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I N T E R V I E W S Jump to: STUDIO 360 / WEEKEND AMERICA / WPS1 / KALW / SIGHT UNSEEN / RESONANCE FM IN LONDON / CITY IN EXILE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE RADIO TANIA NEWSLETTER PLEASE CLICK HERE Current issues, events and trends in art are a jumping off point for an exploration of ideas that aren't necessarily "news," yet are provocative and offer a lens on experience that only art can provide. Studio 360 presents richly textured and emotionally resonant stories that look at art's creative influence and transformative power in everyday life. Studio 360 is a weekly show that airs nationally through Public Radio International. For times on your local NPR station, visit Studio 360 for station listings. PIRKLE JONES In 1956 Pirkle Jones got a call from Life Magazine for a photo assignment like no other. The farm town of Monticello California would soon be submerged under Lake Berryessa and vanish from the face of the earth. Jones joined his hero, the photojournalist Dorothea Lange, to document Monticello's final year in a series of photographs called Death of a Valley. To hear this piece, click here. LOS CARPINTEROS The artists in the Cuba-based collective Los Carpinteros connect with their country through their abstract multi media art. They work together as one unit yet they each have their individual roles and tasks. And most importantly, they embody many of the traits that are inherent in Cuban art, namely the innovativeness and the sense of use and re-use. To hear this piece, click here. NATURAL CAR ALARMS The artist Nina Katchadourian explains how she decided
to transform the car alarm, and install her new version that plays tape
loops of raucous bird calls in cars on city streets.
Weekend America is a two-hour program service designed to fit the weekend state of mind. Barbara Bogaev and Bill Radke host the program each week from Los Angeles, inviting listeners to a lively conversation about the issues of the week, the arts, and public affairs. We have some time, on weekends, to see the world through each other's eyes. To walk in someone else's shoes a bit, and go to places we wouldn't otherwise go. Stop by for a weekly visit with 300 million neighbors. For times on your local NPR station, visit Weekend America for station listings. WHY NOT JUST CALL ME? How do you turn a Crate & Barrel catalog into a giant social experiment? Artist Marc Horowitz found a way and it was as simple as writing his cell phone number on a piece of paper. IMPERMANENCE How do you manage your life knowing you're only on the earth for a short time? Filmmakers David and Hi-Jin Hodge have created a video exhibit called: Impermanence: the Time of Man. Their work is part of an international program called The Missing Peace Project. The program's purpose is to renew and revitalize global dialogue about peace. Weekend America sat down with the filmmakers to talk about how their thoughts on impermanence changed during the making of their work. To hear this piece, click here. NOT A GENUINE BLACK MAN As a child, Brian Copeland was noticed quickly in his San Leandro neighborhood. He was Black. His neighbors were nearly all white and many of them were heavily racist. He shares his experiences from that time in his one-man show called "Not A Genuine Black Man." Producer Tania Ketenjian joined him recently for a walk through his old neighborhood. To hear this piece, click here.
WPS1 is the world's first internet art radio station.The station's programs combine talk and music shows hosted by contemporary writers, artists and musicians with rare historic material that includes the entire audio archive of the Museum of Modern Art. WPS1 has become a live audio museum in cyberspace, extending the visual art, book, music, film, video and performance programs that P.S.1 and MoMA are known for in ways previously unforeseen. Here, at www.wps1.org, is the first all-art, all-the-time radio station, where expression of all kinds remains truly free. Shows air for one week, twice a day. San Francisco: Our Correspondent airs approximately every 2-4 weeks. EDITION #6: Mark Horowitz Mark Horowitz's medium is conversation, making connections with total strangers and seeing what
develops. In an attempt to explain how this is art work, I said that art is meant to change your perception, meant to ask
you to look at things in a different way, offer you an experience you normally don't have, and if you're lucky it affects you
in a way that is both lasting and profound. Through my conversation with Mark in his RV parked outside of the Old Sears Building
in San Francisco, I discovered this is what Mark does. And he has found great success in doing so. EDITION #5: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video, was on view in early 2005 at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. The show presented video works by artists from over 20 different countries. By bringing together recent works that were structured around a single situation, action or individual, Irreducible offered pieces that re-visit and reinterpret video created in the late 60's and early 70's when video cameras first emerged. Artists were using the camera to document themselves working or performing or, in certain cases, simply walking across their studio. The new generation of video artists tend to use the medium to create art that represents and reflects upon the social and psychological landscape of the places they are from. Irreducible includes work from Romania, Scotland, Peru, Poland, Korea, Israel, and Norway. Ralph Rugoff, director of the Wattis Institute and and curator of Irreducible, spoke with correspondent Tania Ketenjian as they walked together through the installation. To hear this piece, click here. EDITION #4: "Noir City" and the Castro Theater Are repertory film houses succumbing to Hi-Def TV? Host Tania Ketenjian gathers three people steeped in the experience of American art-house cinema to pump up its volume in one of the hungriest film-going cultures in the world. Anita Monga was for many years the historic Castro Theater's chief programmer and is one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic film historians in the west. Eddie Muller created the popular "Noir City" film festival three years ago for the historic Castro Theater. Last year, after new owners relieve Monga of her job, she moved the festival to Gary Meyer's almost equally historic Balboa Theater, its new home in San Francisco. To hear this piece, click here. EDITION #3: Home Galleries As Tania Ketenjian tells the story, while New York artists priced out of Manhattan were moving to Brooklyn in the late 90s, a similar spike in San Francisco real estate values forced a number of artists and made it difficult for galleries to stay in business. Almost intuitively, she says, people started making galleries in their homes. Suddenly a domestic address would become a place for openings, a home for artists of different media, and the lines between home and art space blurred.Chris Perez created his first gallery in his Williamsburg apartment while working as an assistant curator on the 2002 Whitney Biennial, organizing a "stealth biennial" with artists he knew and admired. When he returned to his native San Francisco, he continued the practice and opened the showcase Ratio 3 Gallery in one room of his apartment, where Irish painter Conor McGrady recently had a solo show. Chris Sollars transformed his entire house, from the basement, up into 667 Shotwell, a homestead gallery that artists completely transform every month into new installations that are attracting serious collectors and crowds. To hear this piece, click here. EDITION #2: Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations Tania Ketenjian spotlights "Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations," one of three new exhibitions on view at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center (through January 9, 2005) featuring work by artists and collectives from California and Tijuana who treat portraiture as metaphor. Tania speaks to the Bay Area's Faviana Rodriguez, L.A.'s Shizu Saldamando, and exhibition co-curator Berin Golonu. To hear this piece, click here. EDITION #1: Aaron Ximm & Ralph Rugoff Bay Area correspondent Tania Ketenjian opens her
debut show on WPS1 with a visit to the quiet storm of sound artist Aaron
Ximm, host of San Francisco's weekly "Field Effects" concert series
- flush with his field recordings - and Ralph Rugoff, curator of "Baja
to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" at the California
College of the Arts, which not only dares to reopen the East Coast/West
Coast divide but attempts to redefine "regional" contemporary art in
a global culture.
KALW is a pioneering educational radio station licensed to the San Francisco Unified School District and broadcast at 91.7 FM. KAWL was the first FM station in San Francisco, as well as the first educational FM station in the United States, and the first station in San Francisco to broadcast NPR. Programming includes National Public Radio, Canadian and British broadcasting, as well as local productions. A Few Things Considered airs weekly on Sundays 3:30-4:00 p.m. PST on KALW. To listen to a show, click the title of the show. The life of a child in the foster care system is often unstable and constantly in flux. About two and a half years ago, a bay area group decided to use art as a way for foster youth to express themselves, and use the permanence of the photo image to give foster youth a chance to gain a sense of control over their lives. The program is called fostering art, and students meet with two teachers every week for four hours at SOMArts. To learn more about fostering art, please visit Fostering Art. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts had an opening for their most recent show titled Big Deal. Big Deal was created as a reaction to the scarcity of availability of space that artists have. So, Yerba Buena offered several local artists their own gallery space to create large form sculpture. There was a special buzz in the room, as people observed themselves and became aware of their relationship to large pieces, and their own reaction to feeling, well, small. For more information please visit the Yerba Buena Center for the Art's site about the Big Deal and Blow Up. As time passes and companies merge, the world of corporations is growing. Individuality is lost, creativity is set aside, and the worlds of art and corporation become all the more disparate. Pond, a collective gallery space in San Francisco, wanted to address this issue and look at the world of intervention art, art that interrupts consumer spaces forcing you to stop and think about that space. For more information about Shopdropping, please visit the Pond's Shopdropping site.
Sight Unseen speaks with artists and creators of all mediums seeking to understand what drives them to make and develop the ideas that they have and how those ideas can affect the ways in which we as listeners view the world and ourselves. Sight Unseen airs weekly on Fridays from noon to 12:30 p.m. PST on KALX in Berkeley at 90.7 FM. Sight Unseen can also be heard on Resonance FM in London on Tuesdays ay 1:30 p.m. GMT. To listen to a show, click the title of the show.
The term architecture has become quite broad in the 21st century. Not only do architects break boundaries in the notions of how to design a building but architecture is not just about structures but it's about space as well. The term architecture is used to describe the structure of a thought, an action, and empty space itself. Henry Urbach is the curator of design and architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and he is constantly exploring this notion of space through exhibitions he organizes. His interest in architecture began as a child but while studying a variety of mediums and disciplines during his years in school, he realized that architecture encompassed much of what interests him—social structure, beauty, history and decided to explore it further. He opened a gallery in New York called Henry Urbach Architecture, the first of its kind to exhibit architecture in the four white walls of a gallery space. After 10 years of that, the SF MoMA invited him to San Francisco and it was an offer he couldn't refuse. In this interview with Henry Urbach, we discuss space, community, public and private spheres and why the new buildings that are coming up in downtown San Francisco leave something to be desired. Last week, I went to see a dance performance from ODC, or Oberlin Dance Company. Although San Francisco is one of the epicenter's of dance in the US, I rarely go to see dance performances. I think, maybe I won't get it but after seeing the performances from ODC, I discovered it's not about getting anything, it's about having an extraordinary experience. Brenda Way has been dancing since she was 3 years old and dance has always been a means of expression for her. But at the height of the 60s, when political and social movements were high and boundaries were being broken in the arts, Way realized that movement could mirror and further express her political ideals. Trained as a formal dancer, she began breaking new ground while living in NY. She was invited to Oberlin College to teach and that was when she started the Oberlin Dance Collective, ODC. She came with the collective to San Francisco in 1976 with 16 people. She now is the co-director of ODC Dance Commons, a 33,000 sq. ft space, with 180 classes a month, 200 performances a year, and above all else, a deep sense of integrity, community and strength, the ideals she started with in the 60s. Lee Friedlander, photographer and artist, was born in Washington State in 1934 and discovered photography early in his life. He was inspired by Robert Frank and Walker Evans, truly American photographers who observed and captured American life. With this in mind, Freidlander took a different path in a similar genre, adding irreverence and humor to his work, a very witty and seemingly unself conscious style that became the inspiration for many great photographers to come. Friedlander was one of the first to elevate the snapshot to an artistic work. And he snapped all kinds of things, people at parties milling about, himself in a hotel room or a shop window, women in the street, NY scenes, workers, models, nudes and his family. There's a strength in the playfulness of these images, a sense of exploration, freedom and the discovery of a love—Friedlander's love for the medium of photography. Two years ago, the Museum of Modern Art in NY put together an extensive retrospective of his work. That show has come to San Francisco. Today on the show, the words of senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips speaking about the exhibition aptly titled Friedlander which takes us on a journey through his work from his earliest days to now. FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN—PART ONE FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN—PART TWO This week, I watched a series of documentaries that I didn't realize would change the way I looked at the world, at gender and at myself. But it did. I had read about the series in the New York Times several months ago. The article explained how a woman took a camera all over the world filming herself and other women talking—sharing stories, observing their lives, revealing their thoughts and experiences around sexuality, relationships, choices and fears. I was immediately intrigued so when I heard that the series was coming to San Francisco, not only did I have to see it but I wanted to interview the filmmaker. So I did. Here, youwill be listening to the words of filmmaker Jennifer Fox whose film, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is opening across the country and the world. Flying takes viewers on a trip to NY, South Africa, Germany, England, Pakistan, India and 12 other countries inviting us into the intimate spaces and lives of women Fox met on her travels. The inspiration for Flying was that Fox realized that women speak differently than men, especially when brought together. Beyond that, Fox was, well, a seemingly free woman, unmarried, without children and in her 40s. So different from many of her counterparts, this left her wondering who she was as a woman, wasn't she supposed to be married and what was the universal experience around not just sharing stories but understanding ones womanhood. Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is playing this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Daria Martin has shown extensively around the world in the few years that she has been making films. This year alone, she will be in a touring solo exhibition in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Her work has been seen at the Tate in London and in galleries and museums all across Europe. She writes, speaks and performs and now she is teaching as well, Daria Martin was once a painter but turned to film for many reasons, one of which is that she loved its collaborative qualities, the fact that the creation of a film is not a solitary experience but one that includes not only a multiple of people but a vast variety of references and mediums. She is from the Bay Area but is now living in London, working as an artist and teaching at Oxford. She is having a brief stint here at the California College of the Arts, teaching, ironically, in the sculpture department. She initially came to the University by invitation from Jens Hoffman, director of the Wattis Institute and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. That was where he learned of Martin's work and invited her to present some of her films at the Wattis Institute. A professor took a leave of absence from CCA and wanted Martin to fill the spot for the semester. It was in the sculpture department and although a filmmaker, Martin associates sculpture with film in that, much like film, sculpture has a structure that moves, at least in our eyes, since we are doing the moving so to speak. Even though film is a two dimensional medium it has a 3 dimensional sense. In her course, Martin is exploring the internal sculpture of film not only physically speaking but sensically as well as she observes and shares with her students the ways in which film can offer senses beyond sight and sound. I spoke with Daria Martin in her 1940s flat where she is living temporarily that is right across from the CCA campus. The myth of the Academy Awards seem to loom much larger than that of any of the festivals including Cannes or Sundance. Winning an Oscar is the ultimate achievement in filmmaking. So it came as no surprise to see the joy and excitement on director Stefan Ruzowizsky when he was doing the rounds across the country for his film The Counterfeiters, nominated for best foreign language film. The Counterfeiters did in fact win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film however I spoke with Ruzowitzsky when he was nominated. Based on a book by Adolph Burger, it tells the true story of largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. The film opens with Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, master counterfeiter, who minutes into the film is captured by the Nazis and later put to work, with a group of other prisoners, to create false British sterling and American dollars. He does so with great precision and in so doing saves the lives of him and his co-workers, so to speak. But his work helps those who are killing his people as a concentration camp with dire conditions exists behind the walls of the counterfeiting operation. Stefan Ruzowiztsky tells the tale simply, starkly and skillfully. When Paul McCarthy first started working as a performance artist in the mid-1970s, he was inspired by the Vienna Actionists, performers who used blood and excrement in their work. McCarthy himself did several pieces in which he replaced blood and excrement with ketchup, mayonnaise and chocolate sauce. In a piece titled 'Penis Painting', McCarthy paints with his penis, and in others with his head and his feet. He poured ketchup on his genitals and had them disappear between his legs in a piece called "Sauce" and In Sailor's Meat, from 1975, he copulated with raw meat, dressed in lingerie. In 'Class Fool' (1976) McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup spattered classroom and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. Some people may claim, "what is artistic about that" but the essential foundation of work for McCarthy is that it change your perception. And these pieces surely changed the immediate perception of ones existing environment. One would never guess when looking at McCarthy that he chose to push boundaries in this manner. He stands at about 5 foot 8, a long white beard, rounded fingers, jeans and a fleece jacket. He's a grandpa and he uses Santa Claus in his work but there is nothing square or reserved about the sculptures and performances McCarthy has been involved in. When the Wattis Institute approached Paul McCarthy to do a show, he decided to create a group show that reflected the memories he had of his early work. The exhibition Low Life, Slow Life: Part 1 has opened at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco and it is based on a series of lists McCarthy had compiled over the years—lists of artists, works and events he valued. In its entirety, it will ultimately include the work of 35 artists from such well knowns as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Marcel Duchamp to seemingly more obscure artists such as Paul Cotton, John Heartfield and Allan Midgette. Part 1 looks at McCarthy's early years, investigating his student years in Salt Lake City to his early career in the Bay Area during the 1970's. In 2009, Part 2 will address his work from the mid-70s to today. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is presenting At The Origin of Performance which chronicles the life of postmodern dancer and performer Anna Halprin through videos of her dance performances around the world, images of her daughters, drawings made by her students and, for me, most affecting of all, a series of photographs of Halprin herself in her 80s. It's a series in which she melts into the elements of the California coastal environment. In one shot, she has covered her entire naked body, from head to toe, in molasses and hundreds of fine bits of tree bark as she becomes a chameleon with a redwood. In another shot, she is wrapped in a white fabric, moving with the frigid Northern California tide, like a long piece of white kelp that has found itself on the shore. How does a woman in her 80s so fearlessly engage with the world around her. Well, Ms. Halprin is hardly a fearful person. She was one of the first people to ever use nudity in dance, to contemplate death through performance and to combat her own disease with cancer through movements and approaches she created herself. I spoke with Anna Halprin when she was at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts previewing the exhibition created in her honor. In the early 1900's, 99% of children in America were born at home. Today, 99% of children here are born in hospitals. The most fundamental aspect of life, birth, has had a diverse and at times shocking history. From such things as twilight sleep, a process employed in the 1930s that drugged women and restrained them during childbirth to the use of Thalidomide in the 1950s that led to serious birth defects, to the current dramatic rise in c-sections, women have been struggling to fight for a sense of empowerment around this very basic right—to have a child. In the 1970s, during the women's movement in America, a sub-movement was happening around birth where home birth was being encouraged and a culture of home birthers developed. However, these women were far from the mainstream and the choice was still viewed as an outlandish one. Now, childbirth, the medical establishment and the impeding fear of lawsuits and insurance companies has brought the issue of empowerment around childbirth to the forefront and people across America are voicing their frustrations and confusion around the process of giving birth. The Business of Being Born is a documentary by Abby Epstein and Rikki Lake and it brings the discussion of childbirth to the mainstream spotlighting the challenges women face in a hospital setting and the strength of homebirth as an empowering and very possible choice. Rikki Lake is famous for her roles in John Waters' films and as an American talk show host however after giving birth twice—once in the hospital and once at home—she discovered something that had great meaning for her, the movement around delivering babies in America. So she made a film and it is reaching across america to sold out theatres. The Business of Being Born looks at the hospital industry, looks at the role of midwives in American society, it follows the births of several women and reveals a history that is shocking to many who have not researched this topic.
LAUGHING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Laughter and humor are fundamental binding experiences. One cannot underestimate the joy felt at a baby's first smile, the connection we have when we laugh with a stranger or the sense of comraderie that humor establishes between friends. When it comes to art work, humor allows for an entry way into understanding what often is a deeper, possibly darker message. This is quite true for contemporary art where ore often than not a piece makes you laugh through its title or subject matter. Some find this infuriating, wondering why they can't get the joke while others simply enjoy the process of enjoying themselves. Laughing in a Foreign Language curated by Japanese native Mami Kataoka and is being shown at the Hayward Gallery in London. It is a group show with over 80 works of art, all centered on one central there, laughing. It opened on the 25th of January and runs through April, 2008 and while seeing the show would be brilliant, the concept of it raises enough questions and ideas to explore in contemporary art, which Mami and I did in this coversation. I spoke with Mami Kataoka when I was in London in early January. Under our conversation are the sounds of a video piece at the Hayward. We spoke about the duality of humor, the notion of the outsider, and how she actually found all these works. Gannet has a disability called Mowat-Wilson Syndrome which essentially means that his right and left brain have trouble communicating and thus he can't really integrate what he sees and hears. He drools, he has trouble eating, he can't speak and it's sometimes hard for him to see. But one thing he definitely does do is enjoy sound, enjoy life and people, and express love. When filmmaker Robert Arnold first met Gannett, it was through his friends from the Art Institute where he had studied. Robert's friends who were painters and musicians and sculptors were also caregivers and some were taking care of Gannett. You would see them in the neighborhood, a young, hipster looking type, walking slowly with a disabled person. It was already unusual to see a disabled person on the street. Here in America, and possibly in most of the western world, disabilities are not necessarily public and thus our comfort level with disabilities is shallow. Robert Arnold did not set out to make a film about a disabled person, he wanted to explore the inner world of someone who could not communicate externally the way we can. And he discovered someone so full of life and emotion. The Key of G is a documentary that tracks the mundane things, Gannett eating, showering, dressing but it reveals the extraordinary. And it shows how Gannett moves from his mother's house into a home with a group of artists who make him part of their community. Mario Ybarra Jr. may be called a Chicano artist but when the LA Times suggested that, he responded by saying “I make contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles. It’s not my goal to learn Nahuatl but to speak Cantonese.” What I believe is so telling about that statement is that Mario's mind is expansive, he explores a myriad of sides to a single idea and when speaking with him, you get that keen sense of a brain digging deeper and making connections we so often don't. Ybarra comes from LA, his family is from Guadalajara, and he has been practicing art for most of his life. He and his wife Carla founded the art collective Slanguage in LA and he has worked with numerous aspiring artists offering them opportunities they otherwise would never had. And he's only in his early 30s.Ybarra has been part of the Tijuana Biennial, he has shown work at the Tate in London and the ICA in London. He has just been accepted into the Whitney Biennial and he just completed a residency at the California College of the Arts, the product of which is a large mural that covers the walls of the entrance at the Wattis Institute, the gallery housed at the college. The mural was initially supposed to be up for 3 months, but Ybarra wanted it to remain there for 300 years! It's time has been extended to 3 years with a possibility for much longer. I interviewed Ybarra about one single thing, his mural at the college. This is the most unusual interview I have conducted because as you will notice in the next half hour, I ask only one question. Ybarra is a storyteller, an orator and although he spoke straight for nearly an hour, everything he said was absolutely fascinating to me. I hope it will be to you as well. This is part one of a two part conversation with artist Mario Ybarra Jr. speaking from the Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Right now, as I speak, hundreds of thousands of people are communicating on chat rooms. They are talking about their day, their views on politics, their innermost feelings, voicing their anger, looking for love. In fact, they are doing any number of things. The one consistent premise of chat rooms is not the topic at hand but the mere act of reaching out, of wanting to connect, of doing everything to get a sense that someone out there, in the ether, understands you and your experience. I have never personally experienced a chat room and neither had sound artist Ben Rubin when he decided to create Listening Post with a statistician named Mark Hansen. They wanted to reflect a social phenomena through sound and the result is extraordinary. I would love to describe it but it really needs to be experienced and thankfully it can be, right now, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Essentially, it's a visual and aural representation of chats going on in the world right now. It has six scenes, each reflecting a different, say, genre of chat and it's arresting and beautiful and sad and intriguing and many other things I am sure. These are just some of my own personal reactions. Listening Post has been purchased by the San Jose Museum of Art but is currently traveling all over the world. When Hiroshi Sugimoto was a young man, he was slated to take over his father's business. The first born son in a Japanese family, Sugimoto could have been a successful business man but business did not speak to him, it was far from how he wanted to spend his life. In fact, what captivated him was the fundamental issues many of us grapple with, issues of life and death, of time and history, the ways in which we see the world and how that differs from the ways other people see the world. When Sugimoto was 12 years old, he started using a camera and realized that photographs are like a time machine, a way of documenting and recreating memory. One of his most famous series of works is titled Seascapes and part of the reason Sugimoto created it was to recapture his very first memory, the site of the horizon. Sugimoto is a trickster of sorts. He loves to make the viewer think they are seeing something real and he furthermore loves to play with the notion of what is real. As he says, photography used to be used as a means to gather evidence. But now, it can be so manipulated that it hardly tells the truth. Hiroshi Sugimoto has a large retrospective here in San Francisco at the de young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He chooses to hang his shows himself so the exhibition is not only striking in its content but glorious in its context. As you enter the gallery space, you are warned that you are entering a very dimply lit space, virtually black, and you may have trouble seeing the people around you. This allows for a deeper focus on the images and it further brings to life this pictures that seem to be asking questions about what life is. The first image we see looks much like a painting, as many of Sugimoto's works do. But, as he said, painting is a much more ancient medium and has much fewer limitations. Sugimoto loves the challenge of photography and the many contradictions it inspires. I spoke with Hiroshi Sugimoto when he came to San Francisco for his opening. We walked through the exhibition together. EDWARD BURTYNSKY and JENNIFER BAICHWAL In 2005, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky won the TED prize, a prestigious award given to three people a year. As part of the award, the recipient is given the the chance to speak at the TED conference and share three wishes he or she has for the world. In the case of Burtynsky, these issues revolved around sustainability and his intimate awareness of the fact that man's effect on earth is becoming increasingly destructive. In fact, Burtynsky's study on man's effect began when he first started university. It was a project his professor gave him, to document the evidence of man on earth, and, according to Burtynsky, he is still working on that initial project. Edward Burtynsky's photographs are beautiful, massive reflections on massive global influences. However, what is interesting about Burtynsky is that he is not photographing inherently beautiful landscapes. In fact, some of the images he captures are quite horrific when you think of the consequences of the subjects he deals with--factories, quarries, urban mines, oil. Now a film has been made about the work titled Manufactured Landscapes. The filmmaker, Jennifer Baichwal, loved Burtynsky's work and given the social implications it has, decided that a film would be a brilliant way to reveal the source of the images The film looks at the life behind the still images Burtynsky captures, it takes us into the moving reality of the the quarries and dams that Burtynsky travels around the world to photograph. In the film, we travel to China and Bangladesh. We see young men knee deep in oil, we see older men who have worked on the Three Gorges Dam for nearly ten years, we see cities leveled and piles of electronic waste, we see clouds turned black from the smoke of coal mines and we observe the way Baichwal meticulously turns still images into moving pictures. It's a brilliant film and one that forces you to look at all the things you find disposable and re-question their value and the place where they might ultimately end up. Vivienne Westwood, the well known fashion designer who has changed the face of design over the last 40 years just arrived to San Francisco with an expected splash this past weekend. This week on Sight Unseen, part one of my interview with Dame Westwood. As you may know, Westwood's initial designs shocked the world with their punk aesthetic. She worked with Malcolm McClaren, manager of The Sex Pistols, opened a store on Kings Road called Let it Rock and that was when her design career began. Over the years she has both broken boundaries and remained committed to a history of design and fashion—Westwood has reinvented fashion objects, re-contextualizing them, changing their meaning and commenting on established British traditions (both of aesthetic and class). Along with that, she has been embraced by the British establishment even though she was so anti-establishment during the early part of her career. Now she has a show called Vivienne Westwood: 36 years in Fashion. The show started at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is traveling around the world. It's only stop in the US is here in San Francisco at the de Young Museum and right after the opening, the museum was filled with visitors. The show is quite extensive, spanning Westwood's entire career and the deYoung has offered an entire floor of the Museum for the show. In a way, when entering the exhibit, you feel like you're entering into the beautiful mind of the designer. Vivienne Westwood and I spoke about the reverence to the past (and the necessity of that reverence), the banality of contemporary art, the experience of collaboration and her advice to young designers, amongst other things. The largest collection of Matisse's outside of the Matisse Museum in Paris, Picasso's first sculptures ever made in concrete, Miros, Giacomettis, David Smith, Lichtenstein, Antony Gormley, James Turrell, these are just a selection of works that Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy have collected over the past 50 years. and now, these works can be viewed in a private museum called The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. I met Raymond Nasher there this weekend. He had just returned from a visit to the White House where he had chats with the First Lady about the arts in America. Raymond Nasher opened the sculpture center three years ago in Dallas. He wanted it to be designed by Renzo Piano, he wanted to create an open air museum, a building where it would be difficult to distinguish between outside and in, and most importantly, he wanted to share his collection with people, not keep it for his family or for himself. In fact, he believes that art is meant to be shared, it's the foundation for a community to grow, to learn, to have profound experiences. That said, Raymond Nasher has amassed a collection very few ever have the opportunity to do and he started from scratch, having grown as a collector and a real estate developer, all the while living in a nurturing relationship with his wife Patsy, who had the eye for the work. MONTAGE: A COLLECTION OF VOICES FROM THE PAST YEAR This week, I have selected a montage of bits and pieces of interviews I have done over that last couple of years. I have spoken with loads of artists from varying backgrounds, architects from London, installation artists from Switzerland, curators from NY, performance artists from Maine, designers from Canada and a furniture designer from Dorset. The snippets you will hear are both about their art and about their perceptions, on their life, experience and the work they have created. The voices you will hear are those of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tobias Wong, William Pope.L, Ralph Rugoff, Wim Wenders, Philip Wood, Dennis Crompton and Matthew Higgs. Throughout, the music of Miles Davis. The Rape of Europa is a documentary that has recently premiered here in the Bay Area at the SF International Film Festival. Today on Sight Unseen, the voices of two of the filmmakers RichArd Berge and Bonnie Cohen. The Rape of Europa tells the story of the systematic theft and deliberate destruction of tens of thousands of works of art by the Nazi party. As you may know, Hitler was an aspiring artist before he became the leader of the Nazi party. But when he applied to art school, he was rejected. Many people on the board of the university were Jewish and he was so infuriated by his rejection, and so obsessed with the notion of becoming a great artist and collector, that he and his party proceeded to quote un quote "collect", in other words forcefully steal from major museums around Europe. Some of the greatest treasures (Klimt, Raphael, Picasso, Rembrandt) were hidden in castles and salt mines, others were burned and destroyed. Many of these would have been entirely lost had a group of army men called the Monuments Men not been assigned to find them. There are still countless pieces still missing and other pieces that have been returned. And to add insult to injury, the Nazi party not only went into museums and art institutions but they went into people's homes, their private spaces, and took what they wanted. They stole furniture and artifacts, works that only have value to the owners themselves. The Rape of Europa looks at all of these aspects and poses the issue of the importance and exchangeability, or lack thereof, of life and art. In the film, art and life are one in the same, they can't live without the other and trying to wipe out art work and forcibly steal it from a country is much the same as wiping out that race. It takes their history, their memory, their pride. Richard Berge, Bonnie Cohen and I spoke about this, about parts of the film that never made it to the screen, about the volume of works stolen, the ways in which they were found, and the importance of contemporary jewish museums and how the creation of those museums is an attempt to reclaim a lost past. JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IN UNWRITTEN The Clash is one of the most influential punk bands in history. In essence, they changed the face of music and they have influenced a wide range of creative luminaries such as Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi, Damien Hirst and Johnny Depp. We see all these faces and so much more in Julien Temple's most recent documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Joe Strummer started the band whilst living in squats in London. A revolution was happening in music and some of the most groundbreaking sounds of the time were emerging, least of which was The Sex Pistols. They were around at the same the time The Clash was and then aspiring filmmaker Julien Temple had a choice. He knew something big was happening and wanted to document it in some way. So, at the time, he settled on The Sex Pistols and his first films were about them. He has since had a long and full career in film and his latest work turns to The Clash and particularly lead singer Joe Strummer. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is made beautifully in a pastiche of interviews, found footage, animation, concerts and personal interviews with Joe Strummer himself before his death at the age of 50. This film isn't just a chronicle of a band. As Julien Temple said, "You can call it a music film if you want but it's about celebrity [and] its effect [on] not just the fans but on somebody famous. Joe's life throws up so many ideas. I like him as a philosopher more than as a rock star." I spoke with Julien Temple when he was here in San Francisco. Cinematic Orchestra is a British band that is difficult to define by genre. MOJO said that their most recent album "builds into a grandly melancholic journey through life, love, family and, finally death, via chamber jazz intimacy, midnight acoustic buzz and rich orchestral sweep" while other places would see Cinematics as downtempo or acid jazz, trip hop, or even drum and bass. But really none of these titles suit them. Maybe what is most true is that their elemental, their reach a certain quiet space within you and rest their for a while, and their work is very well crafted much like a sculpture, removing the excesses to allow for an inner beauty to emerge. It's not the least bit surprising that this would be true considering that Jason Swiscoe, the founder of Cinematic Orchestra had just finished art school when he started this proejcting and in school, he was a scultpor. Since the bands inception, they have played music for ceremonies honoring filmmakers as presitigious as Stanley Kubrick, they have been asked to create the soundtrack for groundbreaking films Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Needless to say, they fall within the liminal spaces of a myriad of artistic genres. I spoke with Jason Swinscoe when he was in San Francisco performing. In 2004, a groundbreaking artist came onto the scene. Her work was uninhibited, vibrant and massive. She was being compared to Kandinsky and Pollock, she was discovered in a coffee shop in Binghampton, New York, and she was 4 years old. Her name is Marla Olmstead, you might have heard of her. In fact, if you watch television or follow the media, she would have been hard to miss. Her work, her name and her story was absolutely everywhere. The way she came about, outside of the confines of her home, was through a friend who had a cafe. He wanted to show her work there and sold a piece for $250. Then a gallery owner thought of having a show. The local paper wrote an article about it, the New York Times picked it up and her career soared. That is how filmmaker Amir Bar Lev discovered her. He was working in television and struggling to find a way out and in the New York Times, there she was. It seemed like the perfect story about modern and contemporary art. Her pieces were selling for 10s of thousands of dollars and after her opening, and the articles, there was an 85 person wait list for her work.And it was all the more engrossing because the media was so attached to Marla and it became a story about the media's role in creating the image and value of an artist. Amir Bar Lev called up the Olmstead family and was let in. But half way into filming marla, an expose came out on 6o minutes. It was suggested that Marla was not the sole creator of her work. In fact, it was her father that was helping her create these pieces and suddenly the story of a miraculous talent emerging from a shy and beautiful little girl who came from a modest and humble family start to crumble. Even Bar Lev had his doubts and we see all of this in his film "My Kid Could Paint That". the power of this film is that it doesn't offer answers but it extends a myriad of conversations, about art, the art world, media, family, and the role of a documentarian. The film was a sensation at Sundance and has been hailed as "the best documentary of this or any other year. I spoke with Amir Bar Lev when he was here presenting his documentary. Here, he tells the story of how he discovered Marla. There's a Romani proverb that states, you cannot walk straight when the road bends. You may wonder who I am referring to when I say Romani. Well, it;s the true name of a group of people that have long been called Gypsies. Mention the term gypsy in Europe and other parts of the world, and there arises an immediate disdain. Gypsies are seen as thieving travelers with no home, no clear identity, and no sense of community. But like most prejudices, this is sorely misconstrued and we get a sense of the truth of the Romani people through a film titled When the Road Bends, Tales of a Gypsy Caravan. Shot by legendary filmmaker, Albert Maysles, When the Road Bends takes you on a journey through five Romani bands from four countries who unite for the Gypsy Caravan as they take their show around North America for a six-week tour, sold out tour. What is amazing is how these people, with different languages and different customs begin to understand eachother and unite through music. Jasmine Dellal is the filmmaker and I spoke with her when she came to San Francisco. INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTORS-PART TWO Wu-Tang Wu-Tang Wu-Tang Wu-Tang....These were the chants coming from the crowd awaiting the appearance of the Wu Tang Clan at Rock the Bells, a music festival put together by producer Chang Weisberg and his team the Guerilla Union. It was the first time Wu Tang would be together after having broken apart several years earlier. This was 2004 and at the time, Denis Hennelly and Casey Suchan wanted to make a film about the event. Now Rock the Bells is also a documentary, one that followed the happenings of Chang and his team as he brought together Wu Tang Clan for that first time. It's hard to describe the legend of the Wu Tang Clan and all that they represent. When they first came on the scene in the early 90's, they embodied everything that hip hop is, strength, community, comraderie, mystery, talent. They started as three members, grew to nine, now, some say, they are 300 Wu Tang affiliates, rappers or producers that associate themselves with Wu Tang. The core memebers of Wu Tang have now become an all-star New York-based lineup of Grammy winners, multiplatinum-selling solo artists, multiplatinum record producers, film stars, screenwriters, TV stars, product spokespersons, business owners and, most recently, major motion picture composers. Needless to say, Wu Tang has gone quite far in a short period of time. However, the members of Wu Tang, while celebrties, are like a family, with their trials, tribulations, challenges, triumphs and pains, possibly the biggest one of which was the death of the infamous Old Dirty Bastard, also known as ODB. Rock the Bells, by filmmakers Denis Hennelly and Casey Suchan, observes all the intimacy and intricacy of producing an event of such portence, of bringing togther a band that loves eachother and struggles with their individual personalities, and of taking the viewer on a ride of a concert that could very well fall apart and become destructive. Rock the Bells has been the official selection at nearly 20 film festivals world wide and has received praise ranging from "a fascinating glimpse of a dreamer and a music culture that has always depended on dreams" to "it's like Dave Chapelle's block party grew testes." The art scene here in San Fracisco doesn't proclaim itself like the one in New York does, it doesn't shout out, some may even argue, there is no art scene. But hidden in the crevices are gems that shine brightly and one of those gems is Raimonds Staprans. San Francisco is not a place where you come to so to speak make it. You come here to live the life of those who have made it, or try your best to. It's such a beautiful city and it's hard to resist its charm. I imagine this is part of what artist Raimonds Staprans has felt, living here, away from his native Latvia. I learned of Raimonds Staprans from my studio mate and friend Gage. He had seen Staprans work at an opening at the Hackett Freedman gallery in downtown San Francisco. The brilliance of the paintings in color and the seeming loneliness, near emtiness in subject was initially an attractive contradiction for me in Staprans work. Like a haiku, there is a vastness in simplicity. and as staprans and I discussed in this interview, one can go so much further in thought when placed in stillness. I spoke with Raimonds Staprans at his home here in San Francisco. We sat before his window, a brilliant expansive view of most of the city. To my right was a painting that hung low on the wall. Staprans likes to hang paintings nearly at the floor. I was surrounded by his paintings and his presence. Born in 1927, Staprans has lived a full life, a painter in America, a playwritght in Latvia, a refugee of WWII. And yet his demeaner is in no way dramatic. He tells you how it is, as long as you ask. NOT GIVEN: TALKING OF AND AROUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF ARAB WOMEN-PART ONE NOT GIVEN: TALKING OF AND AROUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF ARAB WOMEN-PART TWO The exhibition Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women is here from Marseilles and was curated by Isabelle Massu and Dore Bowen. When I spoke with the curators, they both commented on how interesting the reactions to such an exhibition has been here in the US as compared to France. The thing is, in the past few years, the image of the arab world in America has changed dramatically and has been tainted by media. Recent histories and our own sense of difference has made arab identity both skewed and inaccessible. The exhibition Not Given offers a very different, and possibly a clearer view of the arab world and particularly of arab women. The collection of photographs we see is drawn from the Arab Image Foundation, an organization that has meticulously collected images taken by and of arab peoples. The foundation not only has collected these images but has categorized them in a very distinctive and conscious manner, giving tags to each image—woman, man, tie, street. The images that Isabelle and Dore have focused on are images that were given the tag disguise. What we are faced with is images that may seem shocking to the occidental viewer, arab women kissing on the lips, arab women getting married, arab women standing naked, arab women crossdressing. The images are not sordid, in fact there is a sense of playfullness, a definite sense of disguise. However they are provocative because they put into question not only our assumptions about arab culture but our identity of arab women in particular. In this interview, we speak of the images themselves, the interest that Dore and Isabelle had when they first came across these photographs and the ways in which those perceptions have changed. TANYA ZIMBARDO-C0-CURATOR OF MEN IN GOLD by SYLVIE BLOCHER Money—in most circles the term is a vulgar one. It's not appropriate to speak about money, it's impolite, offensive, divisive, it conjurs up unwanted emotions and even though it drives much of what we do, how we spend our time and where we put our energies, it's a topic that is rarely discussed. French video artist Sylvie Blocher has created a piece that opens the conversation about money. It is titled Men in Gold and it is one of her ULA projects. ULA stands for Universal Local Art and what Blocher does is look at universal issues that manifest locally and create art works about it. She does this all over the world and in the case of the Bay Area and San Francisco, that universal issue was that of money. Blocher calls this area the Golden Valley and it is in this valley that money has sprouted at exponential growth in the last 10 years. The valley is Silicon Valley and it is there that many people became millionaires nearly overnight. Blocher and the SF MoMA essentially did a call out for millionaires, finding out through their networks who would want to be part of this project. Basically what these millionaires had to be willing to do was to sit and answer a series of questions from Blocher, questions about their relationship to money, do they sexualize it, do they feel guilty about it, does money isolate them, does it excite them. Blocher cuts out all her questions and you are left with the answers and the look of these entrepreuners, venture capitalists, these young men who have great wealth, reflecting on themselves, on their life and on this seemingly taboo topic. Blocher looks at how wealth manifests itself in society and in the person themselves. I erased an interview from my flash recorder, the precise interview I was going to use for this week's show and after searching everywhere and even coming to the point where I wondered if the file might be magically floating in my car, I have decided to just give up, settle up and offer what I can for the show and the piece and play music. So the piece that was going to air this week was an interview with the somewhat obscure but longstanding canadian band, Do Make Say Think. The band first played in an elementary school gymnasium. These words that make up their name were on the wall and so they were known as Do Make Say Think. Charles Spearin, the frontman who was one of the people I interviewed, is a father of two. Before Do Make Say Think became a band, it consisted of a bunch of friends hanging out in a living room , playing around with instruments and a 8 track. I asked him how is this different from sound art and while it is often difficult to distinguish the two, I think we ended up agreeing it came down to melody and intention. Now 10 years later, no longer a roomate but a father, Charles is still making music. It is his passion, it gives him meaning and it allows him to explore. The line between sound art and music is a fine one when it comes to this band. the song playing under me is a track from their first album and has the feel of a sound art piece. Ten years later, while their music has definitely matured, that sense of experimentation remains. Often the band will sit and argue over the most minute part of a piece, and try and understand conceptually why a sound should or should not be there. In other words, they may be the conceptual art of music. In the next half hour you will hear tracks from their very first album and their most recent album 10 years on. This first track is titled The Fare to Get There from their very first album. Following that is in mind from their most recent album, You, You're a History in Rust. After that, Her Story of Glory and finally, again from their first album, Onions. OPEN STUDIOS: WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE OF ART (or the earliest you can remember)? For a few weekends a year, San Francisco artists open their studios open and invite everyone in. I work in a studio space with a collection of painters and sculptors and I tried to think of a way I could contribute. So I laid out a mic, mini disc and headphones and asked people to record themselves answering this question: What is your first experience of art (or the first one you can remember)? This is a collection of the answers I received. I wasn't even there to record but people did a lovely job of holding the mic and sharing some of their early experiences. Tara Wray was born in Manhattan, Kansas and raised by an undiagnosed yet evidently mentally unstable single mother. Tara never knew what mood her mother would be in, when she might want to pick up and move as she did every year, what might drive her to become angry or over protective, insulting or adoring. there was no consistency, a lot of fear and a sense that although tara was the daughter, she had to act as the mother. When Tara was 20 years old, she left home and went as far as she could. She studied in Finland, then New York and didn't speak to or see her mom for 6 years. During that time, she wrote about her, thought about her, cried about her, missed her, was angry at her and longed to see her. The only way she would do so however was on her own terms and it was then that she decided to make a film. Having never picked up a camera before, Tara decided to make a film about her mom, their reunion, their past and the desire to come back together. Tara's debut film titled Manhattan, Kansas has won a number of awards, has been traveling around the country and was part of The Independent Film Festival here in San Francisco. Jens Hoffman was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and he recently moved to San Francisco to head the Wattis Institute, a gallery space housed in the California College of Arts. Wattis is one of the most innovative galleries in San Francisco with exhibitions that offer a real sense of curatorial practice at its best. As we discuss in this interview, Jens believes in the strength of a curator to direct a show that is at once surprising and offers a new way of seeing. What don't we see, what passes us by, how can a curator help us see more clearly, change the context of a space and of our presence in it? I spoke with Jens after he had been here for two weeks. He had already planned two years of programming at the Wattis. We spoke about his thoughts on place, time and the role of a curator and how it mirrors his experience of that as a theatre director. When Mark Becker set out to make Romantico, he never imagined the film would turn out as it had. As he will reveal in this interview I had with him, he was living in the Mission district of San Francisco, an ethnically mixed and increasingly gentrified neighborhood where gringos like Mark eat burritos and visit cantinas. The relationship is generally amicable but the circumstances of each culture remain slightly unclear. Often in the Mission, patrons of bars and restaurants come across mariachis, or mexican musicians, belting out songs from the homeland, as if it's their passion. But the fact is that many of these performers have struggled across the border and found themselves here, only to struggle to make a few dollars a night, just enough to send back home and make a difference. The story of Romantico follows such a person, Carmelo, but reveals a much more in depth experience and past. Carmelo wanted to tell his story, of his childhood, leaving school at the age of 7 to beg for money for his family, struggling to raise his own kids, a bout of depression, the strength that he had to keep himself and his loved ones strong and the arduous and seemingly inevitable journey from Mexico to America.....and maybe even back again. ART BASEL MIAMI'S SOUND ART LOUNGE Art Basel Miami has become the largest art fair in the world. Artists, galleries, curoators, collectors and any of those interested in the arts join together for 5 days in balmy Miami to buy, share, celebrate, question and experience the growing world of art. Sound Art has now made a stronger appearance at Art Basel Miami and this year the Sound Art Lounge was a walk through the botanical gardens with the accompaniment of sounds—of birds, insects, opera, words, anything that curator David Weinstein could come up with. I spoke with David at Art Basel about the collection of sounds he has put together. To gear the sounds themselves, please click on the links below. ART BASEL MIAMI'S SOUND ART LOUNGE—PART 1 ART BASEL MIAMI'S SOUND ART LOUNGE—PART 2 ART BASEL MIAMI'S SOUND ART LOUNGE—PART 3 Bjørn Melhus is an artist based in Berlin but shown all over the world. His main medium is sound and video and he uses these to subvert and re-contextualize American television—the evangelists, the home shopping networkers, the daytime talk shows. In so doing, we are forced to look at the reality we so readily accept, a reality that televison consistently presents. And observe the ways in which we see ourselves through this scripted world. THE BLOOD OF YINGZHOU DISTRICT "Extend your arm, bear the pain of a needle. Then flex your arm, 50 Yuan is earned." This was one of many jingles created by blood banks in China, which rural people committed to memory. But due to unsafe practices, thousands of impoverished Chinese contract HIV and other diseases through contaminated blood, often leaving behind orphaned children to raise each other or depend on compassionate families for support. Hong Kong-born filmmaker Ruby Yang and award-winning producer Thomas Lennon followed these orphans in the rural villages of Yingzhou District for one year and the film, The Blood of Yingzhou District, was born. NO MUSIC DAY and BEYOND THE CALL In the first half of the show, the voices of people on the street in San Francisco talking about what music means to them, some of their best experiences of music and even humming a few tunes (is humming music?). And later in the show, the more usual Sight Unseen fare, an interview with documentarian Adrian Belic (Genghis Blues) talking about his recent film, Beyond the Call, about three humanitarians whom Adrian travels the world with for 6 years observing what they do, how, why and the shock at what unusual humanitarians they are. Jewish culture in America is quite powerful. I say culture because although Judaism is a religion, it carries with it a strong cultural component. As a result, the identity of a Jew and how that identity manifests in their personal life is quite fluid. This week, you will hear the voices of three artists exploring this issue in an exhibition at the San Francisco Jewish Museum. The show is called the Jewish Identity Project. It began in New York and has found its way here. I spoke with three artists from the show. Jaime Permuth, a Guatemalan Jew, one of only 1000 from Guatemala City. Jessica Shokrian, an American from Iranian/Jewish descent, and Chris Verene, a gentile as they say, a non jew who grew up in what was first town in A,erica to have Jewish settlers. Jaime documented the conversion of a middle aged woman into Judaism, Jessica created a collection of video pieces that were deeply personal and reflective of her identity and what created that identity and Chris followed the last few years of a close friend of his father's in his hometown, Max, a jew who escaped the holocaust and came to the US by himself. How is our identity formed, what does our religion say about who we are, why is it difficult to identify what Judaism is, and how murky has the term become as we observe from afar the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Does that have anything to do with Judaism per say, and in the end, how does it affect identity? . To learn more about The Jewish Identity Project, please visit www.thejewishmuseum.org. JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE On November 18th, 1978, 909 members of Jim Jones' congregation called The People's Temple consciously drank Kool Aid mixed with cyanide and died in Jonestown, Guyana. The event was viewed as the largest mass suicide in history and shattered the hopes that thousands had for The People's Temple. Many of those who died were children, and what remains absolutely shocking is how could one man convince hundreds of people to kill themselves in a community they had built in the jungles of South America. Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple traces the rise and fall of the congregation and follows the life of its charismatic leader Jim Jones. Filmmaker Stanley Nelson, a new york native but recent transplant to the Bay Area made this brilliant documentary after he had heard the voices of several of the former member of the People's Temple on the radio. As we discussed, he was amazed at the positive reflections these members had. What had the People's Temple created before everything went so awfully wrong and how had it affected the survivors who didn't die on that fateful day in 1978. Stanley Nelson speaks with former members, shows footage from the community and congregation of the People's Temple, and draws us in to the development of Jim Jones as a person, a leader, and what some may call, a murderer. I spoke with Stanley Nelson about the history of the People's Temple and the effect the making of the film had on him as a person, amongst other things. To learn more about Jonestown, please visit www.firelightmedia.org. In 1923, Edward Weston was in love. He had fallen in love with a fiery, beautiful Italian woman named Tina Modotti and decided to move to Mexico with her. She learned photography from him, they took photographs together and they had a love affair that lasted for three years. The thing is, their love was challenging and their visions almost opposites. Weston relished in beauty, in form and shape, in abstraction while Modotti saw art as a means to create change, her work was about the people, the peasants, those that struggled and her intention was to bring light to the human side of experience, not the aesthetic one. Eventually Weston and Modotti wen their separate ways but the exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, titled Mexico as Muse, brings their visions together side by side. The works are well executed, beautiful. They show us Mexico, free from civil unrest, open to a burgeoning art community, glorious in light and challenged by issues of class, of the divide between the indigenous and the newer settlers. What Mexico as Muse reminds us of is the connection we in America have to mexico, a connection all too often forgotten or denied. It also illustrates that inevitable question that rises in artists: what is the point of my work, what is its purpose and how does the purpose of beauty versus action manifest. I spoke with Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. To learn more about Mexico as Muse please visit www.sfmoma.org. In 2005, Laura Poitras had had enough. She was sitting in her apartment in Tribeca New York and day after day, she was reading about the challenges, some may say atrocities, occurring in Iraq. What was happening there, how were American soldiers creating democracy there, what were the consequences of such a "pursuit" and what was the story behind the news coverage, behind the facts. Poitras, an American woman, decided to go to Iraq on her own, no protection, no understanding of language, very few contacts, and a huge sense of belief, a belief that exceeded any fear she had. She wanted to cover the elections in Iraq, elections being one of the foremost representations of democracy. She stayed there for eight months and filmed almost every angle one could surrounding the 2005 elections. Potras is a verité filmmaker, a style of documentary filmmaking in which the filmmaker is never seen or heard, the only, and maybe most potent way their presence comes across is through their lens and the choices they make of what to look at and what to reveal. Poitras did not want to be a character in her film, she wanted a protagonist that could represent the struggle, someone we as viewers could connect with and understand, and whilst at Abu Ghraib prison, she met Dr. Riyadh. Riyadh is an Iraqi doctor, a Sunni, a father of six and a political candidate. While an outspoken critic of the occupation in Iraq, Riyadh is just as outspoken about the necessity of democracy. We see Riyadh with his patients, we share dinners with his family, we sit in on political meetings, we eavesdrop on private discussions he shares with his wife. And we see soldiers, army officers, peace keepers, arms dealers, residents, visitors, UN officials and children. In fact, it seems hard to imagine a place where Laura Poitras didn't get in, her access was remarkable and her compassionate curiosity shines in this film titled My Country, My Country. We hear the voice of Laura Poitras speaking about why she made My Country, My Country, how, and the power of belief in the face of danger. To learn more about My Country, My Country, please visit www.zeitgeistfilms.com. Several months ago, two photographers in Los Angeles were asked to document their neighbors Quincañera, a rite of passage in Mexican culture in which a girl is introduced to womanhood at the age of 15. The tradition is an ancient one, dating back to the Aztec period. There are several things that every quincenera has, one is lots of pink, pink clothes, pink cake, pink ribbopns, pink everything. There are waltzes, serenades, church processions and a huge party. And it takes months to prepare. Directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer observed the preparations from their Echo Park home in Los Angeles and after doing the photo series for their neighbor, decided a film must be made. Within four months, Quniceañera was written, funded and shot. The film was born. My name is Tania Ketenjian and today on Sight Unseen I speak with the main actors of the film, Jesse Garcia and Emily Rios. Next week, the directors. Quniceañera was made in a kitchen sink drama style, a british genre of film making where all personal family stories are brought to the surface—secrets, lies, loves, fears. In this case, the film presents issues of gentrification, sexuality, modernity, religion, parent child relations, love, commitment and acceptance. And it reveals what happens when a culture moves to America— what traditions do their bring with them, how do those traditions change and how do older generations accept those changes. I spoke with Emily and Jesse about their own experiences and perceptions about the issues that come up in the film. Both coming from a background of Jehovah's Witnesses, they had never had many celebrations. Here, Emily speaks about what experience she brought to the film and her first memories of a quinceañera. In part two, I speak with the directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. To learn more about Quinceñera, please visit www.sonyclassics.com/quinceanera. JUSTINO, NIGHT NIGHT AND ME-DI-ATE The term sound art is a funny one, at least it seems a bit odd because any time I mention it, people seem to wriggle their eyes. What do you mean sound art, do you mean music, found sound, random recordings, field recordings, bird calls. I suppose the term is difficult to explain. I see it as a manipulation of recorded sound through a computer program. But when you speak to a sound artist, it seems like the art form came upon them when they first started listening to music and decided to play around with the a tape deck and cassette to change the way a pre-recorded piece sounds. I find this exciting because it seems to be what artists truly do well, expand the way something already is thereby changing the way in which we experience it. San Francisco is famous for its electronic music/sound art scene. When I first moved here three years ago, I went to a sound show where I was asked to put on blindfolds and experience the vibration of sound, be immersed in it. As a result, I lost sense of time and space, my normal faculties of sight and sense were completely affected and I experienced sound in a different way. Project Soundwave is the creation of appreciator Alan So. He started a company called mediate in which his ultimate goal has been to "challenge perspectives to inspire new and unique experiences within ourselves and the world around us. He wants audiences to look beyond the surface, and look deep into ideas and works critically, imaginatively and without limitation." Thus he has begun a sound series titled Soundwave bringing together sound artists, dancers, writers and filmmakers to provide a space where collaboration can occur and observe the ways that collaboration expands boundaries. On this weeks Sight Unseen, the voice of Alan So and two of his artists who took part in Soundwave, Justino and Night Night. Their pieces weave in and out of their answers. To learn more about med-ia-te, please visit www.med-ia-ate.net. The sounds you are hearing are the sounds of the opening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last week. I walked through this show that had a massive sculpture that spelled out Oakland, films and videos, drawings, paintings and music. The show is called Sampling Oakland and it does just what it says, it offers a sampling of some of Oakland's up and coming galleries and art spaces. Oakland is just across the Bay form San Francisco but has long been known not so much for its art work but more for its higher level of crime and its lower income population. What many seem to forget is that in the 50s 60s and 70s , Oakland was a bastion for music, specifically jazz, what many believe to be America's only original art form. But as Oakland became more and more neglected, many of these clubs that attracted artists from all over the world were forced to close. It seems like art is now having a resurgence there. San Francisco is simply too expensive for artists and its space and time that artists need to produce their work. How this affects a community, what art brings and takes away from culture and how this manifests specifically in oakland are some of the topics we visit in this interview. I spoke with the curator of Sampling Oakland, Berin Golunu, along with the owner of one of the older art spaces in Oakland Kevin Slagle of Ego Park and Nicole Neditch of Mama Buzz Cafe. To learn more about Sampling Oakland, please visit www.ybca.org. UNDERCOVER SURREALISM AT THE HAYWARD GALLERY IN LONDON: PART ONE UNDERCOVER SURREALISM AT THE HAYWARD GALLERY IN LONDON: PART TWO Georges Bataille, surrealist artist, coin collector, librarian and editor of the magazine Documents once said: "A museum is comparable to the lung of a great city, every sunday the throng flows into the museum like blood and leaves it fresh and purified. The museum is the colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself, in short in all his aspects, finds himself literally admirable and abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in all art journals." This week Sight Unseen visits the Hayward Gallery where a show titled Undercover Surrealism is on display. The story is this: Quirky surrealist Georges Battaille (author of such notorious erotic works as The Story of the Eye and The Tears of Eros) was given some funding to create a magazine titled Documents, that reflected upon the growing Surrealist movement. His tack was to bring ideas and objects together in Documents that one wouldn't necessarily correlate and be critical in ways that most didn't expect . An image of a big toe along side a painting by Dali, a documentary about aquatic life along side a film showing a woman leaping out of a seashell. Bataille was radically pessimistic and highly subversive and thus the magazine itself was controversial only lasting two years, from 1929-1930. However the ideas and vision it espoused continue to resonate. The Hayward has brought Documents to life, transforming the gallery into the magazine itself, text on the walls, the objects in Documents presented just as they were on paper. I spoke with Simon Baker, co-curator of this exhibition and an expert in Surrealist art. The exhibit was 3 years in | |||||
