OPEN SPACE

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

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests. Here's Timothy Buckwalter in the Koret Visitor Education Center.]

Name/Place of residence/Occupation/Hobby?

My name is Timothy Buckwalter. I live in Albany, California. I’m an artist and I’ve recently started curating and I also write about art. I have a blog about art. If I had a hobby, I think my hobby would be listening to music. I love music. Music is tied in real closely to my paintings.

Do you collect anything?

I collect art. Contemporary art. I like to collect art that I relate to. I’m not going out and buying Joan Miro prints or something. I want to have something in my house that I have an emotional or psychic connection to. The work that I have is often by people that are my friends, or just work of someone that I respect or work that touches me.

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

It’s a tough question because I have so many friends that are artists that I see all the time. I guess it would have to be somebody that was a hero of mine. I can tell you who I wouldn’t invite; I wouldn’t like to have dinner with Andy Warhol. I think he would be incredibly dull since he’s so staged. Maybe Dorothea Lange. Her work has always fascinated me and her ability to just continue working. I would like to have dinner with her. You know who I think would be wonderful to have dinner with? I’ve always admired Joan Mitchell’s paintings. I would love to have dinner with Joan Mitchell. It would be a really wonderful dinner.

What if I could invite a couple people to dinner? He’s my dream dinner: it would be Dorothea Lange, Richard Prince, Donald Judd and Joan Mitchell. To me that would be the perfect dinner party. There would be endless debate. Or endless chastising.  But it can’t be a friend? I would totally like to have dinner with my friend John Zurier who is a painter who I have lunch with a lot and we talk about art.

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

How about we rephrase the question because as an artist I don’t want to steal someone’s art. But if I could have a painting in my house. What about that huge Pollock that was in Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment? I would love to have that piece. I mean, there are so many pieces. I would love to have one of those early Stella black paintings. That would be amazing. A Kline, a really big Kline, like Chief at MoMA or something. Or I would love to have a Barnett Newman. One of those big Newman’s. But then I would have to have a bigger house. I would love to have a big piece of art but then I’d need to have a bigger house. I would like to have something that I’ve always thought about. It’s funny, last year on my blog I asked people what their dream collection was. The other thing I would love to have is Duchamp’s Étant donnés – it’s the barn doors that you look in and there’s a naked woman. I would totally love to have that piece. Bridget Riley did this amazing painting that’s like a nautilus that you walk into, that you spiral into in the late 60s; I would love to have that piece. A Robert Frank photo. There’s that Frank photo of the flags and the matronly women that you can’t really see their faces in the window, that Frank photo is amazing. I would love to have everything. All at once. I would go back in time too. I would love a della Francesca one of those frescos that are on church walls. If it’s art, I would probably take it. Actually, I don’t like Yves Klein so I wouldn’t take a Yves Klein.

What’s your favorite tool?

You mean like George W. Bush? That kind of tool? Does a paintbrush count as a tool? Then I love a paintbrush. I would say the paintbrush is my favorite tool. In the positive sense of a tool.

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You may have seen Tim before when he put together a music-filled  “Collection Rotation” in June.

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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“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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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…)

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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