Category Archives: Art & Development

Art & Development

Headlands Open House / Home for Artists

One of my favorite things about being part of the Headlands community is the post-Open-House walkabouts. Since I’m reluctant to leave my studio during the Open House, it’s nice to go around to the other artist’s studios and see everything I missed. We visited about two dozen studios tonight. I love visiting studios and hearing artists talk about their work.

Here are a few photos. Click on the image for a larger file.
headlands center for the arts post open house walkable photo collage

And if you were caught in Fleet Week traffic and missed Open House, here’s a 360 shot of my studio. Click on the image for a larger file.
lorem ipsum series, miniature charcoal ingots, the best person i can be lighted sign

I haven’t got installations up in my studio, because I’ve got an installation and sculpture out at Bay Area Now‘s Galleon Trade exhibition at YBCA, and am also preparing for the Headlands’ Mystery Ball on Oct. 25. The Lorem Ipsum series (2 panels plus 2 hand-drawn wall texts) will appear in Kearny Street Workshop’s Shifted Focus exhibition, which opens Oct. 25 as well.

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Art & Development

Dreamy utopian radicalism in art

I find the backwards-looking tendency in contemporary art to be a bit nostalgic, so I was really glad to hear a respected art critic rail against the trend of valorizing the sixties…

[Martha] Rosler’s show is simply mediocre. What is points to, however, is far worse and more widespread. Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. A generation is caught in a Freudian death spiral and seems unable to escape the ridiculous idea that in order for art to be political it has to hark back to the talismanic hippie era—that it must create a revolution. It is sophistry to think that everything relates to Europe and America in 1968. The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties [in a generational cycle of critical writing]…. It’s a trap set by a previous generation in order to preserve its legacy a little longer, or at least until its members relinquish their positions in academe, museums, and media. Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more “political” than today. It’s time to turn the page.

Jerry Saltz, “Welcome to the Sixties, Yet Again,” New York Magazine, October 13, 2008.

Last year I wrote about the sixties trend, but never published it. Here are excerpts…

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If art by emerging artists is any indication — recurring images include utopias, rainbows, communes, self-help books and God’s eyes — we’re entering a new New Age.

god's eye
God’s eye

Authenticity is IN. Irony is OUT. And many contemporary artists and curators are looking back at the 1960s and 1970s’ youthful idealism and radical social change.

For example, sixties- and seventies-style collectives were celebrated in Whitney Biennials past, museums all over are taking a look at Feminism, and Sixties poster art shows too. Maybe it’s nagging White guilt, or a feel-good riposte to 1990s Identity Art, or Presidential Regret (Blame my administration—not me! We ARE the world!) towards a more humble, human-scale, wishful we-can-change-the-world movement.

I like the idea of an injection of radicalism. I like cooperation and collectivity over competition and materialism. I like authenticity, not irony and distancing oneself from the world. But artists in their 20s and 30s weren’t there, and much of this recent contemporary art idealizes radicalism. Symbols of hippie communes abound, while images of war, the tumultuous end of colonialism, and the beginning of the Cold War are largely ignored. It seems like the 1960s and 1970s is standing in for an age of innocence. And I think that’s a problem. Why? The widespread politicization of hippies (read: white people) in the 1960s stemmed from two things: the groundwork laid by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s (read: people of color–who took real risks: Where to send the kids to school? Go to work or stare down the fire hoses today? and made real, permanent change in groundbreaking Federal-level legislation–and white allies), as well as a real cost to the middle class (read: the draft).

The 1960s and 1970s wasn’t an age of innocence. It was a time of radical social and cultural change, yes, but it wasn’t the idealized, nostalgic era that many artists seem so enamored of.

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Art & Development

JPGs = containers; installations = contained

installation view

I’ve posted some photos of my work in Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition at YBCA on my site.

So strange how the physical work and the documentation have separate, yet inextricably linked, lives. The former is temporal, a bit precious, the latter is detached from meatspace reality, and lives on in the currency of images. I don’t think of myself as a maker of illusionistic images; still, it’s probably more common that my work is recalled in JPG form, than in first-hand memories.

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Art & Development, Research

in Guangzhou this weekend?

The Guangzhou Triennial opens this weekend, and the program sounds fantastic.

I really enjoyed my 2001 visit to Guangzhou (Canton). Guangzhou is the major city in Guangdong—the large southern region including the Pearl River Delta and original home to something like 90% of Chinese immigrants who came to California prior to the 1965 Immigration Act. Guangdong is also where my maternal and paternal ancestral villages are; both family lines can be traced back several generations (as many as 26, on my mom’s side) in that region.

Anyway, during my visit I found Guangzhou to be really cool—a bustling metropolis full of young people breaking from the past. The triennial program sounds like Guangzhou is finally getting into the game with some forward-thinking contemporary art practices—a contender to Hong Kong’s and Beijing’s dominance as top art centers in China! I’m especially fascinated with the program’s theme.

For the curatorial discourse of this Triennial, we propose to say ‘Farewell to Post-Colonialism’. This represents the theoretical basis from which we hope to explore our critical vision. The Triennial attempts to open new frontiers for creativity with a critical review of the role cultural discourses of Post-colonialism and Multi-culturalism has played in contemporary art. While affirming Post-colonialism’s achievements in exposing hidden ideological agenda in society and inspiring new art, this Triennial also critically examines its limitations for creativity, and calls for a fresh start.

We hope to uncover elements of the paradoxical reality veiled by contemporary cultural discourse, to make contact with realms that slip through the cracks of well-worn concepts such as class, gender, tribe and hybridity. We hope to think together with artists and investigate through their practices to find what new modes and imaginative worlds are possible for art beyond those already heavily mapped out by socio-political discourses.

GZ Triennial will host 181 artists from over 40 countries around the world, including 50 films/videos from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa under the projects “Middle East Channel”, “East-South: Out of Sight” and “Africa: Personal Poetics”….

(By the way, if you think that China is monolithic and closed, as most Americans think, I should mention that one of the things I learned on my visit were the significant numbers of African immigrants in China, who often study in the universities.)

The 7 “Forums in Motion” of the 3rd Triennial is a long expedition that traverses across a wide terrain of ideas which focus on Farewell to Post-Colonialism, Limits of Multi-Culturalism, Thinking Through the Visual, … Anxiety of Creativity and Possible Worlds and Farewell to Post-colonialism — Towards a Post-Western Society?

Saying farewell to post-colonialism and peering into the future for glimpses of a post-Western society— or the century to follow the American Century—is something that really resonates with my installation, Binary Pair, in Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition.

THANKS to everyone who made it to the opening last night! I had a blast and it was so nice to see smiling faces and hear respected colleagues’ impressions of the work! If you missed it, stop by YBCA before October 19 to catch the show — it’s almost all new work, featuring 5 CA artists paired with 5 Manila-based artists.

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Art & Development, Community

they’re prepared

This is my first time working with an institution as large as YBCA, and it’s been really neat.

Over the past few days, I’ve been installing my work for Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition (which opens Thursday, Sept. 4) with help from the lead preparators, Justin Limoges and Justin Wyckoff. They’ve been friendly, calm, helpful and meticulous. YBCA’s also got a on-call, kick-ass installation team, which includes the fabulous Tammy Kim, who have transformed the Terrace Gallery in no time at all.

I often exhibit at spaces with fewer resources, and I am happy to bring my own tools and install my own work, but working with YBCA has been a welcome change of pace. For example, my kinetic sculpture needed to be mounted on YBCA’s 14-feet-high ceiling and I’m not really a fan of heights, so I was looking forward to handing that off to a professional! It was nice enough that someone would go up on a ladder to hang my heavy, unwieldy sculpture of moving parts, but I wasn’t prepared for the moment when Justin took out a tape measure to get the baseboard just 1/8″ over, making it parallel to the lighting track. That kind of obsessive attention to detail is usually exhibited by artists installing their own art, so to have it automatically extended to my work, even as a zillion other installation details need to be attended to, made me feel extremely grateful for this exhibition opportunity.

Thanks to the hard work of the installation team (and their sacrificed holiday weekends!), the opening is three days away but the gallery is already looking great. Megan’s site-specific installation is looking great, and works by the paired photographers (MM Yu and Gina Osterloh) and painters (Johanna Poethig and Norberto Roldan) are looking really cohesive.

Hope you can come see Galleon Trade!
Opening: Thursday, Sept 4, 5-8 pm, YBCA

Cheers to the unsung heroes of the art world.

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Art & Development, Research

Hope is rare

“In photometry, luminous flux … is the measure of the perceived power of light. It differs from radiant flux, the measure of the total power of light emitted, in that luminous flux is adjusted to reflect the varying sensitivity of the human eye to different wavelengths of light.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_flux

Luminous flux accounts for the relativity of perception, in the same way that optimism and pessimism can flux from one to the other.

optimism and pessimism chart

I think of optimism and pessimism as inseparable poles, whose ambi-valent pulls are equally strong, producing a productive state of dialectical tension. But my latest work is premised on the idea that hope is rare and requires willpower, while pessimism is abundant and passive.

According to Adam Cohen, in his review of Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (nytimes.com, August 28, 2006), “Pessimism is not, as is commonly thought, about being depressed or misanthropic, and it does not hold that humanity is headed for disaster. It simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world’s problems will have a positive effect.”

So it occurred to me that the metaphor of light and dark for optimism and pessimism lends itself to the idea that hope is rare and pessimism is abundant. Because light, which often represents hope, is rare — especially when you consider that only visible light connotes hope, while the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum bounces around and through us, constantly and imperceptibly.

Even the view that hope is rare may seem pessimistic. But rarity suggests a thing that becomes valued, cultivated, appreciated.

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Art & Development, Community

Problems and solutions

You could think of art as a series of problems and solutions. There are visual or formal problems, of course. But it’s a month away from the Galleon Trade exhibition at YBCA (opens September 4), and I need to solve technical problems.

Working in different media is challenging, but it’s great because I’m constantly dipping into new fields of knowledge. Right now, I’m learning about DC (direct current, as opposed to AC, alternating current), and solar power and batteries (both of which are 12 volt DC).

Mostly, I get by with some how-to books, videos and reading Wikipedia. But some problems are too complicated or unique. I wish I had a go-to tinkerer, a mad scientist who lives in a crappy Victorian surrounded by guard dogs in West Oakland, like in Ang Lee’s Hulk. But in real life, I turn to artist-friends like Erik Scollon and Chris Bell. In addition to their technical knowledge, they have experience and, critically, access to resources.

This is about as far away from the artist-genius myth as you can get, but it’s true: sometimes problem-solving hinges on procurement — sourcing the bits and pieces that add up to make installations. One of my biggest challenges is the extreme segmentation of our late capitalist markets. There’s only so much the average shopper needs from an art store, hobby shop, fabric store or hardware store. Then there are artists. I have to source materials in quantities large and small from random outlets. My installation will be comprised of materials from solar companies, battery distributors, Urban Ore (a recycled goods shop in Berkeley), a specialty industrial electrical connector manufacturer, a marine supplier. In my research, I’ve also purchased goods from a train hobby shop. Art takes you to some funny places!

I shared a moment about this with Jessica Tully. She is using a special aerosol chalk in her Syndicate spray stencils. When she called local hardware stores to get more chalk, staffers often suggested spray paint. Sometimes they’d say that spray chalk doesn’t exist. I get similar responses too, and they’re not helpful. Nobody likes to be told we’re making stuff up. We’re not yahoos, we’re just artists. Trust us!

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Art & Development

Haven’t started your Burning Man art-car yet?

If you’re a budding tinkerer or thinking about kinetic sculpture projects, sign up for this class at The Crucible!

Electromechanics for Everything
Entry-level class
Using the simplest of electronic and mechanical components, you’ll learn to make things spin, twitch, jump, bend, and wiggle. This class covers switches, buttons, relays, motors, servos, and solenoids, along with some basic analog and digital control circuits, AC/DC current, and safety. The techniques taught in this class can be applied to almost any kind of project.

ELECTROMECHANICS FOR EVERYTHING
5 sessions
July 23 – Aug 20
Wed 6:30-9:30Pm
Tracey Cockrell
Price $270 Member Price $250
The Crucible
West Oakland

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