OPEN SPACE

In Sacramento, one of the girls who stood vigil outside a Los Angeles courtroom waiting for her “father to be released” in 1969 makes headlines again six years later. Charles Manson follower Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a gesture that she claims is in defense of the Redwood Forest.
“I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason,” Fromme says. “I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respec... More

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. We close the series with a heartfelt missive from the University of Illinois library to Lebbeus Woods, discovered in the university’s archives by Daryl McCurdy, architecture and design department assistant... More

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Sometimes in New York this thing happens—you are going out and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by folks you know from San Francisco. After a while you might pause, stare up at the sky, and ask to nobody in particular, “Where are they all coming from?”

Even when you talk to complete strangers—if you talk with them long enough, ... More

Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are the opposite of language, and don’t need it. He talks about poetry, but only because he is talking about what’s ineffable, about what is beheld by the eyes, but also held inside of the body. His camera stares, and when, in the dark of the theater, the slow, silent images are illuminated by light, looki... More

SFMOMA closes twenty days from now and the museum is rolling out four days of festivities to mark the event, including performances, free art viewing, and one of several 24-hour viewings of Christian Marclay’s epic masterpiece The Clock—twenty-four hours of collaged film fragments that reference the time of day or night, synchronized with local... More

Artists often cite one another as influences; it is easy enough to name what inspires or repels us, creatively. But the many-pronged relationships between people and objects, places and daily routine, labor and creativity—these are much more complex and harder to articulate.

—Jessica Brier, foreword to Episteme

Earlier this year two Bay Area ar... More

On Saturday, April 27, for SFMOMA’s Slow Art Day, I led a small but insightful group of viewers through the permanent collection, including parts of the Logan Collection that are currently on display in a show titled Don’t Be Shy, Don’t Hold Back. I’m an experienced art viewer, but the method of slowly looking in silence revealed things that surprised even me.

The premise for the day was to experience five pieces of art in uninterrupted silence for ten minutes apiece. However, I slightly augmented our proposed requirements by having our... More

In many ways the clocks are the least of it.

Take away the clocks and you’d still have a complex, and maybe more mysterious, work.

See the north side of the Bay Bridge in an old film noir, before its current animated lights; we can’t not juxtapose it with a recollection of the current bridge, now with the light array. One of the clock’s basic units: world war once, as in “the war between now and what once was.”

The early morning hours are dominated by people being awakened over and over and over by alarm clocks—often being alarmed themselves because they’ve overslept—and they or the camera then turn to and gaze out of windows.

It’s a kind of narrative that involves cumulative repetition. It’s musical in that the downbeat is the appearance of the clock. The fill is human biological and cultural behavior, the making of a metanarrative that might be called “how/when/where we sleep.”

As in: This bit of narrative is over, and it’s marked by the appearance... More