Engineer's Daughter

squart! into the wild

I can only imagine what kind of web traffic I'm going to generate by writing about an event called SQUART!, but here goes.  SQUART! stands for spontaneous queer art and is the brainchild of current Headlands artist-in-residence Laura Arrington.  A kind of pretension-free performance art game show, under normal circumstances SQUART! invites teams to take two hours to collaboratively create a piece they then perform for an audience and a panel of judges.  However, for the Headlands version (subtitled "Into the Wild") Arrington stretched the process to almost a full 24 hours, and there were quite a few exhausted-looking performer-types running around with a vaguely manic gleam in their eye when I first arrived on Sunday afternoon to observe the results of their labors.  Each of the four participating teams were asked to do something around the themes of retreat and shelter as well as incorporate elements like a wild turkey and Wile E. Coyote, and one team member had to stay up all night and then be a featured soloist in the final work.  I was impressed with how cohesive and assured the finished pieces were given the circumstances, and there were some downright breathtaking moments too.  A man with legs I would have killed for posed dramatically in black pumps and a pink party gown during the first performance, while in the next piece a woman threw her head back and ululated wild-turkey-style before climbing up a support pole and holding herself there only with her own strength.  Team "Wreck" transformed the Headlands Officer's Club into a sort of spooky undersea fantasia, while the final team literally jumped out the window and enacted part of their piece in the rain on the hillside.  Besides the works themselves a big part of the pleasure of the event for me was hearing the constructive critiques of the celebrity judges (Meg Stuart, Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessy, Big Art Group) and the perceptive, intelligent things they had to say about such experimental material.  It was as mind-expanding as the Headlands ever is for me.  Keep an eye out for another SQUART! happening at SOMArts in June and for Fox Den, the new piece Arrington is working on while she's at the Headlands, which should be popping up at Z Space in December.

See also:

• Headlands Center for the Arts
• Laura Arrington

elbow grease

Nigerian artist Malam Zabeirou holds one of his paintings inscribed with words from the Koran, c. 2000

See also:

• Anthologie de l'Art africain au XX siècle
• Bamako Encounters, the Biennial of African Photography

agenda 03.30.2011

This is my birthday weekend, and the Bay Area is giving me many nice presents in the form of music and art and silent film and Serge Gainsbourg.  See you out there.

Thursday, March 31:

• Star Fucking Hipsters, La Plebe, Static Thought, Bum City Saints at 924 Gilman

Friday, April 1:

• Oakland Art Murmur: Eric Petitti + Josh Short at Johansson Projects
• Jeff Stratford Art Show Opening at Buzz Gallery
• Captain Ahab // Brotmann & Short // Primary Colors at the First Church of the Buzzard

Saturday, April 2:

• Alula Editions Opening Night Reception & Prototype Sessions at Triple Base
• The Lab's Annual Art Auction
• Bardot A Go Go's Serge Gainbourg Dance Party at the Rickshaw Stop
• PC Worship, Arms & Legs, Saything, Seven Lies About Girls at the Stork Club

Sunday, April 3:

• What's Next in Indie Sci-Fi at WonderCon
• Goth Night at 924 Gilman: Bestial Mouths, Primary Colors & More

Tuesday, April 5:

• Sound and Silent Film in Nature with Composer Matti Bye at Headlands Center for the Arts

disponible - a kind of mexican show, phase 2

I wrote a little while back about the first phase of the excellent Disponible - a kind of Mexican show featuring contemporary Mexican artists at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Saturday I rushed back up the hill to see the second phase before it closed that very day.  All of the art from phase 1 was still in the galleries, but one of the interior rooms had been converted into an artist's workshop for Teresa Margolles's site-specific piece.  Margolles had arranged for keymaker Antonio Hernandez Cumacho to practice his trade in the gallery for the duration of the show, which for 40 years he was able to do in his shop on a main street of Ciudad Juárez before drug violence forced him to close.  Though Cumacho was not present when I was there merely reading his story made me choke up a little, and his vacant carving station as well as a series of his souvenir keys strung up along one wall on fishing line spoke volumes.  Arturo Hernández Alcázar's installation about the work done by poor Mexican citizens was similarly affecting, its full title Never Work (transformation of knowledge into work, work into energy and energy into hot soup).  In the piece he documented both in audio and through visuals the economy around disposal of first-world electronics in Mexico, where workers perform backbreaking, potentially toxic work just to put food on the table.  The only part of the show I didn't get to see (because I missed the screening) was Natalia Almada's film El General, a still from which is pictured here, which deals with her own complicated legacy as great-granddaughter of controversial Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles.  I have pledged to hunt it down though.

See also:

• San Francisco Art Institute
• Teresa Margolles
• Arturo Hernández Alcázar
• Natalia Almada

bailiwick

Gritty reality: Charles Shepard Chapman (1879-1962) with male model, c. 1920

See also:

• Chapman in front of the finished product
• Chapman also painted the background for the mountain lion diorama at the American Museum of Natural History

pink flowers

Horrid Red

Currently native to: Aachen, Germany, and San Francisco, CA

Last Bay Area appearance: None

Next gig: The Hub in Sacramento, CA, on Thursday, June 16, 2011

RIYL: Peaking Lights, Roman Soldiers, Children's Hospital

Notes: Horrid Red is a relatively new project from two of the guys from Teenage Panzercorps, Bunker Wolf and Edmund Xavier, one of whom lives in Germany and the other in the Bay Area.  Their sound resides somewhere between cold wave and new goth, with lyrics in German.  I predict anyone raised on Joy Division and The Cure (like myself) will latch onto it immediately.

Buy: Pink Flowers (Soft Abuse) and Empty Lungs (Holidays)

See also:

show 192

playlist

public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - 11am PST, Sunday, March 27
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

Please to note the shortened time this week (blame Cal baseball).  And this will also be my last sesh before I take two weeks off to celebrate my 35th.  Tune in or stream it live to get your fix.

colorless, odorless, and tasteless

Eva and Franco Mattes, the artists behind the infamous 0100101110101101.org, have been exploring our relationship to technology in their work ever since they helped birth Net Art back in the day.  Their current show at Cain Schulte is as relevant and disturbing and wickedly brilliant as they have ever been, from their depiction of users' reactions to Franco's staged suicide on Chatroulette to their video My Generation that edits together footage of video gamers completely losing their shit while they engage what is supposed to be escapism and light entertainment.  The centerpiece of the exhibition is a special version of the Atari arcade classic Pole Position, rigged to a genuine car engine so that it pumps exhaust into the gallery when you step on the game's gas pedal.  "THE MORE YOU PLAY THE MORE YOU POLLUTE" declares a sign taped near the quarter slots, and I confess I was reluctant to contribute any more toxicity to the air myself.  The fire extinguisher taped to the side of the game was making me hella nervous too.

See also:

• Cain Schulte Gallery
• Eva and Franco Mattes

triskaidekaphobia

Pretty as a picture: Elizabeth Taylor painting, 1947 (photographer unknown)

See also:

• National Velvet trailer
• White Diamonds ad (via Cliff Hengst)