A few years back I stumbled across the work of Fred Eerdekens. It’s at once philosophical, conceptual and beautiful.
Fred Eerdekens
Eerdekens is represented by Spencer Brownstone, the work of other represented artists is really good. I especially like the work of:
I have always liked Lindsey White‘s photos. Her new photos and videos make up a nice show at Partisan Gallery, somebody’s house on Guerrero. Endearingly earnest, like her previous portraits, but less quirky-cute, and more chance-magic (in the end, it’s just about personal taste: arty vs. Art). The new works are about light, and veer between optimism and the pathetic/mundane.
A bad pic of a great photo by Lindsey White, of a spear of light on a pillow. She shoots digital and 120mm, if you wanted to know.
A multi-channel video installation; each video is a single shot of a single thing. It functions like a sequence of photos in a book, only with slight movement and minimal audio. Great!
Also liked Richard T. Walker‘s two-channel video installation at Iceberger. More instruments, letters to nature, human projection onto the romantic ideals of nature. His English accent adds something; for no good reason, I assume that it suggests more of an awareness of the Romantic period than if he were American. Maybe my visit to Cumbria, the land of all those English Lake writers, has something to do with it.
It was a nice summer evening, and I enjoyed chatting with artists and meeting some guys showing with Little Tree Gallery, but I couldn’t shake my self-awareness of the New Mission, as youthful gallery-goers drank Pabst on the sidewalk for hours on end, just like during First Fridays in Oakland. What’s at stake is so different for different people, isn’t it? Earlier in the day, I found a kindred iconoclast willing to challenge hipsters’ endorsement of dingy ethnic restaurants in rough neighborhoods like Tu Lan and Shalimar. WTF? Thanks to the digital age, there is a source to explain this behavior: Stuff White People Like. See #91: San Francisco and #71: Being the only white person around.
Another thing White People like is critical theory (see #81: Graduate School). I must be White, because the podcast of Johanna Drucker‘s lecture at SVA blew my mind. The artist and author challenges Adorno’s 20th c. aesthetic theory and explains her notion called aesthesis, a specialized form of knowing (through art), characterized by knowing grounded in central experience, emergent experiences and co-dependent relationships. In contrast to Adorno’s assertion that art is autonomous, Drucker suggests that art is complicit and co-dependent; that it is in fact a form of commodity production, even if we don’t like to think of it so.
A tasty morsel:
She classifies low-brow pop paintings and drawings that reference comics or media as:
combinatoric mass culture kitsch production
And on the meat of the matter, for me:
To dispute Adorno’s assertion that because art is removed from the world of utilitarian objects, they are inherently resistant, Drucker says:
The notion of resistance [inherent to art] will die hard because it is the last link to the kind of utopian belief that … has a long history with modernism, and certainly gets reformulated again in mid-19th century with the coming of political philosophy…. The shift to political philosophy from ‘regular’ philosophy is that rather than understanding or describing the condition of knowledge or sensation or the mind, the political philosophy said the point is to change it. So the task of change — which again, the world is broken, we do need to fix it — … comes to be identified with the avant garde and … the role of art assumes a moral hierarchy and a moral high ground for the artist and the work of art. And that seems to me to be highly suspect. And that’s where I come back to complicity. We are not better than the world we inhabit….
The notion that difficulty, in and of itself, is a form of resistance that performs some sort of political efficacy—it’s just not true. It’s what I call magical politics. It’s like, where exactly does the transformation of power relations and political agency actually occur in those difficult works? It doesn’t….
I make difficult work. I write really obscure things. But I don’t imagine that they are making a transformation of the political structure. I do imagine, and I do believe that they transform the meme world. That’s what we do. We are meme makers. We transform. We reimagine. We remodel. We offer new models of cognition and new models of experience. And we produce that as an effect. We don’t produce that inherently in objects. It is an effect of what we do.
I had similar feelings of caution around the sense of artists having a moral high ground in the process of developing new work for Activist Imagination. So it’s great to hear Drucker put a historical framework around the conditions of art-viewing that we are subject to, and available for displacement if we choose.
A recent view from the Marin Headlands.
Marin can seem awful far from San Francisco or Oakland, but really, once you get up there, it’s totally worth it. So come over for Tuesday’s Artists’ Talk.
Tuesday, June 17 @ 7:30PM
Artist Talk: Headlands Graduate Fellows
Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin Headlands, CA
The Graduate Fellowship Awards were established to provide outstanding recent MFA graduates with free studio space for one year and a chance to segue from art school into the professional artist’s life during their time at Headlands.
Mariah Hess, MFA in Photography, UC, Davis
Ginelle Hustrulid, MFA in Film/Video Mills College
Julie Chang, MFA in Painting Stanford University
Joe McKay, MFA in Art Practice UC, Berkeley
David Gurman, MFA in Film/Video CCA
Emily McLeod, MFA in Photography SFSU
Vanessa Woods
Location + Directions
—–
And tomorrow, don’t miss:
Saturday, June 14, 2008, 4:00 PM
Rodney Ewing: Public Safety Artist’s Talk
Frey Norris Gallery, 456 Geary St, San Francisco
On Saturday, June 14th at 4:00 in the afternoon, Ewing will offer a slide presentation and gallery talk that will examine popular media discourse on issues around public safety (and the anxieties that fuel them and attempts to mitigate them) and how these intersect with his artwork and studio practice. This event is free and open to the general public.
Currently at Frey Norris Gallery: Rodney Ewing’s first exhibition with the gallery, Public Safety, is comprised of three thematic series that are displayed throughout our space: Disarm, Countermeasures and Meditations. Public Safety examines devices and methods ostensibly designed to protect citizens. Ewing re-structures them as tools that might provide an alternative kind of security, tools that subvert the original intentions of the represented objects’ creators. The redesigning of these instruments and re-application of these techniques appear as cable-hung and wall mounted images, light boxes and installations.
Saturday, June 14, 7-9 pm
Opening: Richard T. Walker
Iceberger Gallery, 3150 18th St. @ Treat, San Francisco
Iceberger is proud to present Sometimes I like you more than othertimes. a solo show by Richard T. Walker. Walker utilizes spoken dialogue, text and original music compositions to generate video and photographic works that explore complex relationships between language, the environment and the human condition.
Ongoing / May 22 – June 29, 2008
Exhibition: You Make Me Make You, Suzanne Husky
Triple Base Gallery, 3041 24th St, San Francisco
For her ambitious installation at Triple Base, Suzanne Husky has crafted a series of soft sculptures that include Chinese factory workers, Mexican laborers, “counter-mainstream hipsters”, and a series of inventive Berkeley “eco-heroes.” The work depicts extreme labor, oppression, community, superficiality, unmindful expending of resources, and white guilt. This show is sure to entertain if you like stories, using your imagination, and thinking critically about the world we live in today.
The Dinner Lecture Series event will take place on Friday, June 27th and features special guests Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine of Futurefarmers.
SAT. JUNE 14TH, 7-10PM
OPENING: IF WE LET OURSELVES GO: NEW WORK BY LINDSEY WHITE
PARTISAN GALLERY, 112 GUERRERO (between Duboce and 14th)
Show: June 14th-July 12th
After opening, viewings by appointment:
415 272 7029
Awesome!
Check out photos of the installation of “ROOM 307: INKLING, GUTFEEL AND HUNCH,” an exhibition of contemporary art at the National Art Gallery in Manila. The show was spearheaded by MM Yu and Poklong Anading. I love the sequence of images, that shows the transformation of the dark, raw colonial-style hall in to a vibrant, populated group show, literally filling the hall to the rafters.
I especially loved the use of the windows as natural lightboxes for photographs by various artists.
The DIY spirit shines: groups of people doing what needs to get done, with scaffolding, no fancy scissor-lifts, and jury-rigged painting implements, mmmkay?
People do similar projects in warehouses in Oakland, but no one’s got a patent on authentic, DIY collectivity.
Mario Ybarra Jr. opens a new show at Lehmann Maupin (NYC) June 24. Hint: it’s gonna be NUTS!
Ybarra also just opened his museum show at the Art Institute of Chicago a few days ago!
You know who else is on a roll? Jon Brumit. When I met Jon at his Vendetta Clinic at YBCA a few years back, he just seemed like this kooky SF dude who made art to facilitate talking to strangers. Then a collaborative he’s in, Neighborhood Public Radio, was at the Headlands. Then they were at the Whitney Biennial, and now he’s going, going…
Whoa! Two greatly admired artists are coming to the Headlands this fall: Ann Hamilton and Kerry James Marshall. Though I get impatient, I look to these artists and think about how wonderful it will be when I’ve been an artist for 25 or 30 years, when the work will be getting REALLY good…
Zero One San Jose: Families out and about on a warm-ish summer night: nice. Arty hi-jinks: cool. Laptop DJs wearing coveralls: is that really necessary? I like the idea of a new media festival, but I guess to fully appreciate everything requires a certain level of connoiseurship. New media, like anything else—paintings, drawings of little characters, textiles—can be a little hokey, but maybe new media is a little more susceptible because of the wow-factor can be blinding.
I think the point of the festival is to stumble upon art in public spaces, but for an out-of-towner like me, walking around San Jose at night looking for installations off South First Street was asking a bit much. It seems like a design solution would help…
Liked Jim Campbell’s First and San Fernando Street. Simple, giant faux-LED, responsive, with its structure unhidden to the public.
Jesus Aguilar at Space 47. I loved Jesus’ show at Stephen Wirtz. Really good stuff. At Space 47, a crisp white-cube storefront gallery run by Binh Danh and Angelica Muro, Aguilar shows some “Jesus Aguilar” via Google research-as-poster/vinyl/vitrine/video art.
First Thursday Gallery Crawl: I usually binge and purge on art. That way I see a bunch of shows for a week or two, and then don’t beat myself up when I miss a few shows the next week. My trip to New York a few weeks ago was a big binge. I think I’m still recovering, because nothing really hit home Thursday downtown.
Like Sarah Wagner’s deer at Sweetow: the photos online are nice, but they’re exquisite in person too.
Like Laurie Reid’s crushed glass squiggles (basically fancy glitter abstract gesture drawings) at Stephen Wirtz. Even though the artist is probably interested in a formal investigation, I like the drawings on a conceptual level.
But I did get to see Intersection’s auction yesterday, and a big thanks goes to Kevin Chen, program director, for framing my donation. It looks great, and I hope it was able to support Intersection‘s phenomenal programming.
A few years ago, I was stuck in a catch-22: I only liked art I felt I could learn from, but I didn’t like what I was seeing, so I went to see less art, and so limited my chances of discovering exciting contemporary art.
Things have changed. First, I’m more receptive. I’ve expanded tastes in art beyond painting and drawing. I put aside preconceptions (as well as feelings of intimidation at fancy galleries). Second, I’ve built up my art endurance. Since I know more about art, it’s easier to look at art for longer durations — to contextualize it, file it away, and recall it — before feeling overwhelmed. It’s like eating: don’t fill up on the bread. Be selective. Cleanse the palette. Save room for dessert.
Most importantly, I’ve become a believer in reciprocity — that the more I look at art, the more I’ll be able to find what excites me. Sooner or later, I’m always delightfully surprised.
—
I hadn’t explored art in the South Bay much — until today.
The San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art‘s large windows let natural light into the meticulous, winding exhibition space. This Show Needs You is a friendly show of interactive social practice projects, including works by the veteran Linda Montano, and the esteemed professor Ted Purves and his partner Suzanne Cockrell. I appreciated SJICA’s reading room, chock full of printed matter and sited in a welcoming foyer just inside the front doors. The Print Center looks modest but immaculate. A show by San Jose State University MFA grads opens this weekend — don’t miss the impressive ceramic tableaus of Amanda Smith.
Making our way back up So. First Street, we popped in to the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles‘s shop and foyer: cat earrings and donut-shaped coasters in the former, a cool minidress knit of VHS tape in the latter. Did I mention the tape is wound through a video camera, purported to be taped or played back in a later performance? Badass. (Knitter’s Tapestry by Daniela K. Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai). In conjunction with the ZeroOne festival, the Museum is exhibiting textiles using digital technology.
Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americano (MACLA) is exhibiting works for auction. A fair amount of figurative painting, some fine relief prints by Juan Fuentes, and Jaime Guerrero‘s uncanny luchador mask in dripping hand-blown glass. I also really liked a mysterious photo of a falafel “totem,” perhaps a double-exposure of signage and a drive-in.
I was feeling all of my 30 years in Gallery Anno Domini (I’m just too damn old to appreciate the youth/skate curating / pop culture consumerism), so I found myself admiring the minimally-renovated theater the gallery and store are now housed in. With a huge central space, and a massive screen, I wondered why AD doesn’t present more media work. Maybe showing art that privileges evidence of the hand, i.e., drawing/painting and modestly-sized sculptures, is a form of rebellion in Silicon Valley.
Unfamiliar with San Jose (and with lunch calling), I totally forgot to stop by Space 47, around the corner from AD. I’m excited by the idea of an artist’s run outpost among San Jose’s chain stores, and hope to visit it soon.
The deSaisset Museum at Santa Clara University is nice campus museum, and the Woff and I had our socks knocked off by their current show, Eye on the Sixties: Vision, Body, and Soul: Selections from the Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. Like Woff said, it was like seeing old friends: a choice Nauman print, a Ruscha gunpowder drawing, a Nathan Oliviera work on paper, a David Park’s impassive faces in full color. I also loved several hilarious Oldenbergs, like screenprints of 2-D Mickey Mouse structures, and a semi-transparent plastic relief of a car obstructing a lithograph behind it. I even found a deliciously tactile lithograph with silver ink on gridded paper by Frank Stella, whose God-is-in-the-details geometric abstractions don’t often appeal to me. The show also reflected the burgeoning use of new materials: I found Sam Richardson’s cast plastic landscape cross-sections to wonderfully ambiguous, and somehow contemporary. There was also a kinetic “painting” with stripes of translucent color gently waving across a screen reminiscent of a television. James Grant’s #14, Bright Circle (1970), a rainbow-colored oculus of cast resin, takes the cake.
James Grant, #14, Bright Circle, 1970, cast polyester resin, 29 1/8 x 29 1/4 x 5 1/4 in., Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, © The Estate of James Grant
Go see the show, and be sure to ask the attendants to turn on the kinetic works (they’re usually off, to minimize wear-and-tear, but it’s quite ecologically sensitive, isn’t it? Thanks, P, for lending the hybrid. Happy earth day.)
In my research for Activist Imagination, I learned that Kearny Street Workshop’s early poster activities were heavily supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Neighborhood Arts Program. So it’s really beautiful that this year, KSW is celebrating is 35th Anniversary while SFAC is putting on a big Neighborhood Arts Festival. And the festivities sound terrific.
SF Arts Commission’s Neighborhood Arts Festival
Featured events include:
Monday, April 21: Mapping Survival panel discussion
Wednesday, April 23: The Money and the Madness panel discussion
Saturday, April 26: Unveiling the Future town gathering
Friday, May 2: Poetry Potluck reading
Saturday, May 3: 40th Anniversary Bash
Arts Fair
Speed Dating (RSVP requested)
Doctor Session (RSVP required)
(A sampling of community arts events put on by our Community Partners can be found here)
The Activist Imagination exhibition continues through May 24; there will be an artists’ talk and reception on Thursday, April 24 at 7 pm, and a closing reception and catalog release on May 24th at 6:30 pm.
image: Kearny Street Workshop artists, including Zand Gee, Nancy Hom, Jack Loo, Mitsui Murai, Leland Wong and others
An exhibition of reproductions of Kearny Street Workshop Posters, curated by Christine Wong Yap
1974–1983, digital prints, 10 x 10 x 10 feet (installation) Photo by Christine Wong Yap.
—
Reproduce & Revolt By Josh MacPhee and Favianna Rodriguez is coming
An extensive collection of contemporary political graphics collected from around the world, including art from many of today’s most exciting street artists, poster makers and graphic designers. All of these images are granted to the public domain, to be freely used for political purposes.
R+D 