Engineer's Daughter

throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line

Along with Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari is one of my favorite living L.A. artists, and so I'm really glad I made it out to the Legion of Honor earlier today on the last day of their retrospective exhibition of his prints.  Collecting the work Baldessari has been doing since the 1970s after he burned most of his paintings, the show is a wonderful mash-up of appropriated photographs and images from old Hollywood movies, unusual framing arrangements, and bold splashes of bright colors.  He plays with collage techniques as well as three-dimensionality, as in the awesome Person with Guitar series (pictured here) where sometimes the instruments stand out from the surface of the print and other times they are recessed into it.  I also loved some of his most recent pieces in which he has drawn lines of color onto photographs of peoples' foreheads to emphasize their worried, furrowed brows.  In one of his very first prints Baldessari handwrote the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again as if on a chalkboard, and I have always loved that as a mantra.  Tweak it slightly to encompass your creative output of choice, and then live it like Baldessari has.

an illustrated life

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, November 1
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
This time the Family Man will be joining me on-air to beg for your loose change.  And not only is it my last fundraiser shift, it's my last Sunday morning shift period.  I will be spinning nothing but my favorite tracks again, so don't forget to fall back tonight and be sure to tune in!

Earlier this week I took a long lunch at 49 Geary to see the Charley Harper show at Altman Siegel Gallery.  Harper is probably best known for the strong modernist design sense he brought to his wildlife illustrations for books like The Golden Book of Biology, and the gallery had many original pages from that and other books on display (complete with printing notations) depicting Harper's wonderful rendering of a variety of marine life, a hungry owl, baby animals, dancing pheasants.  But I also adored Harper's vintage takes on technology and industry that were interspersed among the critters, seeing his rigorous geometry applied to a painting of a "hypothetical push-button shopping panel" or a reel of magnetic tape juxtaposed against a tom-tom drum.  Unfortunately the show closed today, but I highly recommend leafing through the massive Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life at your local modern art museum gift shop or just visiting the Charley Harper Art Studio Web site.

right here, right now

I will not tell a lie: it was a bit of an ordeal getting out to the Headlands Center tonight, what with the epic traffic generated by the Bay Bridge closure.  But as soon as I was sitting in the Mess Hall at a table with other friendly faces, enjoying Keith Mercovich's gorgeous Indian-inspired vegetarian dinner, all the exhaust and gridlock was instantly forgotten.  After cones of homemade double-vanilla ice cream the program continued upstairs with a presentation by Aaron Ximm of part of his work-in-progress MARINCELLO UNSOUNDWALK.  Ximm explained that in the mid-'60s a huge development had very nearly been built right across the Gerbode Valley from the Headlands Center, and then he played a series of seven field recordings captured around the Bay Area that demonstrated everyday sounds we might have heard had the dread Marincello come to pass.  Ximm made it clear that we would be the only group of people to ever hear these sounds, so I closed my eyes and brought an extra degree of presence to my listening as wastewater burbled, golfers thwacked balls, traffic zoomed, and children shrieked.  Then as if to drive the point home about remaining in the moment Ximm took shears and cut up the only copies of the recordings right in front of us.  The theme of immediacy continued with a performance by dancer/choreographer Kara Davis in which she did live improvisation with three other dancers and also a trio of musicians to demonstrate the principles of connection central to the martial art Budo.  Similar to aikido, Budo seeks to transform moments of conflict into peaceful resolution, and it was a beautiful thing to behold the dancers and musicians spontaneously play off each other with both music and bodies twisting this way and that.  Afterwards I walked through the starry starry night over to Ximm's project space for a repeat viewing of his RODEO SUNDIAL which I'd seen at the Center's fall open house a couple weeks ago.  Utilizing a 12-hour field recording Ximm made of a full tidal cycle down at Rodeo Beach on his first day out at the Headlands, the piece also features 12 jars of water and sand from the beach set in a circle and tiny LED lights that flicker in the darkened room in response to the sounds of the waves.  Ximm offered to make pancakes in the morning for anyone who wanted to stay for the whole 12 hours, but I relegated my experience to a slightly shorter span of time.

lightning fields

I was already familiar with Hiroshi Sugimoto's luminous photographs of architecture and of the interiors of movie theaters, but the pictures in his Lightning Fields series currently on display at Fraenkel Gallery are another revelation entirely.  The huge black-and-white images are so richly textured they could be landscapes or documentary evidence of some as-yet-unidentified fauna, and I found myself openly wondering how the artist had managed to capture the intricate patterns traced by electricity itself.  Turns out Sugimoto used a powerful Van De Graaf generator to put electrical current right on his film, thereby exerting some control over the process but also leaving a lot to chance.  I instantly associated back to the images of direct electric sparks created by Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot in the 19th century that I saw in SFMOMA's mind-blowing Brought to Light show last year, and Sugimoto is certainly paying tribute to the boundless curiosity of early scientific photographers.  In fact the show includes two images from Sugimoto's latest project in which he is printing large-scale photographs from original negatives by William Henry Fox Talbot, the man credited with inventing the negative/positive photographic process in the 1830s.  It's all enough to make a science-oriented photography geek feel a bit faint.

open house

'Twas a beautiful day out at the Headlands Center for their fall open house yesterday, what with the gathering storm on the horizon and the occasional sunburst through the clouds.  Beyond the Center's gorgeous natural setting I found heaps to inspire me as I peeked into studios and chatted with artists, even if my head was so full of input at the end of the afternoon I thought it would explode.  Here is just a tiny sampling of the highlights:

• Scott Oliver's installation that reconstructs a topographical map of the Headlands using found items and garbage.
• Scoping Shaun O'Dell's CDs (Smog, Can, Sun Ra).  Oh yeah and his freakin' amazing paintings too.
• Vera Kachouh's marvelous collection of found photographs depicting bodies of water.
• Skyping with Patrick Gillespie in Syria.
• A taste of Michael Robinson's film work that has me all excited about the program he's curating at Yerba Buena in early November.
• Newly-minted Macarthur Genius Camille Utterback was out to lunch, alas.
• Aaron Ximm's interactive sound installation: the sound of the sea and twinkling lights in jars of water, all in a pitch-black room.  I will be hearing more from him and from dancer/choreographer Kara Davis at their joint public program at the Headlands next week.
• Christy Chan's Headlands Nature Channel video.
• Being able to tell Emily McLeod how much I'd loved her photos in the Domestic Disturbance show.
• Helen Lee's glass typography.
• A persimmon oat bar and a refreshing hibiscus beverage from the mess hall.

domestic disturbance

The intersection of art and life is a strong theme in the brilliant group show currently on display at Cal's Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Domestic Disturbance.  Jennifer and Kevin McCoy deliberately blur the boundary in their video I'll Replace You, pictured here, in which scenes from everyday life are acted out between spouses and friends, but the characters keep changing.  The exhibition also gave me another chance to try to unlock Desirée Holman's Reborn video which I first saw in a slightly different format at Silverman Gallery earlier this year and which features the artist's surreal investigation into the culture around the equally surreal lifelike baby dolls called Reborns.  There is a sly sense of humor in Stephanie Syjuco's work The Village (Small Encampments) when she superimposes touristy photos from the Philippines onto pictures of the interior of her own American home as if a man is plowing her carpet with a water buffalo, and Kara Hearn is hilarious acting out every single role herself in the series of short scenes in her video One Thing After Another, all shot completely in her apartment, studio, and car.  All of the artists play with truth and fiction in ways that can have you not knowing whether to trust your eyes, as in Emily McLeod's eerie pictures of the exteriors of homes that are photographed in such a way that they appear to be dollhouses or dioramas.  Things are not always how they first seem.

san francisco plays itself

The image here is the photograph that opens the first part of SF Camerawork's 35th anniversary exhibition San Francisco Plays Itself.  If John Chiara's evocative picture of sunlight reflecting off rooftops in the Excelsior district looks a little skewed it's because it was taken with a giant camera Chiara built and has mounted on a flatbed trailer, and the one-of-a-kind photograph shows the evidence of his process.  It kicks the show off with a bang, but there are many more treasures to be found within the galleries.  SF Camerawork has chosen artists who have actively engaged with the landscape, people, and politics of the Bay Area, creating a unique portrait of this place that I so love.  The exhibition begins with "Perspectives", and I was particularly drawn to Alex Fradkin's moody and color-saturated images of the old military bunkers in Marin which I have spent a fair amount of time exploring myself.  The "Figures" gallery highlights Larry Sultan's wildly opulent portrait of SF socialite Denise Hale not far from a photo of William T. Vollmann in drag as taken by Ken Miller and Katy Grannan's lovely frank images of tranvestites at the beach.  In the final section of the show, "Actions", I was happy to find Kota Ezawa's lightbox remix of the famous Patty Hearst Hibernia Bank heist, as well as Ari Marcopoulos's gorgeously grainy photocopied images of his sons' scars and the pictures Richard Misrach took along Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue in the '70s, work that I was completely unaware he had done.  The whole exhibition is really just part one of SF Camerawork's anniversary celebration with the second part opening on January 7, and I can't wait to see the next installment.

wallworks

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, October 11
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Anyone who has ever visited Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has undoubtedly been struck by the space itself, designed by Fumihiko Maki and just as impressive in its own subtle ways as that Mario Botta structure across the street.  For her debut as Yerba Buena's brand-new Director of Visual Arts curator Betti-Sue Hertz invited 8 artists to work directly on the Center's walls themselves, and the current show Wallworks displays the results.  In a nice personal twist the very first exhibition I ever saw at Yerba Buena when I first moved to San Francisco in 1997 was Three Great Walls in which Margaret Kilgallen, Shahzia Sikander, and Carolyn Castaño installed oversize works in Gallery 2, a huge airy box of a room that has a viewing balcony from the upper-floor galleries and whose fourth wall is made of glass.  That was the first time I'd ever seen Kilgallen's work in person, and that's exactly where I fell in love with her on the spot.  For the current exhibition that gallery contains Makoto Aida's Monument for Nothing III, a veritable explosion of Japanese cultural references whose candy-colored coating distracts only momentarily from their disturbing nature, and on the opposite wall the contrast of Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas's The Cosmic Rift, an epic black-and-white painting of trees tumbling into formless void.  All of the participating artists take full advantage of all the wall space they were given, and my favorite piece is Display of Properties by local artist Leslie Shows, pictured here.  Rows of pale flags hang near the high ceiling in Gallery 1, their colors and heraldic emblems missing because they are running down the walls, mixing and swirling and enacting their own dramas.  The only tragedy in Wallworks is the fact that Edgar Arceneaux's 22 Lost Signs of the Zodiac: Three Variations of Seven has been removed to make room for another exhibit in Gallery 3, which made me stomp my foot in frustration.  I hate it when museums do that before the first show is over (*cough cough SFMOMA William Kentridge cough*).

discovered

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, October 4
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Shortly after Bruce Conner died in 2008 SFMOMA put up his glorious 1974 piece SOUND OF ONE HAND ANGEL, a life-size photograph in which the outline of the artist's body forms a ghostly silhouette fading into a dark background while a single handprint glows bright as if placed directly on the film, right at his heart.  Already one of my favorite artworks, it was especially moving to see the picture after Conner's passing as a very physical reminder of his presence.  The pieces in the current show up at Gallery Paule Anglim, Bruce Conner: Discovered, still retain a little of that melancholy for me, but they are also an excellent small taste of the prolific artist's enormous body of work, taken from many points during his career.  Concentrating primarily on his works on paper, the gallery is displaying several of his awesome inkblot drawings, one of which is pictured here, as well as some other moody abstract black-and-white drawings and a few assemblages.  I could stare for hours at what Conner managed to do with just a little black ink on white paper, and I remember again that while he is gone his art remains.

tour de san francisco

Whenever I do one of my long weekends in another city I always come back to the Bay Area with a renewed energy for all the amazing art and culture going on right here in my own backyard, and the way I'm feeling post-Chicago is no exception.  This weekend I took advantage of the gorgeous weather and hoofed it from one end of the city to the other, taking in street fairs and art installations alike.  Because I'm feeling lazy (and a little woozy from all that sunshine) here on a Sunday night I'm distilling the highlights down to bullet points instead of doing full write-ups for each one.  You will quickly notice that food and drink constitute a strong theme:

• Summerland in Mint Plaza - A grilled shrimp skewer over an artichoke heart and frisee salad from Chez Papa Resto, then a red velvet and an horchata cupcake from Mission Minis.
• Tour de Fat in Golden Gate Park - One New Belgium Hoptober golden ale.  To benefit the SF Bike Coalition and the Bay Area Ridge Trail, naturally.
• Expo for Independent Arts in Golden Gate Park - A chatty stop by the KALX table, and a free scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from Ben & Jerry's thanks to a random benefactor.
• Altered Barbie at Shotwell 50 Studios - Always a fun show, but Alis Cumming's creepy-cool voyeuristic photos of dolls in compromising positions (one of which is pictured above) genuinely knocked my socks off.
• Folsom Street Fair - Plantains with beans and cheese on corn cakes from Pica Pica.  Strawberry salad from the Spencer on the Go truck.  Oh yeah and the kink.com booth.