OPEN SPACE

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

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 The notice concludes with a call for papers: “either new or already existing (published or unpublished, recent or older) scholarly articles from around the world…Texts may be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc… All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…)

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…)

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…)

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.