Mechanisms at The Wattis Institute of Art Technology

Dear Reader,

I went to this show with my friend, and we had fun.  It was fun.

There was a lot of art at the show.

I thought about Context.  Context makes things art.  Electrical hardware installed in the wall is art if it's in an art show.  The metal air conditioning air conduits are art if they are in an art show.  I'm a person if I'm at an art show, because art shows are for people.  I didn't see any animals besides people at the art show.  There were some bicycles parked outside.

I kind of don't know what to say about the show in retrospect.  I know my reasons for liking certain pieces, but why would you want to know why I liked something?  Unless you saw the show and liked certain pieces and wanted to share my reasons for liking something.  Or maybe you liked something at the show and couldn't put it into words why you liked it and wanted to see how I put into words my feelings about pieces.

Or if you didn't go to the show, why not?  Maybe you could go and experience it for yourself.  What then?  You don't want to take that risk of going to a bad show?  I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't gone with my friend.

If I had to sell the show to somebody, I'd say, "It had objects in it.  If you like objects, then this show is for you.  It also had images.  If you like images, then this show is for you.  You really should go to this show if you like images.  If you like documentation of actions which are intended to shed light on past evils of insurance companies, then this is your show.  It's waiting for you.  Live the dream.  Attend the show."

There was a menu sign from a restaurant that served burritos, and some of the letters were taken out to leave a kind of cryptic artifact, like some kind of rosetta stone or mysterious stone tablet from the past.

An artist bought some Aetna stock and put it in a fund to pay reparations to former slaves from when the United States had slavery.  The reparations trust focused the spotlight on the policies Aetna sold to insure slave owners against loss or damage to slaves.  People used to be property.  Are we still property?  Aetna!  I have an app on my computer called dayforcehcm, and the hcm stands for human capital management.  My employer uses the app to schedule employees.  I'm an employee.  I'm capital.  Here's a definition of "capital" I got off the internet:  "Wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing."

There were some Jay Defeo drawing type works, and I kind of liked them.  I knew the name of the artist, but didn't know their work, so it filled in a space in my mind to see them.   They were well executed and interesting forms or shapes or variations on physical objects.  There was one of some goggles, and the form was distorted and I kind of got sucked into it.  It was curious.

There were chrome hemispheres on a wall.  It was visual and unusual.  I've never seen anything like that.   If you like chrome hemispheres on a wall, then this is your show.

There was a water fountain high on a wall and it reminded me of the Duchamp fountain.  The placement high up on the wall made me laugh.  ha ha.

There was a tall piece of wood, 20 feet high, with a vibrator on it that vibrated it.

There was a collection of animal traps from montana or wyoming, I forget which.

There was supposed to be a projection in a hallway, but I couldn't see it.

There were a bunch of photographs on a wall.  There was a video projected on a wall.

There were some silver objects stacked up against each other.

There was an object with a lot of different characteristics.

There were two shaped canvases.

There were some impressions in waxy cooking grease of a certain kind of office chair, Aeron.  So funny.  I used to sit in an Aeron chair in another life.

There was a room that was supposed to have a video that was out of order.

There was a soccer video room that I only glanced in because we had to go.

I talked with another attendee today, and they said the show was about Silicon Valley in some way, but I don't recall exactly how.  Maybe it's some kind of commentary.  I've met some computer people, and think sometimes silicon valley is kind of full of itself, but there are always nice people.  If I had a piece in the show, it would be a computer with a busted monitor and a flower growing out of it.

This is a computer with a busted monitor and a flower growing out of it.

The gallery tells us to look closely at what's in it.  It tells us to pay attention, so in my mind you can constantly see new things in something you thought you already saw.

Nothing is art, and everything is art.

There were a lot of people.  It was a social event.  I met a lot of people, and saw people I already know.

Maybe it will sit in my brain and influence my life in some way, how, I don't quite know.

An Idea of a Boundary

I went to the show, An Idea of a Boundary, at the SF Arts Commission Gallery in San Francisco on Van Ness, across the street from the city hall and next door to the opera theatre.  We had a hard time finding parking and were about to go back to Oakland where I can afford to live because of rent control when wham, suddenly, just like that, in the wink of an eye, the bat of a bat eyelash, surprisingly, we found a parking space on Fell street and walked 10 minutes to get to the art show inside of the building, not outside.

Jackie Im was the curator, and I met her, and she is nice, and that's pretty much all that matters.

For starters, all the artists were women, so automatically, it's better than any show of men, but I didn't sense any misandry.

Here's a bad drawing of the art entitled "Yoke" by an artist.

 One piece was called yoke, and I forget the artist.  It was a construction out of metal and I forget what else, and it was a designed object with color and textures and shape, standing about 4 feet tall.  I guess it was just that, a designed object.  My friend liked it.  It didn't tickle my fancy.

This art is a projected moving image on a wall.

Another piece was a video projected on a wall in a nook/room of its own.  I didn't go into the room to experience it up close.  I looked at it and then kind of looked back at it as I was walking around the larger room since you didn't have to go into the small room to see it.  If curiosity is a sign of intelligence, this blog is semi-intelligent.

The woman was standing up against a wall, at least that's what it looked like since her projected image had a shadow.  So, it played with the idea of the wall as a reflective surface to project light and images onto as well as an object with physical properties like mass and volume and sense of humor.  In other words, it was a physical object.  The illusion of a wall was projected onto a wall.  Metaphysical is this?

Davena Semo made this art.

One piece with which I resonated or that engaged me was a steel thing.  I don't know what the word is, but it looked like mesh that was definitely in a steel frame over a reflective surface.  Please just look at the photo of my drawing.  My friend noted that on top of the mesh patterned steel there was a reiteration or repetition of that shape, just like repetition and reiteration that occur in nature and in art.

This piece was neat because it gave me a feeling, had some kind of mystery, tapped into my reptilian brain, my lower brain functions.  If I were this artist's art teacher, I'd kick her out of the class and give her money I don't have. 

I have to admit that I met her, and she was nice, and so I'm essentially just glad-handing and kissing ass here.  But I did like the piece.  I couldn't put it on my wall because I don't think it's decorative, but a museum or collector might like it.

A. K. Burns art, "Before the Wake."

Another artist in the show whose work I remember is A.K. Burns, and I remember it because one of my friends is fascinated or obsessed with pareidolia, and so I'm now happily well versed in it.  She probably didn't intend it, but I liked to look at the spirulina glued onto photos of Glen Canyon pre-damnation, finding faces and objects in the blobs and splatters.  I found what looked like a gargoyle in one and a rubber duckie in another and a really good image of a man's head in another.

Only now in writing this does it occur to me that a dam is a wall.  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," and let the river and canyon live.  I read about the dam and can't make up my mind if it's good or bad, so the art sits in my brain telling me about the earth before humankind started controlling rivers.

Here are some rounded, red bricks in bags on a piece of canvas.

Another piece of art sat on the floor.  It was a bunch of mesh bags holding red bricks made into big, round, river stones, shaped by waves or water or something.  I think they came out of the San Francisco Bay located in California.  And, well, I lost my train of thought, but, it sat on the floor, so you had to make sure not to trip on it.  The round, redness of the brick-stones was unusual, and the mesh bags kept them together and were see-through, so that you could see the "bricks",  and the canvas was white and had d-rings on it, and I guess I didn't get it, or I wasn't supposed to get it.  I mean, I know that the bricks were in a wall, but what's the point?  Walls are washed away, eroded by time?  They are temporal?  Wait long enough and you can put a wall in a bag?  We are all  just prisoners here?  Of our own device? (Eagles, American Musical Group)

Here is my hamfisted idea of a boundary.

Here is my piece which isn't in the show.  It's a wall of wine boxes filled with the blood voluntarily given by migrant workers.  I paid them $25,000.00 each for their blood, and as a gesture of good will, I will be donating my blood to Migrant worker blood banks as often as I can in the next 25 years.


There were more pieces of art that I liked, but I don't fully remember them and don't want to write too much for my short attention span.

Matisse and Diebenkorn at SFMOMA

Here's the café at the museum.

A lot of people like art, and I am no exception. 

We, me and my friend, went to see the Matisse with Diebenkorn Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California.

We went in the front door and up the stairs and to the elevators and up the to fifth floor where we got out of the elevator and went into the exhibit.  There were a lot of paintings by Diebenkorn and Matisse placed side by side, starting from the beginnings of their careers and going to the ends of their careers.

I like painting, so I looked at the surfaces of the paintings to see how much paint they used.  Sometimes they used a lot, and other times they used less, but they didn't do too much thick impasto stuff like Van Gogh.

I liked Matisse's stuff more than Diebenkorn's and felt like the museum was placing a local artist with Matisse to see if he could stand up to Matisse, be on the same stage with him.  I like Matisse more than Diebenkorn, but there were a few paintings of Richard's that were nice, particularly some of his later landscapey things and a painting of a woman that reminded me of Elmer Bischoff's paintings.  But if this is a traveling show, it'd be interesting to see it in a different museum not so near to where Diebenkorn lived.  I guess what I'm trying to say is this, "I never get out of town so I don't know how Diebenkorn is received in other parts of the world."

It took about 45 minutes for me to get to the end of all the paintings and drawings.  I particulary liked the drawings of Matisse's where he erased a lot, and I liked the paintings of Matisse's where you can see his adjustments to get the forms right.

I like Matisse's drawing style better than Diebenkorn's, his simplification of forms. 

The subject matter of these two painter guys was pretty prosaic - people, interiors, exteriors, still lifes, nature morte, abstractions.  There were no paintings of monsters or lions or tigers or fancy cars or airplanes or bicycles or dancing people or people in a bar drinking.   And there wasn't a single cat in the whole f#cking show that I could see.

I, Paulette, do a lot of plein air painting, so it's interesting to see the work of people who mostly paint inside of a building.  I like plein air because I don't have to think about anything, I just go outside and do it and breathe fresh air and stare at the outside world which is constantly changing and often beautiful.  So, it's interesting that these manly men find beauty in kind of boring subject matter, people sitting around, interiors.  But there are some landscapes.

Neither of them is female, so they should feel lucky just to be in the museum.

Sophia Cleary at Real Time and Space

Here is a photo of Sophia Cleary.

I went to the performance and artist talk, Sophia Cleary's, at Real Time & Space in Oakland, California on Wednesday, March 22 at 7 p.m.

I got there before it started and sat and drank a beer and talked to people about things.  There was a cork puller on the table that impressed me with how heavy and durable and stainless steely it was, so I had fun playing with that. It had two handle/levers that went up and down like arms and a twister handle that looked like a head.  I was entertained.

There were about 25 people there.  She showed slides and talked and performed.

She showed slides and talked about a performance where she blew up balloons and had her audience inhale the air in them so that she could penetrate them, be in them.  The slide showed somebody sitting in a chair holding a full balloon up to their lips.

And there were slides of her choreographed dances.  One was a 40 minute dance I'd seen a few minutes of on youtube not knowing it was 40 minutes long.  She recalled overhearing somebody at that performance say, "This is the most boring thing I've seen here."  And she thought that was an accomplishment because the venue had of history of boring events.

She showed a photo and talked about a narrative dance she choreographed where two women had to share an urn for their cremated body ashes.  The urn looked like a butt plug and they danced around it.  It was kind of a play on A Room of One's Own, the book by the famous, feminist writer person, the woman who wrote The Waves.  The fact that the urn looked like a butt plug was just a coincidence, a happy accident.

She is interested in relationship dynamics and power in relationships, human relationships.  I forget what slide this was related to, if any, or if it was just an interjection.

She talked about her performances in a van with the seats taken out and made cozy, and in the van performances she revealed a personal tidbit to the 3 or so participants about herself.  That tidbit was this.  When she has a tif or spat or conflict with her partner, she has fantasized about being injured and in the hospital so that her partner comes into the hospital to see her and feels bad or sad about her injury.  And she thought this confession/revelation might cause her audience of 3 people in the van to reveal something about themselves.  If I recall correctly, she said she likes the concept of confession.

In the slide show, she showed a picture of a performance she described as her most "professional" at some fancy performance space, and she described it as a death, her being born as an artist but the possibility of becoming anything other than an artist dying.  So, it's the death of possibilities, the end of mystery, the acceptance of one's self.  There was a large projection screen at the performance which doubled as a tombstone, and I think there were flowers, the funeral kind.

She showed a picture of a Jordan Wolfson dancing stripper robot and said that was what she didn't want to be.

She finished her slideshow and we, the audience, moved into an artist's studio for her performance.

For her performance, she read while sitting at a big desk like a person whose name she said, some man who maybe was a philosopher or poet who had sat at a similar desk to make the things he made/wrote.  On the desk was a mound of moist clay and a bunch of white clay balls.  We, the audience/participants stood around the desk, backs to the wall making a square of people in the smallish studio space turned performance space.  She would frequently break out of performer mode into the interactive or spontaneous thought mode.  I kind of glazed over while listening, trying to listen as best I could. 

She talked about the interfaces between things like that between the desk and the floor, the place where things touch and how you can't see the place between your foot and the floor while they're touching.  She extended this to include people touching people.

As she read, she handed out hard clay balls which the square audience around her circulated, in a circle.  And the room was small with 25 people in it, so it got really warm and stuffy after about 20 minutes. 

After her monologue, she asked us people to put the clay balls on the desk, and we did.  And then she asked each one of us to choose one we liked since they were all made by hand and slightly different from each other.  We did that, so about 15 of us had clay balls.  And she asked us to one by one sit in the chair and break the ball and read the message inside written on fabric or clay. 

We did that too, and we revealed whether or not the written message resonated with us.  One written message was, "Release the need to let go," and mine was "Amplify your intuition."  I probably have intuition, but I don't think about it.  I think of it as being the same as body language, where you can read people by nonverbal information. 

And that was the end of the performance.

And it goes without saying that because Sophia is a woman, her art is better than any man's art.