimes painting by a single candlelight surrounded by elekes (symbolic beads) for Orishas, the African spirits, he takes the materials of the neighborhood and reconfigures them into the shape of the African continent. Each one as multilayered, complex and idiosyncratic as the continent it represents.

I can recall a panel discussion that I attended in New York where artist/cinematographer/film theorist Arthur Jafa discussed how African artists use the power of objects that have been used and contain what the Yoruba of Nigeria call “ashe” (inherent life force) that is evidenced by the patina of utilitarian objects. Githiji’s work accesses this ashe because he uses the slats, wood and debris that comes from buildings and old houses in the west Oakland neighborhood that is home to his studio. The house that is home to his studio was dubbed “Cornelia Belle’s Black Bottom Gallery” a few years ago. It was named after the old black woman that lived in the house for many years. I was part of the five person collective that showed work there about a year ago and I’ve watched it transform into different types of cultural spaces ranging from café to gallery and now studio.

Here are a just a few images of Githinji Wambire’s studio. Look for an interview with Githinji in my next series of posts.
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Eileen Myles, my favorite writer in the whole world living or dead, read at Modern Times bookstore Wednesday night. It’s now Friday and I haven’t gotten around to writing about it because I keep being paranoid that I have swine flu and taking to my bed at embarrassing hours. I think I am just exhausted from those tours I was on. Eileen has been traveling the entire world reading from her newest book, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. Wednesday night she read from the title essay, which recounts her visit to the Iceland, a country she really loves, and her adventures staying in Roni Horn’s water library, where water from Iceland’s 12 melting glaciers are displayed in tubes I imagine to look like really expensive mineral water bottles. Eileen gets mud and grass all over the tranquil space and that is what is the best about Eileen, her writing is like that, it trails the mud and grass of her boots all over everything, calling everyone’s attention to what is missing from pristine environments metaphorical, literal and literary – bodies, her body, probably your body, certainly my body. Eileen’s writing makes a mess, and nothing is hidden. I mean her process is transparent, she leaps from thought to emotion and all the way back around, taking you for a ride on her tangents, like her mind is the most excellent roller coaster and lucky you, you get to belt yourself in and come along. Eileen considers and mucks up the water library, she rolls her luggage through gravel pondering the way she travels —  like a very young person or an unprotected old person? She hitches a ride with a farmer through the rolling Icelandic countryside, she details the Icelandic tradition of epic poetry, and her reports come to us strained through the whole of her, detailed by a New Englander, a poet, a New Yorker, a dyke, the scramble of her altering the landscape as she delivers it to us.

I trust Eileen Myles’ writing more than anyone’s. She’s just so honest, she’s not afraid to make a goon of herself so she is utterly unafraid to call bullshit on any number of things, to recount moments painful or triumphant. She has a great piece about coming up against menopause and her car starts fritzing out like it too is having hot flashes and they’re in it together. She pitched it to all these magazine and no one wanted it but thank god she wrote it anyway, she just trusted it would find a home and it did, this collection I’m telling you about. Other pieces have been published, like the narrative about flossing her teeth, it’s about class, that one, because teeth are absolutely a class thing. Whether or not you have them, the shape they’re in, etc. You know, how dreams of losing your teeth are supposedly about money, they totally are, right, and this is really Eileen’s terrain. One of many of her terrains. She wrote about sleeping in a cardboard box designed for homeless people, that was in Nest, that great interiors magazine that went under, RIP. She writes a bunch about the filmmaker Sadie Benning, there are a ton of art pieces in the collection, though my favorite are the section titled Talks. I love listening to Eileen talk, period, just ruminate on anything and then when they get shaped into deliberate essays like these, part essay part dharma talk part philosophy part wandering total poetry – amazing. Eileen is so cool, the band Japanther just had her come into the studio and record one of her poems so they can wrap their sound all around it. Basically, I think you should buy this book immediately. You’ll feel smarter by the end of it, smarter and like a better person actually, like your heart got opened up alongside your mind. Yeah.

http://www.eileenmyles.com/

I heard an anecdote somewhere that the three words in the English language that evoke the most visceral response are “free,” “sex,” and “sale.” I’m not exactly sure if there’s a particular order to which is more popular, and it’s funny to think how someone could come up with a good marketing slogan involving all three at once and create the best business model ever (”Free Sex Sale?” Uhhhh. Now that’s a bit of contradicting genius, isn’t it?).

Let’s focus on just one of those words right now: FREE.

I’ve been sick for almost four days, holed up and trying to take advantage of the fact that a lot of TV shows are available online via websites like Hulu, etc. So far I’ve watched the first few episodes of PBS’ NOVA series “Becoming Human,” and marveled at the sort of stiff animation of our ancestors (available streaming for free on the PBS site), as well as several installments of the docu-drama “Secrets of the Dead” (one, on the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 -was not the most enlivening to view while being ill, I might add). Also some episodes of Season 6 of Project Runway on Lifetime.com, my shameful pop culture vice (”Make it work!”). But I was supremely let down to find out PBS had just yanked their Michael Pollan epic “Botany of Desire,” from the free section and had just missed viewing it by a day.

So in the midst of this FREE-for-all I wanted to alert everyone that for a limited time every episode of Art21 (”Art in the Twenty-First Century”) documentary series on contemporary art is available to view for free. The new season has some great episodes with William Kentridge, Cao Fei, Paul McCarthy, and more. Catch it now! It’s your tax dollars at work! OK, well I guess it’s really not free, is it. Arrrrr.

Also, a while back I discovered an amazing Canadian documentary called “RIP: A Remix Manifesto,” which explores issues of copyright and media appropriation in our late-capitalist culture. With interviews with copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig, musician and Girl Talk frontman Greg Gillis, and a most wonderful section on how Brazil has taken on issues of breaking copyright (in this case pharmaceutical) for the sake of medical equity for its people, this is a wonderful documentary. All that and cameo appearances by Gilberto Gil? OMG. The cool thing is that you can purchase it for download on a pay-what-you-will model, a pioneering example along the likes of Radiohead and others who are trying to navigate the new world of digital downloads and cutting out the middleman distributor. I highly recommend checking this out — it’s fresh, funny, political, and will energize your thoughts about creative production in a media-saturated world. Also, despite the fact that free is fun, I will gladly pay to support an artist’s project directly.

Now back to the big question: watching Battlestar Gallactica Classic or Project Runway? Or maybe flipping through the latest US magazine and checking in on that affair Fergie’s husband may have had. Being sick certainly has its charms…

I shot the first video anecdote just before catching a train leaving NY Penn Station at a coffee stand with Marisa Jahn. The night before, I had been in a bar near MOMA with Mexican curator Sofía Olascoaga, and after telling her about the general idea she said “Oh, like an anecdote archive?” and I said, “Yes, exactly.” Minutes later Sofía and I were  feasting on a Korean dinner with Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum.  On the way to dinner, Tom gave an incredible account of a performance project, which would’ve been the first, but sadly I had left my camera back at the hotel. Now I bring the camera with me most places, especially trips and meetings. I’ve missed a few good ones: a story about a book-burning performance gone-wrong told by Larry Sultan comes to mind. Occasionally I have the camera, but don’t feel like pulling it out. Some conversations are best left unmediated.

The rough idea for the Anecdote Archive materialized during a conversation with Sam Gould. As we stuffed ourselves with Dim Sum in a strip mall outside of Portland, we exchanged stories of our recent travels. Word-of-mouth we agreed was an important, if not the primary, means of distributing non-object-oriented projects and practices. As we ordered one last plate of pork dumplings we discussed legendary figures like Alan Lomax and the Folkways Archive and more recent projects like StoryCorps. Over the next three days we developed the possibility of building a video archive; informally recording word-of-mouth as recalled by various friends and artists in the year ahead.

The release of Issue No. 1, the first 12 videos, was accompanied by a short excerpt of a text called Talk Talk written by Magnus Bärtås for Geist Magazine (and recommended by Matthew Rana):

“The fact that works of art to a large extent are tales, points to the folkloristic aspect of the artworld. In other words, the art world is a place for transmissions: someone has seen or heard of someone who has done something. The story is told and retold. As in any other oral culture there are misunderstandings, adjunctions, displacements and falsifications. The dependence on ‘what is on every lip’ creates a situation where works that are difficult to talk about run the risk of being neglected and ‘disappearing’. Sometimes an art practice escapes omission through stories about the artist as a person. Whatever one may think of this oral circulation of art — through formal seminars, think tanks, staged conversations, informal discussions, and not least through chatting at bars and cafés — it should be recognized as a place for art distribution equally important as the exhibition space and printed matter.”

Issue No. 2 concluded last week with an anecdote by Ted Purves, chair of the MFA program at CCA and editor of What We Want is Free. This issue includes the first self-reflexive moment in the archive; a project by Josh Greene is recounted by Brenda Tucker and later Greene gives an anecdote. It also includes the first guest camera-operator; artist Catherine Ross follows Sara Magenheimer’s lovely gesticulations. To accompany the second issue I’ve culled images from the web, each corresponding to one of the anecdotes, as an alternate index…

Dirt princess seeks unicorn for woodland frolic, I’ll put some shine on that horn…..Desperately seeking Sugar! Hi Sugar, I miss you lady. If yr around and want some awkward conversation call me…..FTMS- Are you feeling the rush of the roids? Wish you could afford a hooker? Call me anytime. I’m into being a worn out mattress. I’ll do it for free. 24 hour service…..DON’T BUY IT! Did you know? Triclosan is an anti-germicide you can find in anything from toothpaste to dish soap, it’s actually a derivative of agent orange! Avoid!…..WANTED: Foreign Coins. Bring them to Adobe books and trade them for a book…..SLOT MACHINES + POOLS OF CHIFFON. Looking for a tender buffalo to bicycle around with. You think cute butts when you hear alley……Central Y troll seeking new haunts. Will remove dentures…..PARANORMAL CHAT LINE 24 HRS “THE VORTEX”…..Free tiny saw blades-Will mail anywheres. I found them on the street, they are for jewelry making or ? The company name is Rio Grande, they are spiral saw blades, size 3, made in Germany. I have heard they are pricey……FTM LOOKING FOR DATES. Wrestling, 420 and cats will be integral. Interested in getting this party started?….NEED TO TRANSGRESS REALITY? JOIN THE EPHEMERALISTS! THE WORLD WE ARE FORCED TO INHABIT IS A FRAUD!…Artist seeking big freezer or refrigerator to borrow to make massive soppy arrangements, I’ll return it clean.

Baitline is issued by Sy Wagon If you are in need please contact sywagon@gmail or write to BAITLINE!!! 70 Richland San Francisco CA. 94110

Photos for this post were taken by John Huston

The second installment of a semi-diaristic series of entries relating to travels and exhibitions in London and New York during October 2009. Read part 1 here

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Dear Open Space Diary (heretofore again lovingly referred to as “OSD”),

Gahhhhh! Well, I have utterly failed in my attempt at providing intrepid behind-the-scenes reporting from the front lines of the Frieze Art Fair in London, and for that I am woefully sorry. Yes, it came and went (October 14 – 18), and alas, I was not the journalistic gadfly that I thought I would be. I had visions of even opening up a Twitter account to report on-the-spot celebrity art sightings (look! it’s John Baldessari at the champagne counter! OMG, isn’t that Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss with Matthew Higgs at the Gagosian booth? Who knew art and celebrity were so intertwined?!?). Sigh. So many sad emoticon faces to follow up on this one…

BUT! All is not lost. And granted, this diary entry is technically postface, but I think I can relate based on recollection. OK, let’s do it before my brain gets too fuzzy and the mists of my present begin to impinge on the mists of my past…

Below are some general ruminations, a pictorial rundown, as well as a surprising amount of San Franciscan local celebrity sightings at the Fair. Who’s reprezentin’ the Bay? We are! Let’s go, London!

Selling out: Nothing over 500 Pounds!

In a nutshell, I presented a five-day long performative parasitic project for the Frieze Art Fair in London called “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone.” I enlisted a team of 3-5 artists at a time to hand-make counterfeits of other artworks found within the Fair, which we then sold for incredibly discounted rates in our own gallery booth space. The production area was in full view to the public and showed the counterfeiting artists live, in action. We wound up knocking-off about forty different artworks ranging from Rirkrit Tiravanija to Philip Guston, a kind of crazy feat considering we were fabricating them under the harsh stage lights of the general public.

And let me tell you, the figures of attendance are mind-boggling: around 60,000 people came during the course of the Fair, and while I can’t claim to have interfaced with all of them, at the end of the day it sure felt like I had. Somehow I had neglected to realize the enormity of scale and that I would be doing about seven press interviews a day for the Project (NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, BBC TV, the Guardian UK, and more… OH! and don’t let me forget Lithuanian TV). This on top of acting as general project manager, art handler, art pimp (aka gallerist), and artist stroker (yes, stroking the artists makes them feel good, as does offering cookies and beer when their energy begins to flag).

And yes, we SOLD OUT all of our knock-off artworks. Take THAT, recession!

But then again, how could anyone argue with the fact that nothing in the COPYSTAND gallery booth cost over 500 GBP (about 800 dollars), with the lowest being 10 GBP ($16)? Compared to the insanely priced Ugo Rondinone sculpture (which as they were setting it up we all thought was kind of hideous looking, but then again i guess they’re supposed to hideous, right? hmmm) we were looking mighty good, almost just more than the price of lunch for your average high-end Swiss art collector. And sell to Swiss collectors we did. And Hong Kong ones. And German ones. And British ones. And there were a few Americans in there as well. For god’s sake, who wouldn’t want a nice little Francis Alys painting for only $250???

OSD readers, to sum up my time at the Fair, it was grueling and exhilarating, all wrapped up into one bundle of amazing, productive chaos. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dudes, trust me, I’m not complaining of the opportunity but the scale of it was totally unexpected and it took me a while to get my bearings on the whole thing. I was so stressed out I didn’t sleep for the first five days I was there, lying awake in my room at the Holiday Inn, dead exhausted but obsessing about all the things I had to do the next day and what I could be doing better.

By the fifth day of no sleep I remember floating on an eerie cloud of delirium at the Fair, almost having an out of body experience as I was talking into a television camera. And then the next day my mind and body did a kind of about-face and it was like I was running on pure adrenaline. I think it may have been similar to what people go through when they begin fasting: the beginning is totally all about hunger and pain and then all of a sudden it’s like –poof!– you’re just moving along it and through it and you don’t even feel it anymore. Wowwwwwwww. It was like that.

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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 events 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…

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.

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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…

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.

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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.
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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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*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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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…

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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?

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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..

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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

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.)

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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….

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.
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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…)

(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.

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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.

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I went to the Wattis Institute at CCA (California College of the Arts, in San Francisco) on Tuesday to see the opening of the latest installment of the “Passengers” exhibition, which seems to have been up for years now without ever losing any of its ungraspability and alterity. Someone must have a map of how “Passengers” works (possibly lean, saturnine supercurator Jens Hoffmann, b. 1974) but as for me, I’ve never understood it except that it’s modular, like the furniture in an old IKEA ad. It’s been up so long that now it’s known (jocularly?) as the “Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers.” Anyhow there’s always something new going on, and this time around it’s both new and old at the same time.

Mario Garcia Torres (b. 1975) is a Mexican-born, Los Angeles based artist and writer with a healthy interest in interrogating the myths of conceptual art as they grow and twine in the shadow of specific time-based practices.  (You can read Chris Fitzpatrick’s Art in America interview with MGT here.) (more…)

Following on Kevin’s post, I have to ask: Just what is Charles Bernstein going on about in that Parkett article (”Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?”)?

Published earlier this year, his essay responds to the dismissal of Frank O’Hara’s art criticism by Clement Greenberg, and damns by association a “monological and hyperprofessional rigidity that descends from Clement Greenberg (who dismissed O’Hara’s art writing) to Michael Fried and… extends to the October brand, the epitome of, let’s just say, High Orthodoxical art criticism.” Let’s just say. One wonders at the belatedness of Bernstein’s response – and at the fact that the debate has long moved on without him. Greenberg died in 1994, and Fried has focused on art history – and pointedly not criticism – for nearly four decades. (Recent work on Douglas Gordon, Luc Delahaye and others may mark yet another shift for the writer.)

In the meantime, and perhaps ironically, considering Bernstein’s title, Fried’s also been busy writing and publishing books of poetry:  The Next Bend In The Road (University of Chicago 2004), To The Center of the Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), and Powers (London: The Review, 1973). (A recording of him reading at Johns Hopkins is here.)

I’ll leave it to others to judge Fried’s poetry, and whether it is fifty years ahead or behind his writing on art. I can say more about Bernstein’s picture of art criticism. I barely recognize it. I wonder if Bernstein could point to a single art critic under fifty for whom Greenberg is a positive model – or to any review in the last decade that would serve as an example of the  dominant “High Orthodoxical art criticism” against which he aims to do battle. October themselves held a colloquy to mourn the end of art criticism in the hallowed manner seven years ago (George Baker, “Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism“, October 100, Spring 2002, 200-228). And there have been multiple publications and articles debating this subject recently – James Elkins frequently visits the subject, for example. None of these discussions appear to be on Bernstein’s radar.

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As the first artist-in-residence at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, EG Crichton adopted the role of a matchmaker of sorts.  After spending hours researching in the archives she had the idea to personally match a living person with a dead person’s archive, extending a unique invitation to ten people to create a response to the experience of exploring a stranger’s life through what they have left behind.  Crichton’s matchmaking was largely intuitive and sometimes inspired by shared demographics. The results of this matchmaking is a dynamic and comprehensive exhibition entitled Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive that includes both the contents of the archive itself, as well the creative responses to them. The exhibition features visual artists, musicians, poets, and performers including  Elliot Anderson, Dominika Bednarska, Troy Boyd, Luciano Chessa, Crow Cianciola, Lauren Crux, Bill Domonkos, Tirza Latimer, Maya Manvi, Camille Norton, Gabriella Ripley-Phipps, and Tina Takemoto. From cardboard boxes filled with journals, articles of clothing, ephemera, films, letters, and photographs emerged sculptures, poetry, performances, films, letters, and music.

The opening night featured three performances including a poem written by Camille Norton and inspired by the archive of Nancy Stockwell, an aria composed by Luciano Chessa for his match, Larry DeCaesar and the monologue “Dinosaurs & Haircuts” by Lauren Crux.  Crux’s performance was inspired by her experience sifting through the archive of Janny Mac Harg, a San Francisco songwriter, cabaret singer, and political activist. Crux discussed the way in which the archive reflected to her her own role as a lesbian in the latter half of her life while humorously and poignantly interrogating the archive itself: “I suppose that eventually we are all only our artifacts but why does this bother me so much? It’s not death I am afraid of. Like most of us, I hope to have a good death, to go out quickly or gently during sleep without much pain. So, why does the idea of archives bother me so much? Oh, it’s the damn cardboard boxes.”

As I sat tucked in the last row of fold-out chairs in the back corner of the crowded room, listening to Crux’s concern about preservation and the inevitability of one’s life being reduced to a collection of objects stored in a box marked “Acid Free,” I realized that I was one of the youngest visitors at the GLBT Historical Society. There was something affirming about sharing space with an older queer community; a group of people whose own experience of gender and sexuality was informed by a social and political context entirely different than today, people whose struggles and contributions paved the way for today’s generation of queer artists and activists. In this moment the title of this exhibition was more than just relevant, it was visible.

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Charles Bernstein is a poet, professor and theorist, and he co-edited the influential journal of poetics called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E back in the heroic age of Language Poetry (1978-81). Recently he got the art world up in arms when he published a provocative article in Parkett magazine, the spring issue with Zoe Leonard, Tomma Abts, Mai-Thu Perret. Bernstein’s article asks, “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?” and pretty much says, yes, indeed it is, or more so. This question may sound vaguely familiar to some of you out there, for it is a reversal or takeoff on Brion Gysin’s remark that “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage.”

Beneath the impudence of its trappings, Bernstein’s essay is a review of a recent book by New York-based poet and art writer Lytle Shaw, his 2006 monograph Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa). Shaw’s subject is the peripatetic O’Hara (1926-1966), the poet everyone loves to love, but his bigger project is the reclamation of coterie, for many years—all through modernism in fact—the worst word in the world, the word that doomed whomever it was applied to. Pavel Tchelitchev, for example, one of the most interesting painters of mid-century, but now known only as a “coterie” painter. And most often “coterie” refers in a totally arch way, to homosexuality—that which may not be spoken. (more…)

In recent weeks, two long-standing East Bay non-profits have relocated to new digs. Kala Art Institute in Berkeley has just expanded into a new space in the H.J. Heinz building on San Pablo Avenue, where their printmaking facilities have resided for 30 years. Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland has merged with the Oakland Art Gallery, moving from the gallery near Jack London Square where they have been for 5 years, to the smaller OAG space downtown. Though one organization is growing and the other is slimming down, both their moves illustrate the benefits and challenges that physical space poses for arts non-profits.

Kala now boasts a large street-level gallery and expanded printmaking facilities. The new space allows for more ambitious exhibitions. It can accommodate multiple installations. Added studio space means that more local artists can be served through Kala’s residency, fellowship and facility rental programs. The gallery is easier for members of the public to find, and the pre-existing facility on Heinz Street can now be dedicated exclusively to art production. From the perspective of Kala’s mission, this is a huge development.

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An adventure awaits anyone who makes it up to Mission 17, the innovative Mission Street gallery dedicated to conceptual and installation art (2111 Mission Street, Suite 401–at 17th).  I don’t know, sometimes does it seem to you that exhibitions in San Francisco come in only two varieties? Either they’re dumb and lithe and beautiful, like Michael Phelps, or they’re too darn hard to understand.  “The Man Behind the Curtain” (through July 11) has a theoretical platform, but it’s springy and imaginative. I wound up staying on and on much longer than I had planned, caught in an undercurrent of political intrigue and moral outrage, but also just stunned like a balloon had hit me in some pleasure center.

Curator Laura Mott has used the straightforwardness of the gallery space to her advantage.

Its sharp corners and defined spaces aren’t modernist, exactly, they’re harsh and unyielding, and she uses them to show their analogues to democracy both here and abroad. Democracies for example don’t encourage luxury in their voting booths. They’re spare, even severe, for if they were pleasant people would want to stay in there longer and, what’s worse, more people would want to vote.

“F–k Greensboro, f–k these people. They’re never going to change.”

This is what one of my fellow Project M advisors said to me during one of the Saturday critiques, and while I celebrated in my previous post the overflowing idealism that I and others have experienced here in Hale County, I could sympathize with this angry sentiment, too. The social aspect of the work being created here that provides much of the excitement in students and visitors alike can also be its biggest stumbling block. Reaching out to a community means embracing the idiosyncracies and conflicts, not just the potential. And that community will often push back, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes very intentionally.

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June is National GLBTQ PRIDE month and my next couple of posts will respond to art events sponsored by the National Queer Arts Festival.  Despite being late in the month, I hope these posts generate some discussion about the notion of queer arts and PRIDE month, more generally.

Last week I joined a sold-out, yet intimate gathering of people at The Garage for the film screening, Across Queer Time. Curated by artist, Jason Hanasik, Across Queer Time was part of the 12th Annual National Queer Arts Festival and featured thirteen artists including Rudy Lemcke, Curt McDowell, Marc Adelman, Tammy Rae Carland, Jesse Finely Reed, Barbara Hammer, Kristina Willemse, Tina Takemoto, Jennifer Parker, Cheryl Dunye, Julian Vargas, Margaret Tedesco, and Killer Banshee. Hanasik introduced the films describing them as oscillating around tension—fantasy, the world in which we wish we existed, and nightmare (which is, perhaps, part of our reality, as well).  Indeed, the films cascaded through themes of illness, the fear and reality of AIDS, the intersections of racial identity, religion, and sexual desire, private spaces of homes and intimate relationships, and public interventions and demonstrations.  Throughout the evening and over the past few days the title of the film screening continues to echo in my mind—across queer time. This title is especially thought provoking within the designation of June as National GLBTQ PRIDE month, a sanctified 30 day time period in which people throughout the country celebrate and pay homage to GLBTQ history—many of whom flock to San Francisco to participate in the overwhelming number of events, parties, parades and marches.

What exactly constitutes queer time? How is time, and consequently space, understood through queer identities? How do the films featured in Across Queer Time represent this experience?  In my own thinking, experience, and more formal research (influenced mostly by Judith Halberstam’s recent publication, the title of which I borrow for this blog post) queer time can be defined as a way of being that exists beyond the linear and conventional notions of familial institutions and biological reproduction.  It allows for a reinterpretation of family and a radical reformulation of kinship. Queer time also emerges in the context of struggles that are inherently political and personal, such as the AIDS epidemic and the communities formed through collective action and protest. Yet, the films chosen by Hanasik refuse to be directly defined by any formalized theories of queer time and I think their success lies within this refusal. Hanasik made a point to include an intergenerational perspective in Across Queer Time with films ranging from 1974 to 2009. More than this obvious relationship to time, the films featured non-linear narratives and film sequences, and made visible queer spaces, the slippages in identities, relationships, while questioning the time and space in which these experiences exist. The very designation of the term “queer” attempts to dislodge itself from a gay/straight dichotomy to exist within a liminal space of non-definition.

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Richmond’s National Institute of Art and Disabilities has a show on this month that bears consideration in the context of this week’s discussion about the Rural Studio. NIAD was founded at about the same time (and by many of the same people) as its better-known cousins, Creative Growth in Oakland and Creativity Explored in San Francisco. Situated in downtown Richmond, the East Bay’s forgotten city, NIAD serves a population of mentally and physically disabled artists with particularly acute material and therapeutic needs. Very much in the Rural Studio spirit, two recent graduates from CCA’s MA Design program have applied their skills to the benefit of this disadvantaged community in their own backyard. Several key aspects of the Rural Studio project also apply here: approaching design as a philanthropic act, relying on inexpensive and readily available materials, and encouraging students to realize pragmatic projects within an academic context.

Collage Stamp – Stamp Pads Prototype from matthew baranauskas on Vimeo.

CCA Design for Disability is the brainchild of Molly Ackerman-Brimberg and Matthew Baranauskas. The two spent over a year working with Gallery Director Brian Stechschulte,  NIAD’s teacher/therapists, and their “clients,” adult artists with severely limiting conditions including paraplegism and autism. While taking me through the exhibition, Matt Baranauskas explained that as a designer, he initially approached the project with the idea of identifying and solving the problems faced by these disabled artists. It was only after spending time working with the group and making multiple crude prototypes to aid in their art-making, that he began to understand his work differently. Why, he thought, should he just make tools that compensate for disabilities? Wouldn’t that simply make the fact of those disadvantages more oppressive, highlighting the clients’ differences as burdens to be overcome? Instead, Matt and Molly set out to create new tools for art-making, inspired by the needs of NIAD’s clients, but which could have uses for able-bodied and disabled artists alike.

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Displaced and isolated by Levine, however, they become detailed anthropological studies of the scenes they depict – the attenuation of the models’ poses, the baroque architecture of the room, the half-distracted audience, the picture of class and luxury the outfits convey – even as blur, size, rasterization and faint scuffs defy our examination and mark these as mass-media reproductions, images of images. Works in Levine’s signature style – a “rigorously conceptual and coolly aesthetic practice,” as Bishop puts it, indebted to Marcel Duchamp and pictorial nominalism – are across the room. In the context of such rigorous and cool production, the Fashion Collages might seem anomalous: paths-not-taken, “early works.”

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

As an art historian I often think out my ideas first in pictures, experimentally moving reproductions into sequences and constellations, relationships of similarity or opposition. (A decade ago this happened on a slide-sorter or slide-table; now it happens, in numbing fashion, in presentation software.) 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.

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I am very eager to respond to Eric Heiman’s observations and experience so far at Project M and The Rural Studio which he discussed in his June 20th post “Dispatch from Alabama #1: Cynics Need Not Apply.” The issues of housing, the ownership of space, and the role that artists play within sustainable and community based projects are all very dear to my heart.

There is an endless amount of housing issues in the Bay Area from foreclosures, to redevelopment, to tenants rights violations—issues I have become more familiar with recently through my work with the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee. However after reading Eric’s post my thoughts immediately turned to the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, specifically Brad Pitt’s project called the Make It Right Foundation (MIR). This comes as no surprise as I spent the past two years researching and writing about housing politics and the concept of home in New Orleans through my graduate thesis project entitled, “Homesick: The Search for Belonging in New Orleans’ Landscape of Loss.”  This project was inspired by my experience as a volunteer with the organization Common Ground Relief and focused on the presence of the non-local volunteers in post-Katrina New Orleans, the majority of whom are young, white activists from middle-class backgrounds and whose long-term presence in the city, while hopeful, contributes to New Orleans’ changing racial demographic.

While the issue of non-local people, particularly students, working within economically disadvantaged areas is relevant both to New Orleans and Greensboro, Alabama, what I’d like to consider here is the relationship of MIR to Eric’s discussion of beauty and utility within architecture and design.  Pitt developed MIR after observing the damage of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood and meeting with local residents to hear their concerns and assess their housing needs.  MIR aims to build hurricane-safe homes with “an emphasis on a high quality of design, while preserving the spirit of the community’s culture.”  MIR has completed eight homes, however it is unclear to me if the residents who now live in these homes owned the property they were built on before the storm, nor is the affordability of the homes apparent.  What MIR does make clear is that their homes are green and designed to withstand storms through elevation, roof access, hurricane proof windows, and durable materials. (more…)

Few years back, curator Margaret Tedesco named a show she organized at Queens Nails Annex “OverUnderSidewaysDown,” after the old Yardbirds hit, and this time around at her own gallery she dips back into those spooky psychedelic 60s days with “Andmoreagain,” the current show at [2nd floor projects], the unique space she has carved out of her own apartment to show new work. Do you know Arthur Lee, Bryan Maclean, the band called Love that, like Tedesco, stepped out of the bubbling pop stew of LA? “Andmoreagain” is the third track on their third album, Forever Changes, and it’s the ultimate song about the succubus or sociopath, “Andmoreagain,” a supernatural creature who manges to get you to fall in love with you by mimicking your human responses. “You can see you in her eyes/ Then you feel your heart beating/ [Pause]/ Thrum-pum-pum-pum.”

Tedesco’s tiny apartment gets cleared out every time she thinks of a show, the furniture from one sunny room and most of a hallway swept away into adjacent spots, and a show installed—generally on the small side, sometimes only two or three pieces per artist. She has had extraordinary critical success with some of the shows, though the buying public has been, as ever, a little behind the curve perhaps. I’ve seen some great presentations—the Tariq Alvi show, Luke Butler’s Star Trek-themed debut, the exhibition of George and Mike Kuchar’s paintings, the Curt McDowell retrospective, and nobody could have done them but Tedesco. A writer and artist herself, she commissions poets, artists and novelists to create catalogue essays for each show, and when she gets around to compiling these in an anthology it will be the best book of its kind. (more…)

Listening to a drawl-infected conversation about the manufacture of assault rifles on the plane from Denver to Birmingham yesterday, I was reminded that San Francisco, filled to the brim with cultivating distractions and multi-cultural mélange, is the exception not the rule in our country. The arts flourish in our urban centers and those of us drawn to the creative way of life flock to these cities to join this club that energizes and sustains us. So how do a bunch of artists, designers and filmmakers apply their talents in a place like Greensboro, Alabama?

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Much like Helvetica, his endearing 2007 ode to the ubiquitous typeface of the same name, Gary Hustwit’s new documentary, Objectified, is a well-made, highly entertaining foray into the world of design. This time Hurstwit has his sights on the most precious consumer products and their creators. All the heavy hitters are featured, including Jonathan Ive of Apple, IDEO, Smart Design, Dieter Rams, Hella Jongerius, and Karim Rashid, and their voices are nicely supplemented by the scholarly observations of Andrew Blauvelt, Paola Antonelli, and Alice Rawsthorn. But where Helvetica was sharply focused on a single piece of the designer’s large palette unfamiliar to most non-practitioners, Objectified seeks to explain the manufactured allure of these everyday objects that we all covet, purchase, and use. The film’s wider scope also affirms that reflective insight on one’s work and how it truly functions in the world is not the designer’s strong suit.

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I wanted quickly to follow up on a few past posts.

Artist Torreya Commings responded to ‘On Graduate Exhibitions.’ Having finished her MFA at CCA in May, she said of her experience of the grad exhibition, “It’s a very strange situation… not exactly a “show,” not exactly a “test,” still colored by the liminal status of “student” but with rumors of “making it” or being “picked up” flying around. I’m glad it’s over with, mostly.” In ‘A day is as long as a year,’ I wrote a bit about Jia Zhangke’s great film ‘The World.’ The New Yorker posted on their website clips from a few of the director’s films, including Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and Still Life, to accompany a profile in early May by Evan Osnos. It’s a tidy summary of what’s good about Jia’s work, if you need one.

Modern Art Notes posted a two part interview with Tim Clark, on the occasion of his Mellon lectures, which I wrote about here. In the second installment, a compelling passage on Guernica: “[N]ever has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world.”

KPFA has, in their archives, a recorded interview with Clark and Joseph Matthews from 2005, soon after their collective Retort published on Verso their book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (an early version here). It’s no substitute for the book, of course, but the interview is a bracing context for ‘Picasso and Truth.’

A favorite moment comes early on, as C.S. Sung begins the interview. “Afflicted Powers contains the following statement: ‘Spectacularly, the American state suffered a defeat on September 11.’ What does that mean?” Tim replies, “Right. OK, you’re going to get quite an answer from me…” The text from Retort’s 2006 broadsheet, “All Quiet on the Eastern Front” is here. It’s appalling to revisit this one in view of how little the situation has changed in the three years since. The outrageous Iraq war grinds on with no end in sight.

Last week Joseph Del Pesco and I wrote about Artforum and e-flux’s “Call for Art Historical Knowledge,” and mentioned in conclusion that we “sent on May 25 an email asking Art & Education for some clarifications on these matters, but haven’t yet received a reply.” We still haven’t, but Joseph did receive a pleasant note from an assistant editor at Artforum, telling us answers were coming.

Meanwhile, in Iran, protesters shout “Police, police, thank you,” as they’re beaten and slaughtered at Tehran University and Enqelab Square. It’s hard to think about anything else – to think about art. A thousand thoughts crowd in. State power and state violence; the power of the crowd; strength in numbers or strength in documents;  the weakness in images, and the weakness of empathy at a sickening distance; the impotence of solidarity-en-Facebook and the resonance with Guernica; piteous appeals for help in the comments boxes of American websites. “Mr Obama please HELP US/we are in big warning/our students are killing by Ahmadi suporters/helppppppp ussss.”

Maybe bits soon on Sherrie Levine, Otl Aicher, and Kai Althoff.

I attended the Headlands Center for the Arts‘ annual benefit auction on Wednesday night, at the Herbst International Exhibition Hall in the Presidio. The event featured works by 86 artists, ranging from big names like Shepard Fairey and Clare Rojas, to emerging local talents like Leah Rosenberg and Michael Hall. The auction is Headlands’ big fundraiser for the year, so naturally it is a big focus of the organization’s attention and efforts. Benefit auction season is officially upon us, with Southern Exposure’s just last week and Intersection for the Arts‘ happening tomorrow. All this has me wondering what the impact of so many auctions might be on these small and mid-sized arts organizations.

The benefit auction has taken on so much importance because the funding model for most smaller arts non-profits in the Bay Area is heavily dependent on philanthropic foundation gifts, which are scarce since endowments have taken a hit of 40% or more since the recession began. Government funding through the NEA amounts to less than 10% of most institutions’ budgets, while the California Arts Council, never recovered from the last statewide budget crisis, is bound to be cut again during the current stalemate. Organizations are desperate to make up their growing shortfalls with individual and corporate gifts, at a time when individuals are worried about either administering or receiving layoffs, and corporations face increased financial scrutiny. All these circumstances contribute to an overwhelming emphasis on auctions and other ticketed fundraising events that hope to compensate for the lack of broad-ranging community support for the arts in most American cities. (more…)

Last month I got to play an iconic figure of cinema when the San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa recruited me, and dozens of others, for a forthcoming project. He was planning, he said, to recreate the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1921 silent film Battleship Potemkin. I would play the old lady who gets her glasses broken.

Would I do it? Hell yeah! I have worked with Kota many times and always had a ball. He is one of the most imaginative and perceptive artists around. I trust his instincts more than I do my own, so even if I don’t understand why he wants what he wants, I generally fall in. And I embarrass him by telling him is he is my culture hero—a variation on the “science hero” of the Alan Moore comic books—or as they say in his native Germany, he is my “held.” When he confided years back that he planned on making a full length animation of the infamous “sex tape” of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, in which I would play the unctuous preacher who married them, I just said, where do I show up? A version of this animation, “Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One,” was part of the exhibition he presented at the SECA Award show at SFMOMA back in 2006.

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Despite recently receiving my masters in Visual and Critical Studies I have always had a love/hate relationship with critical theory.  Within my graduate program there is a running joke that critical theory is “like a stain you can’t get out.” My biggest frustration is the disconnect I feel between what is discussed and generated within the sterile walls of the academy and the communities that exist beyond those walls who are often the subjects of the theories produced and studied.  Over the past two years, as I was buried in theory and thesis writing, I found myself often questioning the relevance of philosophical texts for those who exist within activist circles, public services, and that which is often described as “on the ground.”

My frustration with the inaccessibility of critical theory hit home after reading a portion of the text, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by philosopher, Judith Butler in a course entitled Critical Race Art History. Butler is infamous for her incredibly dense and often incomprehensible language that consists of the kind of sentences that most people have to read over and over to gain even the slightest understanding.  In Bodies that Matter Butler discusses the materiality of the body and the repetitive performativity of gender, pushing for the destabilization of normative gender binaries—or at least, this is what I’ve gathered from my second and third reading. This theory speaks directly to our intimate understandings of bodies, desire, and expressions of gender.  It is immensely relevant for many people and therefore can be considered a potentially liberating text and yet is written in a language that is inaccessible to so many people beyond and even within the academic institution. This is the contradiction of critical theory that drives me a little bit mad. When expressing this discontent in class, my professor, art historian Jacqueline Francis, gently intervened asking where it is that one has the experiences that inspired Butler’s text: the gay bar or the academy? (more…)

This post was co-written with curator Joseph Del Pesco.

On May 22, Artforum and e-flux announced to their Art & Education mailing list the launch of the Art & Education Papers archive,  “a free online platform for the publication and exchange of texts on modern and contemporary art.” They continue, “At a time when the distribution of many forms of knowledge remains confined to small conferences, private seminars, or specialized academic journals, we believe that the broad distribution and exchange of ideas is key to increasing dialogue in all aspects of art production, criticism, and history.” The notice concludes with a call for papers: “either new or already existing (published or unpublished, recent or older) scholarly articles from around the world…Texts may be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc… All submissions will be considered for publication on the website.”

To say this is an interesting development would be an understatement. Yet the import of this move is still unclear – and indeed the call has been sitting in our inboxes, provoking no definitive action and yet impossible to file away. On the positive side, this archive promises to be one antidote for the cloistered nature of academic publishing, and a healthy rearrangement of existing hierarchies. Existing databases of this kind, such as JSTOR, have clunky interfaces and search engines, and are available only to those at participating institutions. They could use some competition. This archive also proposes to be far more open, and to make available research that is now out of print or difficult to access. Yet it is hard to imagine sending off our work at the behest of a mass email. And there are troublesome questions (familiar enough from the debate on file sharing of music and movies) about what effect such an archive might have on existing publication strategies. (more…)

Last week I went to ATA (Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street at 21st) to see a program of films and poetry headlined by two old friends Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon. Gary is a poet and prose writer credited with the invention of flarf, a much talked about movement to reduce the lyric, epiphanic element of poetry and replace it with materials found by chance on the internet—google searches and the like. Nada Gordon is also a member of the Flarf Collective and has written many books of poetry and other sorts of writing. She is the youngest person to appear in the anthology of US poets theater work that David Brazil and I have been editing for Kenning Editions. The program last week was heavy on “neo-benshi,” right now the dominant nexus where poetry meets film—rather like Godzilla “meeting” Mothra, or Frankenstein “meeting” Abbott and Costello, there’s an element of the gladiatorial about it.

I first heard about the role of the benshi in Japanese and Korean silent cinema at a talk by Walter K. Lew during Small Press Traffic’s translation conference, must have been 2001. The benshi, Lew explained, was the man (sometimes a woman, but usually a man) who stood up in the movie theaters and translated what was happening on the screen for the benefit of local audiences. He would do all the voices in different accents and, as well, give his own color commentary. The role of “benshi” expanded and flowered as Asian audiences were exposed to puzzling, foreign Hollywood films, and these well loved figures were hired to explain even the films of their own countries. Benshis became specialized labor and sometimes well-paid, even stars in their own right. (more…)

This evening, visual and live arts take over the streets of downtown San Jose. For the second year, ZERO1 is presenting the SubZERO street festival in partnership with venues along the South First Arts District corridor. SubZERO will include a combination of media and machine arts, street fair booths, games and live performances on two stages. This lively evening is a precursor to the upcoming third 01SJ Biennial, in September 2010.

Each of the participating venues has programmed its own activities for the evening. They include a Day of the Dead art car and a 24-hour open mic at MACLA, guerrilla-style yarn attacks and interactive animation at Anno Domini, a Rejection Dunk Tank and a one-woman Hot Dog-Eating Contest at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, and sculpture and interpretive dance on the subject of trash in our waters at the San Jose Quilt and Textile Museum. Works/San Jose and ZERO1 are also presenting a variety of interactive art projects taking place in real and virtual public space. There will be games such as Junk Knights, where contestants create and battle with medieval-style weapons made from hardware store materials, a digital fortune-teller, Flintstones art cars and Maker Faire tinkerers and craftspeople. Live shows not to be missed include the eccentric mash-up political jams of The Evolution Control Committee, and the haunting analog drone of Author and Punisher.

Offering contemporary art as family entertainment, SubZERO is a great way to kick off the summer. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to get familiar with San Jose’s thriving art scene, which is anchored in the South First neighborhood. Make the trip. You won’t be disappointed.

Last month I attended a lecture sponsored by the Townsend Center for Humanities at UC Berkeley by local author, Rebecca Solnit entitled “If Gardens are the Answer, What is the Question?” Solnit, whose work ranges in topics from San Francisco geographies, to the history of walking, to landscape, gender, and art, addressed the recent popularity of gardens as educational tools and community resources in schools, rehabilitation centers, churches, and of course, the lawn of the Obama’s White House. Solnit considered the garden as an answer to the corporate farming industry, to American’s alienation from food, and to the development of safe, urban neighborhoods.

Robyn Waxman, a Graduate Design student from the Calfornia College of the Arts (CCA) confronted similar questions as she embarked on her thesis project this past fall.  Waxman questioned her role as a designer and activist in today’s socio-political climate. The answer to these questions came in the form of a 66-foot long vegetable and herb garden built on the Westside of Hooper Street—a side street in the industrial area between San Francisco’s South of Market and Potrero Hill neighborhoods. Hooper Street bisects CCA’s campus and is used primarily for parking for students and faculty.  The garden is growing strawberries, raspberries, chard, spinach, thyme, lavender, and marigolds while simultaneously using bioremediation techniques to remove toxins from the soil.  The garden was created by FARM, an organization initiated by Waxman and comprised of students from CCA and members of the local community, including several day laborers who use Hooper Street as a pick-up site. FARM stands for “The Future Action Reclamation Mob” and is organized horizontally, anyone can work on or eat from the garden.  More than a community garden, I think of FARM as a direct-action collective.  Tucked between two buildings owned by a private college, Hooper Street is unused public property and therefore belongs to the residents of San Francisco.  Rather than waiting for the city’s approval, the FARMers took it upon themselves to transform this neglected side street they pass everyday into a sustainable project site that generates produce for the local community.

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When I was a schoolboy I competed in the National Spelling Bee, and got to represent New York State in the finals in Washington DC. Wow, that was a thrill, but the trauma of losing—well, I came in 9th—has stayed with me for many years and I would never go to see Spellbound or any of the movies or books that have focused on the sport. I was still in shock I think! And this from an event that occurred when LBJ was president and the Vietnam war was still on. Whenever I would stumble across the word I spelled wrong, say in a book or whatever, I would break out in a cold sweat and my face would grow red like a wound. (The word was “eponym.” There! I’ve said it!)

Thus when three years ago, Laura Moriarty of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley called me and asked me to participate in a charity spelling bee, I hung up on her. When she called back, I had to query myself, is this fate, or am I getting a second chance at therapy, by reliving the awful sequence of shame, and now with my adult skills, I might be able to realize that losing a spelling bee isn’t that awful.

(I think I felt I was letting down my mom and dad—and my school—et cetera. Of course everyone was great about it, but that just made it worse.)

So in 2007 I participated in the “Bee In” that SPD holds every year down at Crown Point Press on Hawthorne Lane. A whole line of us all went down on one word—apodyopsis—the condition in which one is sexually stimulated by medical procedure. Well, of course I had often been subject to this feeling—just didn’t know the Greeks had a word for it! I felt better because so many of us screwed it up, including my idol George Lakoff. (more…)

As a resident of the East Bay for the past seven years, I’ve enjoyed watching a small and vibrant contemporary art scene emerge independently and gain some polish. Johansson Projects in Oakland remains among my very favorite spaces. Dynamic founder Kimberly Johansson has built a gallery on the corner of 23rd and Telegraph that would be as much at home in San Francisco or New York, but which keeps a certain East Bay DIY spirit deep inside. Johansson’s sensibilities range from delicate works on paper to kinetic, mechanical and electronic art, all of which is on display this month.

Through June 20, The Echo Fields features the work of Berkeley’s Val Britton and Oakland’s Michael Meyers in the main gallery. Brooklyn-based artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are in the Project Space. Britton works by cutting, painting and pasting onto large sheets of paper. Her images are abstractions of maps, that could also be read as skyscapes. She has explained the origins of her imagery as a personal investigation into the life of her father, a long-haul trucker who spent much of Britton’s childhood on the road. Though emotive, the works are fundamentally structural, and so fit well with Meyers’ sculptures.

Michael Meyers takes Michael Fried’s proscription against theatricality in art as a directive, in the genuine Minimalist sense. Meyers’ sculptures made of blond wood, vellum, string and plaster are very much specific objects. Finely crafted and simply formed, they assert themselves within the physical space of the viewer. They may gently move, buoyed by air currents. That presence is meant to inspire phenomenological awareness in the viewer. The resolution of the work happens within the frame of reference of an audience rather than in pure form, rooting it in a real world context. Though perhaps not as controversial an approach as it was 40 years ago, the strategy remains powerful. Meyers has also designed sets for dance and opera performance, which seems logical given the lyric movement of his constructions. (more…)

San Franciscans have but a few days to scurry down to Ratio 3 on Stevenson Street, there to check out “Liberation Upon Contact,” new work by gallery artists including Jose Alvarez, Sam Gordon, Jordan Kantor, Ruth Laskey, Barry McGee, Mitzi Pederson, Ara Peterson, and Jonathan Runcio. (Show closes May 30.) For those of you who have never been there, Ratio 3 and its director, debonair, saturnine Chris Perez, ”bring vastness to the mind.” That’s their slogan, and I always wince when I hear it first, then I think a little, forced to acquiesce.

A year ago I got a package in the mail with a few DVDs in it, each one an excerpt from Sam Gordon’s project “The Lost Kinetic World,” a 24 hour video montage of his wanderings through the art world. I scanned the accompanying press materials and was surprised to see myself listed among the hundreds of art figures appearing in the film. Dodie Bellamy too. She was on disk 4 and I was on disk 9 or something like that. Naturally we were curious to see what we were doing! The instinct was to fast forward through all the other chazzerai and find ourselves, and yet the rhythm and the fantastic juxtapositions of the material slowed us right down, and we wound up watching for hours. In New York last week I went to visit Sam Gordon in his studio and find out more about the man who had made us immortal with his roving eye. (more…)

Over the last couple months, art historian T.J. Clark has presented a series of lectures at the National Gallery of Art, as part of the prestigious A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Titled collectively “Picasso and Truth,” the six lectures each take on Picasso’s career in the 1920s and 30s: a curious period between the so-called retour à l’ordre of the early 20s and his painting of Guernica in 1937. The National Gallery has been posting their recordings of the lectures on their website (you can find them all here for the moment), and of course they are spellbinding thing to follow, even without the weird, and weirdly affecting, paintings around which his argument circles.

Clark aims to “extract the work [Picasso] did from the horrible penumbra of gossip and hero worship that surrounds it,” and present a clear-eyed account of the paintings and their development. If the lectures are diminished by losing their visual aspect, they retain Clark’s powerful picture of history, and his attentive observation of pictures. Nietzsche is one great adversary in the lectures; what also becomes clear is the importance to Picasso, and to Clark, of ideas about space.

In Clark’s argument I hear echoes of, and arguments with, French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, Picasso’s machinelike paintings around 1910 were the first, shattering look at what space would be in the 20th century. “They set about this work of breaking and dislocating with a will,” Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space. “Once the rift between subject and object had been opened, there were no limits.” The later works register something different, Clark argues: Picasso’s mourning for and resistance to the end of a kind of 19th century conception of space, a way of being in the world, possessing it, belonging to it and being inside it.

The Blue Room, 1901, (it’s in the Phillips Collection in Washington) is Clark’s totem for this sort of relationship to space, its particular pleasures and vulnerabilities. “It will be a question whether the space of belonging survives at all,” Clark warns, early on in the first lecture. “The bed, the body, the window, the cheap carpet, the corner of a wall: they are what space is for Picasso. They are what he cares for and wants to show resisting the worst the new age can do.”

These lectures are essential listening for anyone who cares about modernism, theories of space, or the history of art. Thanks, by the way, to Erica Levin for pointing me to the recordings, and the Lefebvre connection.

Imin Yeh is a printmaker and recent graduate of the MFA Department at the California College of the Arts.  Her practice deflates cultural stereotypes and addresses issues of labor and consumerism through a critical and humorous lens.  Yeh’s piece “Everybody Loves a Skinny, White Boyfriend” was included in the exhibition For Lovers and Fighters that I curated at The Spare Room Project in February 2009. We sat down at a coffee-shop together last Friday and talked about her recent projects, her relationship to local art institutions, and the politics and negotiation inherent in making work that is deeply rooted in one’s own experience and identity. Yeh was a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson award.  Her piece “Good Imports” is featured in the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennial 2009 and in a satellite installation in nearby storefront at 710 Kearny Street until August 23rd.  Her work will also be included in Intersection for the Arts Benefit Auction on June 13th.

Adrienne Skye Roberts: I thought we could start by talking about your two recent projects in the MFA exhibition at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the Present Tense Biennale at the Chinese Cultural Center.

Imin Yeh: I graduated with two succinct but related bodies of work: one is lovingly titled “Good Imports” and is a part of the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennale and the other project is “The Legend of the Power Animals” and was my MFA exhibition at CCA. Both projects have to do with the things we buy being the focal point of what we know about other cultures. Every object we have has a dual story of who made it and who ultimately consumes it.

ASR: Can you describe the installation “Good Imports”?

IY: There are a few pieces in the gallery at the Chinese Cultural Center and I was also given a storefront in Chinatown to do whatever I wanted—which is a perfect place for “Good Imports.” The installation consists of objects—laptops, televisions, children’s toys—that were all made in China and either found or donated to me.  They are installed in an excessive pile and each object is individually covered in hand-printed fabric. The pattern of the fabric is taken from the boxes that souvenirs from China are shipped in. I work at the museum store at the Asian Art Museum and our back storeroom is filled with these boxes. I always loved these boxes growing up and when I would go back and forth to Taiwan or China as a child I would keep these boxes much longer than whatever came inside them. At the museum gift shop, whenever someone buys a $20 tea pot or whatever and I bring out the box to put it in and they are always so excited because they feel like they are buying an authentic object.  The pattern of the boxes becomes a superficial identification of something Asian or something that is Chinese.

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I’ve never met the painter Harry Jacobus but his position in San Francisco art history is unassailable, and his romantic vision has this sort of, oh I don’t know, sublime excess that speaks to me even today.  Maybe you have to be in the right mood to get him, and perhaps that’s why his reputation is highest among poets, musicians, and other artists.   That’s just a guess on my part.  The work is decorative, pleasing, and stops just this side of florid, but all these things are true of Cezanne, right, and yet Harry Jacobus is a name unknown except for, hmmm, I am tempted to use the term cognoscenti even though that seems dead wrong!  But I do love him.

Some find his work unbearably twee, even trite.  If you find the early, romantic pictures of Jess too sincere, you are definitely not man enough to stare down the limpid realities of Jacobus at his most characteristic. (With Jess and the poet Robert Duncan, Harry Jacobus founded the legendary King Ubu Gallery on Fillmore Street back in 1953.) Thus it was with great interest that I opened my mailbox to find an invitation to a show of Jacobus’s crayon drawings—some paintings—that was going to be held at a private home in Berkeley right behind the Claremont Hotel.

I went with Eric Delehoy, a friend of my wife’s who was visiting from Portland, a man whom I hoped would appreciate the rarity of the occasion. Eric, a writer himself and one of the editors of Gertrude magazine, just gulped and got into the car, and from there we got lost three different times.  So when we tiptoed in, the event had begun and our hostess was playing some French music on the piano and it was like a Raul Ruiz film come to life. Either she had taken all her other art work down, and just hung every wall with Jacobus work of all periods, or she actually has this on her walls every day. (more…)

The end of the spring term at art schools is marked by multiple convocations – symposia, commencements, barbecues, brunches, kaffeeklatsches – none more charged and peculiar than the graduate exhibition. A vast amount of effort, skilled thought, time and energy is expended on these events, by students, faculty and event organizers. And yet the exhibitions are as a rule ambiguous: grand, chaotic marketplaces where uneven intentions, practices and audiences converge upon one another.

My photographs, I should say, are from a specific event, San Francisco Art Institute’s 2009 Vernissage, but my remarks below aim to put forward some ideas about the general form, and not the one occasion. (more…)

I must have met Charles Atlas fifteen years ago or so now, but odd to say that this is the first time I’ve ever seen him outside his apartment. I met him through the writer Joe Westmoreland, a novelist and the author of one of my favorite books, Tramps Like Us, and whenever I would visit Joe at their apartment just south of Chelsea, Charlie would be there, totally preoccupied with video work that looked so ambitious I could barely make out what I was seeing. One time he showed us the music video he had just finished for Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) and Boy George—a duet version of Antony’s song, “You are my Sister.” I don’t know if this video ever made it to MTV, for it seemed like each of the two divas looked totally preoccupied with, “Do I look as fat as him?”

Anyhow, when SF MOMA said they were having a show of New Humans and that Charlie Atlas was going to come in person I knew this was one event I couldn’t miss. What is the psychic equivalent of killing two birds with one stone? I called Joe and we met for dinner at the Samovar Tea House at Yerba Buena Center. Dodie who couldn’t go, warned me that the menu was so delicious that there would be nothing I’d like on it. This was true but we had a great time catching up, as Joe had not been back to SF since before the Museum was built—a good ten or twelve years ago. Other friends joined us, Hugh and Sandra, and I practiced my interview technique. “I’m going to ask Charlie some hard-hitting journalistic questions, “ bragged I. “Well, actually one. What did you want to be when you were a little boy?” Joe didn’t know what Charlie wanted to be when he was a little boy, but, he added, “I wanted to train seeing eye dogs.” “That’s weird,” I said. “I used to collect the labels off dog food cans and mail them into the seeing eye people, because if you sent in ten, they would send a dollar to the dog school.” Sandra said she wanted to be a song and dance girl, but that ambition was quashed. Hugh had many dreams. He wanted to be a girl; he wanted to be a junkie; he wanted to be a suicide; he wanted to come back as someone else.

When we got to the Museum, my eyes popped! The New Humans (Mika Tajima and Howie Chen) had transformed the Schwab Room into a giant installation. Tajima’s shed-like abstract sculptures stood like unfinished business, while a gleaming track wove around the floor like a question mark seen from above. (more…)

We have an innate desire to preserve things: spaces, objects, memories. Preservation implies a sanctification, a remove from touch, and guard against eventual decay. Public spaces are redeveloped, graffiti is removed, and a new coat of paint added. Art objects, once delicately handmade, are often removed from touch by display cases and the demarcated spaces of museums.

Local artist Julia Goodman is interested in interrupting this process through a focus on ephemerality, ritual, and meditations on time. Goodman’s art practice consists of collecting junk mail once a week from her neighbors in Bernal Heights and transforming the junk mail into cast handmade paper sculptures. Her practice is multi-dimensional: community oriented as she travels door to door collecting paper and studio based as she engages in the laborious process of carving wood, making and casting paper. Goodman’s piece “Eleven Month Mourning Project: August 19, 2007 – July 14, 2008″ is representative of her dynamic process and adds a public dimension to her practice. Goodman created “Eleven Month Mourning Project” as a way of providing herself time to mourn the loss of her father. The foundation of the project is the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish ritual of reciting a prayer in the presence of others for eleven months after the death of a parent.

For each month Goodman created a series of handmade cast paper sculptures and with this work engaged in public art actions, wheat-pasting one piece each day in a public space. The forms of her sculptures–birds in flight, phases of the moon, arrows depicting wind patterns, and sailboats–are a coded language of impermanence and often intangible movement. In Goodman’s words they represent a “different way of navigating through space.” In a more direct symbol, Goodman created a series of silhouettes of John F. Kennedy, Jr. saluting during his father’s funeral; an image that became a national icon of mourning and speaks to the experience of a bereaved child.

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Over the weekend I finally got over to Gallery 16 to see the last week of Bruno Fazzolari’s exhibition Cold Turkey, a selection of drawings broken up by six recent paintings. This is the last week you can see it, so get down there if you can. As you probably know, the Gallery is only a few blocks from SF MOMA, at Bryant and Third, and if you haven’t been there it is one of the pleasantest places I know with always plenty to see. This time around Fazzolari‘s show is a winner indeed.

The drawings come from a series called “Six Realms” on which the artist has been working for many years; apparently there are dozens of them. I took the traditional gallery walk, with a map in my hand of what I was seeing, and proceeded from left to right, an arrangement that usually adds no meaning, only the comfort of habit.  This time around however, I convinced myself I was catching something happening in those drawings, that I was seeing them progress from simple gestures towards more complex renditions of the social world. From the self — even the self of the young child — to perhaps the loss of that self within the increasingly organized and globalized state. I looked again — made the circle one more time — and by George, I was so pleased with myself!

Nowhere did I manage to agree with even a single word of Kenneth Baker’s review — but wait. I can imagine a few of my readers don’t know who Baker is, but he is the highly respected art writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.  He’s been at his post so long that when I first came to San Francisco and I was gullible, someone told me, and I believed it for a time, that he was the man they named the phrase “a baker’s dozen” after. (Boy did I feel like a fool when I told someone that, and they proved that the phrase was established in, I don’t know, the era of Chaucer!)  Cold Turkey seems to have flickered simultaneous off and on switches in Ken Baker. Like Gerald Manley Hopkins or someone, Baker is nearly impossible to summarize, but you can read for yourself the review that made me so curious. The particular picture that gives KB so much trouble, “Griefly Thurible” (2009) is, for my money, utterly convincing and never brought late Guston to my mind, but to get there I would really have to have more art training I suppose. If the work in the show is guilty of too much “sophistication,” I, suspiciously, tend to embrace it. (more…)

I am the last among my contributor-cohort to post, I must sheepishly confess. Suzanne gave us the simple remit of San Francisco in the present, which remit has nevertheless been singularly difficult for me to fulfill. I don’t live today, as they say. As the Spring semester at CCA has wound down, my teaching and writing has located me decisively in multiple pasts: 1993, 1983, 1978, 1975, 1974, 1969, 1930, 1928, 1924, 1921, 1919, 1917, 1905, 1872, 1849. These are times I can say something about.  Ask me about Vitebsk, Dublin, Bern, Odessa, Dresden, Vancouver, Detroit. N’importe où hors du monde.

This is what it is to be an art historian sometimes. San Francisco is not on my mind. But perhaps this is one version of this city: periods of privacy and labor, thinking, writing, watching movies and dreaming of other places. Wallace Berman was never more himself than when he was making work and listening to “Baby Love” thirty times in a row. These introversions are then punctuated by spells of sociability and coalescence, when everything seems to be charged and happening. Presence is differential if it is anything. It is invisible and unspeakable if it is constant.

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The documentary Empress Hotel, which screened at the recent San Francisco Film Festival, tells the story of the eponymous halfway house in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district that provides unique assistance to the city’s homeless, offering rooms and support services to help them transition back into normal society. The film, directed by Bay Area locals Allie Light and Irving Saraf, follows both the hotel’s residents and its tireless manager, Roberta Goodman (also a co-producer of the film), projecting stories of hope, ambivalence, and despair against a blighted urban backdrop all but unrecognizable to even the worldly San Franciscan. If the documentary alone wasn’t plenty poignant, Goodman and one of the hotel’s former residents (who has since transitioned to a semi-normal life) were at the festival screening with the directors to talk further about their experiences. It was enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. So would it be in bad taste for me to criticize the film for being so, well, ugly?

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I saw this one doll had won the coveted Rondo award for best horror toy of the year 2008, and when I stopped laughing I fell in love. It is the new Barbie doll dressed as “Tippi” Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds. Heaven only knows the licensing fees that form the backstory of this one, but Mattel spotlights the Hitchcock name so avidly that you know his estate must be getting its cut. But what of Ms. Hedren herself? What’s she getting out of this, one wonders. America’s greatest actress is still alive and very beautiful at age 79 and she must approve in some fashion of this doll, and how do I know this? Because if you went on eBay and looked up this doll you can buy a copy she signed herself (comes complete with photos of her signing it, and of course, a “certificate of authenticity”). No living soul interested in Bay Area visual culture can turn their nose up at “Tippi” Hedren in The Birds, filmed largely right in our backyard in Bodega Bay. Jean-Louis, the designer, does he have an estate? Or can you just copy down to the tiniest detail the pale green wool suit he created for Ms. Hedren and just do so scot free? This blog is about image control and dissemination, so I should know the answers to these questions, but I come to you today as a collector.

A collector without much room in his apartment. To make way for my new “Tippi” Hedren doll, I am having to give the axe to my only other doll–a mint condition Kylie Minogue doll from the Fever era, a gift from a treasured friend, a gift which has dominated the front room of my apartment for many years. It is a tragedy but it is a new rule of mine that every time I get something, I have to throw away or give away two of whatever category it falls into — in this case dolls! I love Kylie of course, but I will say one thing always kept me from totally embracing the doll of her–its utter lack of resemblance to the original–whereas the new “Tippi” Hedren Barbie is not, or so they tell me, actually modeled on Hedren’s own face, but it’s an amalgam of Barbie’s face with Birds-era makeup, and thus exists in a floating world, halfway between Barbie and “Tippi” Hedren — neither and both. Roland Barthes could do a better job than I at explaining the sinuous appeal of this simulacrum, but hopefully a picture will tell a thousand words. (more…)

Visitors to the 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition will remember The Magic Window, a suite of drawings and video from 2007 in which Desiree Holman invokes the enticing numbness of sitcom family fantasies from her 1980s childhood. In her latest body of work, on view at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco through May 30, she digs deeper into the complexities of familial psychology, tackling the thorny territory of motherhood. Holman’s practice originates in sculpture, with costumes and props that actors then bring to life in her psychedelic video epics. Her interest is in the mediation of deeply personal ideas, such as the relationship between parent and child, through the lens of popular American culture. The genesis of this project, which she titled Reborn, was Holman’s discovery of a movement among middle-aged American housewives to create lifelike baby dolls, complete with breathing mechanisms and individually-rooted eyelashes.

Holman spent more than two years researching the Reborning movement. She learned that many Reborners have already had grown children, and that many of them are devoutly religious. She found that they take their hobby very seriously, and that they have developed a strong online presence despite representing a demographic that has been slow to embrace the Internet. The process of Reborning is laborious, involving specialized tools and paints, and tremendous technical skill. Holman ultimately produced eight dolls as the starting point for this body of work. (more…)

If you don’t know about 826 Valencia, my guess is that you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years. Started by local author Dave Eggers and educator Nínive Calegari, the tutoring center and pirate supply store has my vote for the best combination of community activism and creativity the world ’round. (You can watch Eggers talk about it at the TED Conference here.) It’s proof positive that writing and all of the arts should be an integral part of K-12 education, and lucky us that these centers have started to pop up all over the country in cities like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Ann Arbor, too.

I was lucky enough to attend an 826 Valencia fundraiser breakfast this morning with the celebrated filmmaker Gus Van Sant, late of Milk and Paranoid Park. Eggers introduced the director and warned that he was going to read a 50-minute treatise on film without any accompanying imagery. Nervous laughter ensued as Van Sant took the podium and, instead, briefly introduced two short films. The first, “Ballad of the Skeletons,” is a politicized music video from 1996 that features the late Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem of the same name over music by Philip Glass and Paul McCartney. Ginsberg, wearing his familiar American flag top hat, addresses the camera directly, cut into a film collage backdrop of politicians, rallies, moon landings and mushroom clouds.

Van Sant’s second film from 1989, “Junior,” (sadly, unavailable online) is the polar opposite of “Ballad.” The camera is immobile, focused on the wall area below a window in Van Sant’s home. After a brief introduction of his “teenage” cat, Junior, to the camera, Van Sant moves off screen to play his guitar. The guitar’s shell catches the sun from the window, creating a blob of moving light that Junior, not knowing any better, chases back and forth to the tune of Van Sant’s strumming. It’s a simple (borderline banal) scenario with which any cat owner is familiar. In the director’s hands, though, the film takes on an unexpected and humorous poignancy, which provides a sliver of illumination into Gus Van Sant, the person, not just the filmmaker.

The first rule every burgeoning writer hears is “show, don’t tell,” and Van Sant’s film treatise “lecture” today did exactly this. He didn’t need to say a word. Viewed together, these two films confirm that Van Sant, in the quest to make meaningful work, is constantly combining and careening between the personal and the public. For him, or anyone trying to create resonant art, approaching it any other way would be a moot exercise.

We went to the exhibition “I am Kurious Orange” on Friday, having misread the invitation and me thinking that I was going to hear a band made up of artists I know, who were forming a de facto The Fall cover band. I guess I can’t read because when I pushed open the door, my pals were nowhere to be seen, but instead we wound up with ringside seats at a theatrical extravaganza it will take all my enthusiasm to describe.

“I am Kurious Orange” is organized by Anne Colvin and presented at David Cunningham Projects on Folsom Street. I know many of my readers will know the block of Folsom to which I refer when I tell you that it’s the block with “Truck” on the end. That’s the gay bar that wits used to call “Truc-kay,” in the French style. Anyhow it’s a decrepit block that hitherto I ‘d always scurried by, but now that I‘ve experienced the excitement of David Cunningham I will be lingering there on the street corners like a superannuated prostitute, or Julie Harris in The Member of the Wedding just clinging to my past happiness and refusing to move on.

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Ever since my wife, Megan, and I received complimentary all-access CineVisa passes to the 1999 San Francisco International Film Festival (a client of the design studio for whom I was working at the time), we’ve gone every year, sometimes clocking up to 20 films if we’re feeling brazen (and caffeinated) enough. We have a cute little ritual of separately marking selections in our respective mini guides and then comparing our lists, culling them down into a single lineup. We usually try to pick films that haven’t found a distributor or been scheduled for wide release as a way to further broaden our screening palette. The process is a crap shoot—mostly because the mini guide film descriptions are barely 25 words long—but that’s also the fun of it. Sometimes the films are great, sometimes we leave the theater shaking our heads asking why anyone would even think to create something as horrifically bad as what we’d just seen. Up until Bullet in the Head, though, not one of the hundred-plus SFIFF screenings we’d attended had ever been introduced as “probably the most difficult film in the festival.”

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When the work of my design studio, Volume, was included in SFMOMA’s Innovation by Design: CCA at 100 exhibition in 2007—I admit it!—the elite glow attached to the setting was a huge part of the thrill. I could now tell my parents, regardless of how much they truly comprehended what I did for a living, that my work was now in a museum. That they understood.

When I later walked some visiting relatives through the exhibition, though, something funny happened. I started to explain the ReadyMade book and then, flustered from not being able to handle the piece that was hermetically sealed behind thick glass, said, “Screw it. Let’s just do this with one of the copies for sale in the museum store downstairs.” And so my presentation continued, but amidst the shopping din and ringing of cash registers rather than the solemn, contemplative air of the upstairs gallery. Such is the conundrum of the contemporary design artifact in an art museum.

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At the corner of Valencia Street and 18th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District is a construction site as seemingly banal as any other construction site: a chain-link fence designates a hard hat zone, wooden frames and scaffolding are visible, and hammering can be heard. As a resident of the Mission District and someone who prefers walking to public transportation, I pass this site several times a week. The construction is happening faster than I imagined and soon enough 700 Valencia Street will transform into a brand new condominium building.  Despite San Francisco’s plan to keep housing in the Mission affordable, all of the eight units will be available at market or above market prices.

The Mission District is historically a Latino/a neighborhood with a reputation of cultural diversity.  Despite recent and visible gentrification trends, it continues to be relatively less expensive than other neighborhoods in San Francisco. Additionally, the Mission is home to many cultural and art spaces including the Mission Cultural Center, Artist’s Television Access, Precita Eyes, Galeria de la Raza, and Southern Exposure. The Mission is known for its countless murals found on the sides of buildings in streets and alleys including Clarion Alley, Balmy Alley, and the Women’s Building. The Women’s Building, tucked just behind the construction site at 700 Valencia Street, is a non-profit that provides vital community services and resources, as well as hosts events and programs geared towards gender equity.  The building itself has a bold presence on 18th Street.  Its facade is bursting with the MaestraPeace Mural which illustrates the contributions of well-known female activists, authors, and artists.  This colorful and detailed mural stands in stark contrast to the sterile construction less than half a block away.

As a native to the San Francisco Bay Area, I have become increasingly aware of sites like 700 Valencia Street and the transformation of many of the city’s neighborhoods, both subtle and not so subtle.  It is nearly impossible to ignore the current nationwide housing crisis; headlines of foreclosures, threats to rent control and tenants rights, and the decline of SROs.  The relationship between artists and urban space has always been complex.  I am reminded again and again of the paradoxical nature of artists in urban neighborhoods: artists of a certain wherewithal often move to industrial and “less desirable” neighborhoods in search of space and cheap rents and in doing so, pave the way for developers and investors.  As the trends of gentrification goes, artists are then often adversely effected by shifts in urban landscapes that they, in many ways, helped to create.  It is a double edge sword.  So, what is the role is of artists in shifting urban landscapes?  And how does public art function in the context of redevelopment?

I recently reread a portion of Rosalyn Deutsche’s book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, in which she discusses the ways in which dominant uses of public space are often exclusionary despite their facade of democracy and unity. In her chapter “Uneven Development:  Public Art in New York City” she focuses this discussion specifically on public art projects in Manhattan during the 1990s, highlighting collaborations between artists and development agencies. This chapter reminded me of the meaning and function of public art in cities and the ways in which it is often folded into new development and the rhetoric of beautification–or a way of concealing the processes of gentrification and displacement.

Last year, local artist Kari Orvik faced this issue head-on.  As a part the show Grounded sponsored by Southern Exposure and Intersection for the Arts, Orvik created a participatory photography project entitled “The View From Here.”  This project spoke directly to the proposed construction site at 700 Valencia Street.  During an afternoon in December, Orvik invited participants to the roof of a neighboring building on Valencia Street and photographed them with the background of the Women’s Building’s MaestraPeace Mural.  The mural on the eastern face of the building depicts a larger than life portrait of Guatemalan indigenous rights activist, Rigoberta Menchu.

“The View From Here” aimed to raise awareness about the five story condominium building that would obstruct the view of the MaestraPeace Mural from Valencia Street prior to the series of hearings before the Commissioners on San Francisco’s Board of Appeals.  In Deutsche’s words, Orvik’s project is public art “as new spatial activity.”  Rather than complicit within redevelopment and the designation of public space for the purpose of capital, Orvik politicizes space and critiques the metamorphosis of San Francisco’s Mission District.  Functioning as social practice, Orvik’s piece lends itself nicely to critique and protest.  While one could walk down 18th Street to view the Rigoberta Menchu mural more closely, I think Orvik intended her piece to be a gesture that speaks to larger issues of what we stand to lose as city dwellers to development and increasing housing prices.  The metaphor is obvious: the Women’s Building, a grass-roots community space and its lively mural created collectively in 1994 becomes obstructed by a brand new, five story, eight unit condominium building affordable to very few who currently call the Mission District home.

Within today’s political and economic climate sites like 700 Valencia Street will continue to be debated in the Mission District. Orvik’s work reminds me of the importance of recording our experiences in our neighborhoods, the histories of places rapidly turning over to developers, as well as the important role of artists as politically engaged citizens who speak against the dominant use of public spaces and attempt to create alternatives.

Matt Keegan’s current show at the new Altman Siegel gallery at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco is smart, stylish, and very sweet.  The artist is intimately concerned with words and frames, how language shapes the context for perception, how social control hammers away at the psyche in the service of a skeletal hegemony.  Here his themes are postcards and calendars, which turn out to be mysterious enough to fill two good sized rooms.  Postcards and calendars: I’ve used them my whole life and never really bothered to think about them, but that’s like telling Peter Carl Faberge “I’ve had an egg for breakfast for the past 40 years but you, Mr. Faberge!”  (Indeed Matt Keegan, with his painstaking construction of multiple frames and perspectives, might have found lifelong employment in the House of Faberge in Romanov times, he might have done a beautiful one for the day Meryl Streep was presented to court.).  I went to the intensely crowded opening — so many young people there!  Keegan is one of the artists in the current, divisive “The Generation: Younger than Jesus” show at New York ‘s New Museum, where all the artists have to be 33 or under—33 being the age of Christ when he was crucified or whatever.  In person Keegan (born 1976) is an amiable, in fact adorable, tall young man with a wide smile and just the slightest touch of a twitch in his fingers — the sort of boy who’s always up to something, one with the suburban gleam of those, like I, born on Long Island’s North Shore where, as the Elizabethan dramatist says, “Like will to like.”

Is Keegan a photographer or what?  But that was my old fashioned way of thinking of things in categories.  The longer I stayed and looked at the work, the more I could see that Keegan might be more accurately spoken of as a conceptualist.  I could tell by the frames, the beautiful white frames, hung in different, cryptically devised distances from the gallery floor, the way Anne Collier’s pictures show at Marc Foxx.  The invitation itself was another clue — it is a large, foldout replica of the memory drawings our local hero Colter Jacobsen made for the ongoing Passengers show at the Wattis Institute — twelve drawings in all, each done by memory, of an idyllic riverbank scene copied from an elusive original.  In its new iteration, Jacobsen (b. 1975) has reinvented these twelve images into a calendar by dropping the typical abstract box of lines and dates under each image and labeling it with a month — not the months we’re used to, but months drawn from the names of rivers in a poem by Jason Morris, one of the most talented of San Francisco’s younger poets (b, 1977).  It’s a rare artist who puts the work of another artist onto the poster for his own show.

A roomful of vintage calendars hangs, each protected by Plexiglas, calendars borrowed from the local Gay and Lesbian Historical Society.  These are pretty amazing, whether they were once intended for the walls of gay-owned businesses, or for private use only.

Our favorite was the handmade one on the wall furthest from the street — looked like I might have made it, mad about nude gay men, cutting them out en silhouette and wheat pasted on colored paper, and then the challenge, to make the calendar that was the ostensible excuse for such display, and I was so high from the glue I pretty much forgot how to complete that grid of the days for who really cares what day it is anyhow, it’s the 1970s!

Another surreal one is the one with the two naked guys photographer in profile who, with their highly toned bodies, collapse themselves into the letter “A,” insinuate into the letter “S,” flagpole themselves as “F,” all the letters that begin the twelve months.  Outsider art of the best kind, totally prayerful and succinct.  On our way out we heard one fellow talk about the 1970s and how he knew the calendar model with the enormous white cock.  “His name was Randy Stick, and what a name to live up to, but somehow he managed.”

Then when I got home I looked at Facebook and my friend, the brilliant Toronto conceptualist Derek McCormack, had left a message on his status bar.  “My life has killed the dream I dreamed.”  Instantly I took this as a reference to the UK pop sensation, Susan Boyle, the ungainly, giggly Scotswoman whose appearance on a BBC talent show has been, for the past two weeks, seen by more people than ever watched anything anywhere,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

This clip has been hailed as the most inspiring ever aired, and I was skeptical at first, then I succumbed.  You’ve all seen it, you know how mean the audience and judges are to her, then she opens her mouth and they all swoon over, flabbergasted.

It didn’t take me — let’s see — four minutes into it before I felt tears welling up, and the same with my subsequent 463 viewings.  I guess you don’t have to be plain, unattractive, brain damaged, or heavyset to identify with the subject position of the singer in this number.  You don’t even have be wearing a number pasted across your chest.  “I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I‘m living.”  I’m not discounting the angst of those younger than Jesus, but in San Francisco, at least, all you have to do is to live past 35 and in a certain sense, hell looms out of every windowpane.

New York-based filmmaker Ramin Bahrani’s third feature film, Goodbye Solo, opened this week in a limited Bay Area run. Ramin takes an approach to cinema that many people would call “low-budget,” but which I prefer to think of as economical: doing only what the story requires, no more and no less. He’s produced three feature films in five years, working outside of the Hollywood system. Goodbye Solo has been lauded by reviewers including the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott, who cited the film as exemplary of a refreshing new realist milieu.

Ramin’s approach to filmmaking resembles that of a novelist more than a director, in that he begins with real people whom he gets to know in depth as he fictionalizes their stories for the screen. Solo is based on a Senegalese taxi driver from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that Ramin met and befriended some years back. He is played by an actor, Souleymane Sy Savane, who is an engaging and natural onscreen presence. Ramin generally uses non-professional actors, such as in his first film, Man Push Cart, in which the real subject of his story played a fictional character that resembled himself.

Ramin’s interest is in telling real, if not entirely true, stories. Blurring truth and fiction, he captures the emotional complexities of a range of working-class and immigrant experiences with a raw and poetic sensibility. Disappointment is par for the course in his films. This is in part because real life is so often disappointing, and also because commercial American cinema so rarely deviates from archetypes of success and affluence.

With a MoMA retrospective (nearly unheard of for such a young director), two Times write-ups in as many weeks last month and a Charlie Rose interview that airs this week, Ramin is poised to break big with Goodbye Solo. Nonetheless it was a lucky few who took the opportunity to meet and talk with him at this past weekend’s screenings. Landmark Theaters’ Clay Theater in San Francisco and Shattuck Theater in Berkeley are screening Goodbye Solo for another week or two. Film fans won’t want to miss this opportunity to support a genuine artist of the cinema.

Daddy always said that if one just stayed put in San Francisco, eventually everyone who mattered would show up here, and then he himself came as if to prove himself correct. I remember him tottering off the plane as though an earthquake was actually happening. And then he came back two other times, never entirely relaxing, but affable enough, like a mint julep. I thought of him tonight when John Giorno came to San Francisco and gave a jubilant reading for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State.

Even if you know nothing about poetry you will remember Giorno as the actor in one of Andy Warhol’s most notorious films, Sleep–Warhol’s first film, made when the artist was 35 years old and looking to try something new. Giorno was 27 and, it is said, Warhol’s boyfriend at the time. The film consists, as many know, of Giorno sound asleep for nearly five and a half hours-there’s a version in which some of the shot footage is repeated to make it last eight hours-an elaborate joke on contemporary health advice which urged Americans to sleep eight hours a day, nearly an impossibility for the always alert Warhol. Tonight John Giorno looks wiry, energetic himself, though I imagine he sleeps just as deeply now.

Maybe this is an illusion brought on by his heavy-lidded bedroom eyes, the left one of which rarely opens all the way up. All in all he is a performer of exquisite looks, a cap of soft white hair exquisitely combed in furrows up and over his ears towards the back of his head. High-tipped eyebrows of an imposing jet black contrast with this white, soft hair, like Mia Farrow with the eyebrows of Penelope Cruz. So yes, he always looks surprised, and yet his eyes have seen so much trouble and pain in the world that only a practice of Buddhism could have spared him.
I met him once before, in New York, in the 1970s, outside the building on the Bowery where, he tells me, he still lives. “Were you looking for me or were you looking for William?” he teases, I guess he knew he had spotted a Burroughs fan! I was an undergraduate with a sort of boyfriend who lived way way downtown next to John Giorno. “Who?” I mumbled, but soon this guy had filled me in on everything Giorno had done.

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