Category Archives: Community

Community, Research

MDR, Balloons, Exuberance

MONSTER DRAWING RALLY PHOTOS & VIDEO. Check out this slideshow of the Monster Drawing Rally by Hanna Quevedo on SFWeekly.com! There’s also a short video on VidSF.com.

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BALLOONS. Thinking about them lately, and came across this awesome photo sequence of a sculpture made of balloons by Hans Hemmert on thepigments.com. Sweet.

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IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE. This economics term, coined by Alan Greenspan, shook markets worldwide in the 1990s. What a paradox. I’ve been thinking about pleasure and its crucial role in the formation of happiness since I started studying positive psychology last year. I’ve also been using unabashedly exuberant typefaces, especially high-contrast Didot faces, despised in their day and seen as both high-class and slightly cheap today. The idea that exuberance is irrational to be equally ludicrous as the idea of exuberance should be rational. It’s a delicious paradox.

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Community

A sequence of images of inventions and rubbish that strike my fancy and stoke my curiousity.

IAN BURNS, Glacier, 2008, Found object kinetic sculpture producing live video and audio Assembled size: 59” x 24” x 21” Edition of 5. Source: Nettie Horn

Ian Burn’s Glacier is the press image for Sensescapes at Nettie Horn (London) 2/27-3/28, a group exhibition that purports:

Despite the age and universality of this subject, our environment or “landscape” is still a source of investigation since our conscience plays a role in shaping our processes of representation of these environments. In order to develop this reflexion about how we experience “the world” around us, the exhibition will deal with the notion of “sensescapes” – a sensory experience evoking the relation between space and senses, geography and mind.

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Installation view of Theory of a family by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez. Source: Silverman Gallery

Still yet to span the gap between Oakland and the Tendernob, but Ginger Wolfe-Suarez‘ exhibition, Theory of a family, at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco 2/5-3/13 looks utterly fascinating. Sign me up.

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Installation view of Graham Dolphin's work at Spasticus Artisticus. Source: Ceri Hand Gallery

Graham Dolphin’s work (pictured) is just some of the slightly ludicrous, Mike Kelly-ish artistic production on view in Spasticus Artisticus,
Curated by Jota Castro & Christian Viveros-Faune at Ceri Hand Gallery (Liverpool) 1/12-1/27. Can’t make it out to Liverpool? See large images of the exhibition online. Photos can’t replace first-hand experience with art objects and videos, but if the other option is missing the exhibition entirely, I’ll take the photos.

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Jeppe Hein, Mobile Mobile, 2010, Exercise bike, steel construction, chain drive, mirrors, Variable dimensions. Source: NicolaiWallner.com

Jeppe Hein’s Millieu Social at Galleri Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen) 1/29-3/20

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A live situation by Pierre Huyghe. Photo: Ola Rindal. Source: E-Flux.com

This mysterious and lovely photo promoting A live situation, an ongoing project by Pierre Huyghe, consisting of a series of situations performed on 10/31/09, 2/14/10, and 5/1/10.

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Art & Development, Community

first set of referents for 2010

Lacey Jane Roberts, Building it Up to Tear it Down, Southern Exposure
Lacey Jane Roberts, Building it Up to Tear it Down, Southern Exposure

Now through February 20, see three solo shows by Genevive Quick, Lacey Jane Roberts and Andy Vogt at Southern Exposure. Quick‘s optical devices constructed from paper and foamcore are phenomenal, pretty, and pretty phenomenal. I’m also looking forward to Mike Lai‘s one-night only performance on February 26. I honestly can’t remember being this excited for Chinese New Year because of art. Lion Dancers, a dance battle, giant fists! If there’s a new year’s cake (buttery mochi baked to a golden brown), I’m gonna freak out.

There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak is on at the Contemporary Jewish Museum closes January 19. Unfortunately, I went on a weekend and could hardly see a thing. Sendak’s empathy towards children’s emotions and vulnerability, and his fantastic line, color and typography have always been dear to me. It’s a treat to see original drawings on tracing paper, quick dummy mock-ups of books, and photo-ready art — acetate line work over watercolor on paper. Overall, though, Sendak is a hugely prolific artist, and I would have liked to see much more space allotted to the exhibition, some attention to his lettering, and proper screening rooms for the videos. Three videos are online, but many more interviews with Sendak are only viewable on monitors in the gallery with single headsets.

A lot of arts presenters are creating quality interactive content, but very little of it seems to escape the gallery walls. The Tate Channel and partners working with ArtBabble.org are wonderful exceptions. Quality videos featuring artist’s projects and interviews are great resources for art students, and they help the public appreciate contemporary art.

The 75th anniversary exhibition at SFMOMA had a lot of “greatest hits.” Having visited the collection galleries before, I was familiar with many of the works on display. There were some nice surprises: a selection of very elegant modern typewriters and their wonderfully designed poster advertisements, a television show produced by the SFMOMA to help their early audiences appreciate modern art, photographs by Will Rogan documenting “public sculptures” such as a Sainsbury’s bag stuck in a fence, and the gallery on Bay Area Figuration — one of the few places you can see several of David Park’s drippy, barely figurative paintings.

Another pleasant surprise was Jennifer Sonderby’s gorgeous exhibition signage: neat columns of matte black vinyl text, set off from the gallery walls with subtle fields of Tuftesque flat cream. I often wonder why proven conventions in print design (such as columns no wider than 60 characters) are disregarded in exhibition signage. I’m starting to believe that anything less than great visual design in modern or contemporary museums is inexcusable. There’s just too much design talent and typographic sensitivity among mass audiences for graphic design to be compromised.

A less pleasant surprise was the decision to organize a few rooms to honor specific early donors. I get that many museums were founded by philanthropists whose embrace of modern art should be acknowledged, still, when I consider the 20th century, I can’t ignore that wealth and power was often consolidated with the aid of discriminatory gestalts. Art exhibitions are ideological. It may not always be explicit, but curating rooms to honor donors sure makes it apparent.

To date, only the second floor galleries were open. An exhibition of photographs is forthcoming. I’m looking forward to visiting prints by Larry Sultan.

I also had the chance to visit the ICA Boston recently. The building was stunning, so much so that the art inside sometimes paled in comparison.

Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself is a great overview of conceptual strategies: improvisational sculptures made of everyday materials, serializing and re-ordering mural-painted bricks to create chance compositions, photographic taxonomies of building materials, formal examinations of cubes. His installation of an exploded view of a VW Beetle did not disappoint. I was surprised by the striking experience of perception in three dimensions. I also adored an installation of nine looped 16-mm film projections of domino-effect bricks in various wild and semi-inhabited landscapes. But the show also illustrated the risk of making work that doesn’t seek to please: sometimes the sum is underwhelming.

ICA Collection: In the Making confounded me: I thought ICAs are ICAs because they are not museums/collecting institutions. It was also hit-or-miss: I thought a small-sized gallery neutered works by Cornelia Parker and Roni Horn, but the show redeemed itself with transcendent, ethereal installations by Tara Donovan.

I wanted to like Krzysztof Wodiczko’s …Out of Here: The Veteran’s Project, because it’s so rare for contemporary artists to address current political issues. But the installation, which simulated the experience of being in an Iraqi neighborhood that falls into a chaotic combat zone, was loud, cinematic, and manipulative. If its goal was to make me feel vulnerable, it succeeded. But the fact is, I wasn’t actually there; I was in a gallery on the Boston waterfront getting shaken up by digital animations, voice actors reading a script, and sound effect artists having a field day. It was heavy handed, and yet, no more meaningful or revelatory than a video game.

But R.H. Quaytman‘s thoughtful, cheeky exhibition of paintings blurred the lines between painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. They called into question the narrative inherent in exhibition-making, modernist tropes, museum storage and display, optical effects, and surface treatments and materials. It might have been neurotic painting-about-painting, yet it resulted in a curious, thought-provoking experience that I didn’t wholly understand, but enjoyed nonetheless. Ironically (or perhaps predictably?) Quaytman’s exhibition is part of a series featuring emerging artists. The show gave me hope that there’s still more to explore in contemporary art.

Curious:
The Survival Annex, shop within shoppe
At the Curiosity Shoppe, 855 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Grand opening just past, not sure how long exhibition/shop is on.

Front + Center: Weather Streams
Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin Headlands
Opening Sunday, January 17, 2-5pm
Thru Feb. 28

Ellen Harvey: The Room of Sublime Wallpaper (II)
Art Production Fund LAB
Wooster Street, NYC
Jan. 16 – Feb 20, 2010
Reception: Jan. 16, 5-7pm

Super Diversity – Who Participates Now?
Discussion on the phemomenon of ‘super diversity’ in the visual arts
INIVA, Rivington Place, London
Feb. 2, 2010, 6:30pm

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Community, Research

two interviews

I wouldn’t presume to tell the truth. I’m telling my version of the truth, but it’s not the objective version. There is no objective version….

Photography does stop time. It’s an exterior form of memory: This existed. That’s its greatest truth: to leave a trace of what has been.

–Larry Sultan

California photographer and longtime California College for the Arts professor, Larry Sultan passed away last Sunday at age 63. His good humor, probing art practice and generosity is missed by colleagues, students and fans.

Listen to an interview with Larry with on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. It was recorded in 1989.

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Why do you want to avoid saying anything concrete?

I’m just not interested in using the position as an artist to dictate anything. I consider myself as one my viewers, and it would be paradoxical to speak simultaneously to myself and others. I like to think that being an artist is neither an entertainer nor a doctor.

What emotion do you most want to inspire most in your viewers?

That’s not a concern, really. I think emotions are too subjective and it’s wasteful to control the viewer. I think it’s more about creating a frequency of tension in the work that connects in different ways to different people.

Über-brain artist Jordan Wolfson as interviewed in “Art, Theory” by Ana Finel Honigman (New Yor Times’ T Magazine, December 9, 2009).

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Community, Research

Art Practical

My review of Primero la Caja, Pablo Guardiola’s solo show at Galería de la Raza, has been published on ArtPractical.com. The current issue, Work(er), includes an interview with David Ireland, a review of the triennial exhibition at the Int’l Center for Photography, and reviews of local shows.

Art Practical is a much-needed site for Bay Area art criticism. It is forged from three grassroots, artist-led initiatives — Shotgun Review, Happenstand, and Talking Cure quarterly — that emerged as direct responses to the Bay Area’s narrow art reportage. Especially after the folding of Artweek magazine, I think Art Practical’s energy, vision and commitment to excellence will be a meaningful presence in the Bay Area art community.

Art Practical welcomes sponsorships and individual donations.

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Art & Development, Community

Art and Interaction

In a nice counterpoint to the typical gallery-going experience filled with ho-hum pretty, salable pictures, I had a great weekend that was filled with art as well as experiences, friends and community.

M and I skipped over to San Pablo Ave for Blankspace Gallery‘s annual Holidayland sale. The gallery is set up as an indie mart featuring affordable knickknackery and small works of art, which tends to be more cute and lifestyle-y than my tastes in art usually run, but perfectly appropriate for gift-giving. I thought Misako Inaoka‘s small guoache paintings on paper were extremely great values. M beamed–he’s always happy to support small businesses in Oakland. We really appreciated Blankspace’s reasonable prices and community-minded partnerships (such as the photo diorama, whose proceeds will be donated to art in Oakland schools).

After a gut-busting stop at Juan’s Place in West Berkeley, we wobbled up San Pablo to the Pacific Basin building to catch the end of Ice on the High, a series of feral experimental events organized by Kim Anno, Maggie Foster, and Aida Gamez. After watching video projections on empty storefront windows, the chilly air lent us the nerve to try the door to an darkened, empty storefront. To great relief, this led us to a sublime installation of mylar and sundry scraps of digital light in the back of the unfinished space, and on to open studios. Kim’s studio was thoroughly engaging, for her gorgeous paintings on aluminum (recently on view at Patricia Sweetow Gallery) as well as her newest work in a wholly different media. We were ushered back to the unfinished storefront for a live video and sound performance. M gamely looked and listened, and I found my brain responding to the Cagean sounds with the unselfconscious unfolding unique to attentive listening. I missed Joshua Churchill‘s performance, so I’ll have to make a point to stop in to his show at NOMA Gallery off SF’s Union Square.

The next day I popped in to David Cunningham Projects for Jigsawmentallama, a group exhibition featuring contemporary San Francisco artists as well as emerging and established international artists. I like DCP for its local/international blend and conceptual/installation/video/performance bent, so I was saddened to hear that the shop is closing and this will be the last exhibition. DCP’s going out with a bang-on show, however.

There’s a selection wall works — including San Francisco-based artist Keith Boadwee‘s beautifully produced, seemingly improvised, visceral photographs exploring the potential of fruit for torture — and some fantastic prismatic Polaroids (look for a witty one of Buckminster Fuller). The show includes an impressive number of videos for such a compact space; many of them trade in psychedelic imagery, but the space doesn’t feel overpowering. Skye Thorstenson‘s high-wattage overdose of color via found footage was installed precisely on a vintage television facing a corner; in effect, it is an exercise in tolerance under a barrage of sound and grotesque pop imagery. I also enjoyed Ireland-based artist Austin McQuinn‘s video in the far back viewing room. In it, a man donning a goofy primate mask mixes clay on a kitchen table, sculpting mountains and finally a ‘man’ in his own image. The kicker is the grandiose orchestral soundtrack, a stark contrast to the video’s poor production quality. I think most artists recognize the implicit egotism in our creative acts; McQuinn’s parody captures this feeling that the artistic act is both slightly supernatural and yet somewhat fraudulent. Don’t miss the installation hidden behind black felt by Swedish, Berlin-based artist Sonja Nilsson. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but I will say that it’s got a pop song, hologram-like effects and a (literally) stunning surprise.

Finally, I also went to Exercises in Seeing, a exhibition to which I contributed a new work, curated by the Post Brothers at Queen’s Nails Project. The premise of the show was unusual — it was a one-night only exhibition held in the dark with 31 local and international artists. The event was spirited, experimental and experiential. I enjoyed watching visitors make their way into the dark, and explore the show as their eyes adjusted. The rules of standard operating procedure had been thrown out; many visitors were liberated to touch and smell the works, while others forged into the darkness with their cellphones held out aloft, both examining and determining worth of examination within milliseconds. Visitors were meant to explore the exhibition with the aid of an audio guide, written in characteristically speculative high style by David Buuck. The audio guide lent much desired in-“sight” to the works on display to me. It’s a pity that more viewers did not take advantage of it in the venue’s party atmosphere, but it’s not too late to download the audio guide and take an audio/visual(ized) journey.

The show seems to be a collection of experiments in art- and exhibition-making, with artists and viewers freed from their conventional roles and responsibilities. I appreciated artists and viewers who were able to run with it.

Though the experience of the artists’ works in the show was limited (due to visibility as well as the nature of group shows in general), I find the work of many of the international artists to be cool, conceptual and witty — here’s a list of the artists’ names with links to their sites or their galleries’ sites.

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Art & Development, Community

A place you should be: Stephen Wirtz Gallery

A quick jaunt around commercial galleries in downtown San Francisco left me feeling a bit “meh.” Maybe because it’s August and galleries aren’t too bothered about mounting statement-making shows, maybe because my nerves were frazzled by high-tourist-season traffic, or maybe my critical eye has become a cynical eye, informed too much by thinking about art as artifactual production, parallel to other forms of industrial and cultural production. My taste for commercial art is nearly nil; like commercial radio, its near-ubiquity ensures that the odds aren’t in my favor — I’ll have to tolerate it far more often than I will be happily drawn towards it.

castneda reiman
Image Source: Stephen Wirtz Gallery Website, Castaneda/Reiman’s Places We Have Never Been Exhibition page.
Image Caption: left: Three Tree Lake (drawing #2), 2009, laser etched paper, pigment print. middle: Rocky Seascape (paper 2 x 4), 2009. pigment print, found 2 x 4, oak veneer, 28 1/2 x 96 x 3 1/2 inches. right: Painting Stack with Rocks, 2009, pigment prints, oak, sheetrock, paint, cast porcelain rocks, 53 x 79 x 70 inches

One show, though, stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. It was Castaneda/Reiman’s “Places We Have Never Been” at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. The Bay Area duo has installed reproductions of landscape paintings — complete with frames and odd slices of textured drywall — a tad too close to adjacent shelves, so the prints sag or drape abjectly. The gallery walls are painted with mismatched roll-outs, and areas of sanded joint compound are visible. Cross-sections of stacked gypsum boards are housed in beautiful stained oak; the effect is a framed geometric minimalist abstraction, contrasting sharply with the unframed reproductions. Impossibly uniform opaque white rocks cluster near the gypsum board, missing any glints of quartz, or the rough scale of granite. You can tell the rocks were man-made, but you can’t tell from what. A small landscape print or hand-drawn transfer sits in a corner, heavy rag paper with deckled edge unnervingly out in the open, unframed. An expressionistic landscape — really, not unlike the kind of commercial schlock you find in rural membership galleries — uses some slate blues and greens that appear almost municipal, echoing the industrial hues of manufactured building materials.

The whole effect creates a tense contradiction: provisionality, finely tuned to point one’s attention to multiple illusions.

To ask “Where is the art?” begets affirmative answers without clear resolution. Yes, the framed painting in the reproduction is art. Yes, the print of the painting is art. Yes, the white rocks are art. And yes, the mismatched latex paint is art.

Casteneda/Reiman successfully disperses the location of the art throughout the site — the artists’ installation is theatrical, staged — while simultaneously saying that the gallery is always a staged installation. In this way, Casteneda/Reimen highlight the artifice inherent in all art. I have no qualms with using the word “artifice,” which does not in itself posses negative connotations (though you may be of the Romantic/Modernist persuasion and your value system only allows for art that is expressive/authentic/autonomous/evidence of genius or some kind of moralistic humanism).

I realize that my description of the work — abject, quoting, dispersed — makes it sound like an exercise in endgames, and the artists like over-theorized malcontents. And I can’t say that all viewers will appreciate the work in the show; in fact, many will do a walk-by, feeling put off (rather than attracted, like me) to the exhibition’s absence of grand gestures, obvious attempts at spectacle and feats of craftsmanship. But I really enjoyed the work, and found the illusions and forms to be quite humorous. There was wit, and yes, ironic distance, and yet, there were so many ideas and connotations that unfolded in my viewing experience.

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Places We Have Never Been closes August 22. Concurrently on view at Wirtz, Kathryn Spence’s Cloudless White, another assembly of abject parts, slightly more expressive and endearing but also with moments of humor.

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Community

Good people, good times

I once worked for a MacArthur genius. Among her many talents was a tremendously high value for people — she conveyed that no matter how smart you are or how much recognition you get, you’re only as good as the people on your team.

Even geniuses don’t go it alone.

Recently I’ve had the good fortune of working with really bright and hard-working artists.

I’ve been working alongside visual arts staff and crew at YBCA who cultivate respect and teamwork. They’re artists, students, musicians, designers and artist’s assistants who are skilled and friendly. It’s been really awesome to be partly responsible for actualizing a massive art exhibition. As a solo artist, it’s easy for me to shape my work around what’s do-able for me, but this experience has shown me firsthand the impressive scale of what resources, organization and manpower can accomplish. It’s also clarified for me that working hard is really enjoyable when you’ve got good tools, peers with good attitudes, and the environment to apply one’s skills and be efficacious.

This is all in the context of helping artists realize their projects for the upcoming exhibition, Wallworks. My former CCA professor Chris Finley is installing a huge installation of vinyl, paint, string and even more stuff, that starts with vector art and shoots off. I’ve also been helping Makoto Aida, one of the mellowest artists I’ve ever worked with, never mind the language barriers. Here’s a photo of the hand of Osamu-san, Aida-san’s equally amiable assistant:

Osamu-san's hand, with "Christine," "Sean" and "Kyle" in Japanese.

Osamu-san's hand, with Christine, Sean and Kyle in Japanese.


(Sean and Kyle are tireless YBCA crew members at who’ve assisted Aida as well.)

Odili Donald Odita, from Philly, has created some really enjoyable, flawless, geometric wall paintings. Yehudit Sasportas, of Berlin, is contributing a truly massive b/w, high-contrast wall painting that’s eerily more like graphic design than painting. The way the flat black background falls away behind the white linework is really wonderful.

Also in the show will be new works by Leslie Shows, Amanda Ross-Ho, Tillman Kaiser and Edgar Arcenaux. Beside the fact that I helped to install the show, I think it’s a really great concept for a show and many of the works will be completely unlike anything you’ve seen in a while.

Wallworks opens Friday, August 3, from 8-11pm.

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