Venice Lido

On the Lido

This year I am staying in a small hotel on the Lido in Venice. It smells of jasmine, is away from the crowds, two stops on the vaporetto from the biennale, and best of all it has a small beach. At the end of each day I come back to the hotel, drop my bags, grab a towel, and walk to the beach. After a swim and a run I have a beer at the surf-bar on the beach, then return, change into dinner clothes and walk to a restaurant. The sun is out till around 7.30 so its a perfect way to end the day. My hotel is Villa Della Palme. Its fairly basic, reasonably quiet, clean, and a hundred euros a night for a double room. Time for a spritz!

The crowds in Venice

Venice Biennale 2011

Start the morning with a Caffe del Doge. It *is* worth hunting for. Almost up there with Blue Bottle coffee in San Francisco!

Crowding onto the morning vaporetto.

For me the most lasting impression from the Venice Biennale 2011 is Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's American pavilion, “Gloria”. It was a refreshing encounter. Most of the works in the pavilion resonate, and together they make a provocative exhibition. The tank piece in particular is great to talk about, look at, listen to… I want one.

Recurring themes this year: Heavy closed-loop industrial machinery (French, American, Israeli, Slovenian & Turkish pavilions); Anything plugged in; Performance everywhere but never when I was there; oh, and lots and lots of talking-head video - so much so that, at Marco Polo airport, I mistook the instructional video at the security gate for yet another artwork.

Missing this year: Any serious attempts to recuperate painting, with the exception of Seth Price’s paintings in the Central pavilion.

Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion. Maximal restraint. And really good legs. The tank piece is also theirs (see the video I posted)

Live performance in Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion

Impressions

Below are the words I jotted down for each pavilion as I went around – Its fleeting, unedited and flippant.

Giardini

Swiss crystal excess. Someone gave Hirschorn too much money.

Denmark. “Speech matters”. Not.

Nordic / Eriksson. Oh D&E where are you now?

Tank. Brilliant.

Venuzuela. Bassim pop tarts.

Russia. Monastryski mystery and substance, served dry.

Japan / Tabaimo. Dreamy animations with mirrors.

Korea / Yong Baek. Flower gun disaster.

Germany / Schlingensief. Egomania confronts blasphemy. I love this.

Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion - I liked the little touches, like changing the label from Germania to Egomania, and adding a 'Kino' grafitti tag on the side.

German pavilion - Christoph Schlingensief's installation is astounding.

Another view of the Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion

Canada / Shearer. Not for me.

Australia / Armanious. Trying too hard.

Britain / Nelson. Theme park made of dust.

France / Boltanski. Trumped by the tank.

Dutch. Opera without the melodrama.

Spain. “The inadequate”. Just so.

Israel / Landau. Didactic rises to new levels and goes underground.

Poland, Egypt, Romania. Worthy, but the Romanian’s grafitti should have been applied to all three.

Romanian Pavilion (Adrian Bojenoiu, Alexandru Niculescu). The 'why not' reasons were better than the 'why' reasons on the other wall, and better than what was inside.

Central pavilion

A slightly disheveled anti-statement that made Catelan’s stuffed pigeons the best statement of all. Oh. and Nathaniel Mellors videos.

Minimalism meets relational aethetics. Norma Jeane, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) (2011), colored plasticine (Central pavilion).

Arsenale

After the Giardini, on to the Arsenale. Song Dong's mirrored chinese closet doors were very Wong Kar-Wai .

Song’s cupboards are a great start. Marclay’s Clock is a great end. Turel’s space glows in the middle, though for me it was ruined by the attendant who insisted on standing right at the front, thereby destroying the effect (apparently someone had fallen off the edge).

A picture of my iPhone with Marclay's "The Clock" in the background. This was a perfect capstone to the Arsenale. I watched for about half an hour, I could have stayed all day.

Elsewhere - Picks:

Hirst deconstructed by Wu Rigen, in the Future Pass exhibit (17 on the maps). It was a fun pavilion if you like anime.

Nicole Knauer's cloud in the Future Pass pavilion.

Irwin Wurm's house, next to the bridge at Academia. The large guy with a blue top is unfortunately not part of the exhibit.

Yes, that is a block of watermelon on the floor. (Wilfredo Prieto, Future Generation Art Prize pavilion).

Karla Black, Scottish Pavilion. It is much better than it photographs.

Melanie Smith's Mexian pavilion showed incredible scope.

Nato a Venezia is thought provoking and the setting is cool. Talk to the gallery guides upstairs to learn more about this exhibit.

Also notable: Iraq / Abidin’s light saber battle. And Haiti by the waterfront: Glad to see them here.

PhD - End of year one

I've completed the first year of my part time Art Practice PhD at Goldsmiths College, London. Well on my way in terms of creating a research plan. A lot further to go in terms of writing and making!

Montalvo Fellowship

I am pleased to announce I have been awarded a Fellowship at the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program, at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, for the 2011/2013 season. The Montalvo Visual Arts Fellowship is an award specifically for committed artists working in areas of contemporary visual arts. I was invited to apply. My work was selected from a pool of candidates by a jury comprised of arts professionals including Bruce Yonemoto, Visual Artist; Alard von Rohr, Curator and Art Historian, Deutsche Bank; Susan Krane, Executive Director, San Jose Museum of Art; and Donna Conwell, Curator, Getty Research Institute.

A home/studio at Montalvo, designed by Adele Naude Santos and artist Doug Hollis.
Photo by Tom Ligamiri. See this SFGate story.

"Montalvo Arts Center is a multi-disciplinary arts center that has been in existence since 1939. Our artist residency is the third oldest in the United States. In 1999, the program was closed to redesign a new residency complex, consisting of ten live/work studios and a commons building designed by six teams of renowned architects and artists, on 10 acres of land within a 175 acre park, that is home to the Montalvo Arts Center. The Lucas Artists Residency Program re-opened in 2004 as one of the largest facilities specifically built as an artist residency for an international, multi-disciplinary program of artists and scholars. The Lucas Artists Residency Program fosters a community of highly motivated, talented, creative, and critical minds from a range of disciplines and geographical areas. As the heart of the programmatic offerings at Montalvo, artists and thinkers are invited to live and work in the Program’s residency for 1-3 months."

See link.

No More Art! @ ImpromptuSpace

GET YOUR PUNK ON!

Featuring: The Flails & Sunbeam Rd

May 12, 10pm to midnight

900 Tennessee Street #18, San Francisco, CA 94107

We are pleased to feature a post-art punk event to end all post-art punk events.These two bands will grind your brain. This follows the CCA MFA Thesis Exhibition (link) and is guaranteed to be an art enema. A short set, don't miss it. Dress appropriately.

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The Flails. Your last chance to see these legendary San Francisco punks before they enter into decrepitude. The Flails are the meaning of the earth.  

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Sunbeam Rd. Nice post-punk guys who all your friends dig.  Why don't these fucking guys have a record deal yet? (more)

For more, see impromptuspace.tumblr.com.

Liberated! @ ImpromptuSpace

LIBERATED!

Exhibition by Bob Lake

Presentation by Ignacio Valero

TALK BY IGNACIO VALERO STARTS AT 6.30pm

April 22nd, 6pm to midnight

900 Tennessee Street #16, San Francisco, CA 94107

This evening we feature two spaces within the 900 Tennessee Street building. One space presents Liberated!, an exhibition of found objects by artist Bob Lake. The second space features Heat & Noise - photography by Lucy Im and Audry Jones, and music by DJs Vinnie Esparza and Jerry Nice.  

A central claim in art is that it offers freedom or escape. Implicit in this notion is the realization that the previous state, of non-freedom, is left behind. In other words, within freedom is the contradictory concept of loss. True acts of liberation inevitably have buried within them a poignancy at this loss. Bob Lake's unusual exhibition of found objects, collected over a period of several years, amplify this contradiction, pointing both to the possibility of new found freedoms and the ghosts that are left behind. 

Accompanying this exhibition, there is a brief critical lecture by Professor Ignacio Valero at 6.30pm, on themes of the free in art. Ignacio is a theorist at California College of the Arts, well known for his wide ranging insights and spontaneous style of speech.

HEAT & NOISE

Photography by iM and Audge
DJs The Count, Jerry Nice and The Others

In the adjacent space is the event Heat & Noise. Lucy Im and Audrey Jones will be exhibiting photographs based on the topic of optics, entropy and work obliquely inspired by the ideas of Kandinsky's musical synesthaesia. DJs Vinnie Esparza and Jerry Nice will be spinning Latin Boogalu, psych and avant-garde jazz. 

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

Rhythm in Space @ ImpromptuSpace

Installation of Suspended Sculptures by Soo-Hwa Yuan
Performance by Liesa Lietzke

Friday's Opening Party April 15th 5-9pm
April 16 & 17  12pm-5pm

900 Tennessee Street #16, San Francisco, CA 94107

In this exhibition we bring together work by Soo-Hwa Yuan and Liesa Lietzke. Architecture and performance art are apparently very divergent fields, with their own specific histories and dialogs. By placing practitioners from these two different fields within the same exhibition frame, we aim to both juxtapose their differences and also reveal ways that they adopt similar strategies for occupying and problematizing space.

Soo-Hwa Yuan, Sculpture & Installation

Soo-Hwa Yuan's work deals with the intersection of light, form, and movement. While his installations explore the mystery of space with light and fabric surfaces on a large scale, it is his suspended sculptures that embody these three elements on a more intimate level.  With light, the sculptures create movement with shapes, and change shapes with movement.  This dynamic interplay of light, form, and motion creates visible rhythms as air moves the sculptures through space.  

The work will be shown in a unique space that allows the viewer to move around, beneath, and above the sculptures to view them from various levels and angles.  

Yuan holds a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

soohwayuan.com

Liesa Lietzke, Playing at the Edge of Intelligibility

Liesa will install herself as a performing sculpture in suitu (business tutu) and flirt with absurdity, accompanied by spoken word. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA in Creative Arts from San José State University. She is currently completing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

liesalietzke.com

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

ImpromptuSpace

Gary St. Frankenstein playing the piano.

I have created a temporary popup event space in two unusual 1,000 square foot industrial units in the heart of Dogpatch, San Francisco. ImpromptuSpace will host a series of art events and performances for two months.

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

Manual or Automatic?

Chickens by left hand, squares by right hand, simultaneously, while wearing 3D glasses. Ink on paper, 22 x 17", 2010

Jon Meyer’s exhibition, Manual or Automatic?, considers the history and the future of the human hand. Industrial automation has dramatically altered the role of the hand in contemporary life, leading paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan to conclude that in the future the hand may regress until it is no more than an index finger with which to push buttons. Responding to this provocation through anaglyph drawings, a mural-sized installation, biographical objects, geometric paintings, algorithmic and software-based works, Meyer tests the bounds of his own neuromotor capabilities, and considers his complex personal relationship to histories of manual labor.

Meyer recently began a PhD in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, London. He is a visiting artist at California College of the Arts, teaching in the Graduate Fine Art, Critical Studies, and Graduate Design programs. A recipient of a 2009 NYFA Artists Fellowship award, Meyer has exhibited in London, New York, Seattle and San Francisco. This is his first large-scale solo exhibition.

With thanks to CCA's Division of Humanities and Sciences and Professor Rachel Schreiber for making this exhibition possible.

Tecoah Bruce Gallery at the Oliver Art Center, CCA Oakland campus, 5212 Broadway.
Reception: Wed., Jan. 26, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Hours: Mon.–Fri., 8:30 a.m.–noon and 1–4:30 p.m. (closed Wed. morning);
other times by arrangement with the artist.

Eclipse - San Francisco