Photography

Gilbert and George, and the End of the Heatwave

Two weekends ago, I had the opportunity to the Gilbert and George retrospective at the de Young Museum here in San Francisco. They started out as performance artists, including themselves in their work as “living sculptures,” usually well groomed and well dressed in business suits. In addition to their live performances, they also made films such as Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk (basically, the pair getting drunk on Gordon’s gin).

Their most well-known works are their photo-montages, and these made up most of the exhibition. These are large scale works (measured in meters), with photos and graphics. It seems they always include themselves somewhere within the piece, along with both Christian and sexual symbolism. Some more basic, with black-and-white photos or subtle colors, such as England, 1980, while others, such as Death, from Death Hope Life Fear, are quite garish in their colors and graphics. You can see some examples here.

Although in most of the photo-montages it is easy to pick out the pair, in a couple it was more subtle, and one can play a kind of “Where’s Waldo” game. Indeed, one of my favorites was a wall of London street names, I could not find them anywhere in it, but I know they must be there somewhere.

I actually heard about Gilbert and George first in 2004. I had begun a collaborative art project and my partner gave be a book to read about artistic collaborations, focusing on conceptual art and performance art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was an era and style of art I often overlooked, and since then I’ve been more open to conceptual art, especially those based on words and text, but also in those that focus on the body. Needless to say, that collaborative art project never came to fruition.

The building in which the de Young Museum resides is itself a work of art. I have several pictures from past visits that will be subject of future “Wordless Wednesdays.” The architecture is characterized by grids of holes in the walls, some of which one can see through. There is also a tower with an observation deck, offering views of Golden Gate Park and the city. On this particular visit, one could see the fog rolling in from the west over the park and the outer districts:

The fog represented the end to the heatwave we experienced two weeks ago in San Francisco.

Weekend events in San Francisco (Music, Art and Cats)

Another busy weekend, especially with the number of things going on. We only have time for a partial review…

First, there a quick stop at downtown pub to see some friends/colleagues. Then a rush to BART to get across the bay to Berkeley and my old stomping ground, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

I was a few minutes late, but still had plenty of time to hear Joker Neils and Gino Robair performing a improvised duet. Robair has an amazing talent for getting electronic-like sounds out of acoustic percussion instruments, and did so again on this evening. Neils was primarily using custom synthesizers, both professional instruments as well as circuit-bent toys. We have discussed circuit bending previously here at CatSynth. He brought several well-crafted examples, including Suziki Omnichords with contact-resistance interfaces; and he also brought a tremendous enthusiasm to his performance and to his discussion of circuit bending in between sets.

Also presenting was Rob Hordijk, who designs custom synthesizers (or “works of art” as he described them). Among the technologies he employed in the “Blippobox” that he presented were chaotic oscillator pairs, where two oscillators feed back into one another to create non-linear modulation, and a filter that he called the “twin peaks” filter (presumably because it has two resonant peaks).

Amy X Newburg lent her vocal and electronic-music talents during the presentation and in the second half of the show – readers may remember her from a a recent music festival that we reviewed.

I had some interesting conversions with both Amy X Newburg and Joker Neils following the performances, which is always a nice coda to a concert.

It was another exceptionally warm weekend in San Francisco (I wouldn’t mind it becoming less exceptional), so more opportunities for walking events. First off I finally made the trip to the San Francisco SPCA to inquire about volunteer opportunities and see their much touted adoption center. The cat area featured large rooms, “kitty condos” as well as comfy areas to hide – it actually seemed on par with the “cat resorts” where I looked into boarding Luna. The SPCA is actually a short work away from CatSynth HQ (well, it’s at least short from my perspective).

Another short walk in the opposite direction from CatSynth HQ led to the Yerba Buena Gallery Walk. Open studios and gallery events are pretty regular occurrences, even within walking distance. Plus, there’s often free food and drink. I didn’t see too many things that truly interested me, except for some abstract paintings at 111 Minna that I had already seen during the first Thursday earlier this month. But that doesn’t mean the afternoon wasn’t without its attractions. Some of the galleries, such as Varnish, were in very interesting spaces, such as converted industrial buildings from the early 20th century. A view of Varnish is in the photo to the left. Additionally, some of the sights on a gallery tour aren’t the works of art, but the people viewing them – and this is even more true on a warm sunny day. Finally, I did have a delightful conversation with Jesse Allen at Chandler Fine Art – his very psychedelic/natural works aren’t what I am usually drawn to, but some of them did include abstract representations of cats and other animals and one “wild cat” in particular caught my attention.

More art on Sunday, this time photography. This Sunday was “Pinhole Photography Day” (who knew?) and the RayKo Photo center featured an exhibit, demonstrations, and most notably a ride on the Bus Obscura a school bus converted into a large camera obscura.

The bus obscura toured our South-of-Market neighborhood, providing a unique view via the pinhole-camera images. Small dots of blurry light would suddenly come into focus as a sidewalk or car or storefront.

Because the image were so localized, it wasn’t always clear exactly where the bus was, though every so often a familiar landmark would emerge. The ride was accompanied by live acoustic and electronic music, adding to the experience and making it different from the regular “tours” of our neighborhood.

Weekend Cat Blogging and more: "Light"

This weekend we have some interesting “bright” photos:

It is amazing how the diagonals in both photos seem to line up.

In the first we have Luna peering off one of the balconies, as she is wont to do . The second could be an “easy like Sunday” photo, but one can also see the bases of Luna's paws, which is the theme of this weekend's Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos. No chaos here, of course.

Some sad news this weekend from our friend's at What Did You Eat. Upsie has being diagnosed with cancer. Her prognosis is pretty grim. She does at least get to go off of her diet and enjoy some of the pleasures of life for last few months. We at CatSynth extend our thoughts to Upsie and to our friend sher – they also lost Sundance last summer.

Weekend Cat Blogging #145 will be held at the The Cat Blogosphere.

The Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos will be hosted this weekend by Pet & The Bengal Brats at Pet?s Garden Blog. The optional theme this weekend is “toes and claws.”

Carnival of the Cats will be on this Sunday at This, That and The Other Thing.

And of course Friday Ark #182 will be at the modulator

Basilico and Eliasson at SFMOMA

It has been an incredibly warm summer-like weekend here in San Francisco, and I took advantage to explore both my neighborhood and the surrounding areas on foot. Today those wanderings included another visit to the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

The featured photography exhibit of Gabriele Basilico was incredibly in turn with my own recent experience in San Francisco, and my interest in highways and industrial landscapes as expressed here on CatSynth. Indeed, it was the perfect exhibition to complement this weekend – it was been incredibly warm and summer-like, and I have been exploring my neighborhood and the surrounding areas on foot. And the title image of the I-80 and US 101 split, shown to the right, is very similar to a photo from Wikipedia that I cut from my recent Super Tuesday article:

The exhibition includes several other photos of San Francisco highways as well as other familiar images from my SOMA neighborhood, and from the towns in Silicon Valley. From the museum’s statement:

This exhibition presents a series of nearly 50 black-and-white and color photographs taken by Basilico at the invitation of SFMOMA during a monthlong residency in the Bay Area last summer…This exhibition will be the first of an ongoing project focused on Silicon Valley, in which artists will document the area on film. Basilico?s objective style and affinity for observing marginalized urban settings in a classical mode promises a compelling counterpoint to future installments in the project.

This of course inspires me to do more of my own work along these lines. I could probably fill Worldess Wednesday for the rest of the year just with photos of the city.

The next exhibition takes us from the amazingly timely to something “out of time.” Indeed, the title of Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” exhorts us to suspend our sense of time and enter a world purely of color, light and geometry. The tunnel (on SFMOMA’s fifth-floor catwalk) sets the tone for the exhibit, with color planes, plays on light, and complex but analytical geometric figures.

Challenging the passive nature of traditional art-viewing, he engages the observer as an active participant, using tangible elements such as temperature, moisture, aroma, and light to generate physical sensations.

Eliasson’s pieces also include a room entirely of yellow lamps reminiscent of the sodium street lamps used in places like San Jose, a screen of rippling light that responds to viewers’ movements on the floorboards, and a walk-in geometric figure of mirrors. To really get the most out of these works, one has to “suspend time” and explore them in detail, even though they are devoid of what we usually think of as “detail” (and what I usually try to avoid in art and design). Of course, that can be challenging on a crowded Sunday afternoon. But not impossible, if you take your time.

This article is included in the February 13 Carnival of Cities.

Skronkathon photo…and upcoming show

Well, there's me, attempting to appear ironic, at the 2007 Skronkathon two weeks ago. I'm playing the ektar, a single-string folk instrument from India, one of several instruments used during the performance.

This is one of several photographs taken at the event by Polly Moller. And it is quite timely, given that we will be performing together this Friday in San Jose:

It all starts at 7:00 p.m. at works/san jose,
451 First Street, San Jose, CA 95112
Cost: $5.00/$3.00 donation

july 27th music night with KIOKU, polly moller & company and dajis

based in new york city, the musical group kioku presents traditional
asian folk music within a new context of collaborative experimentation
and improvisation. the trio consists of wynn yamami (east and
southeast asian percussion, including japanese taiko, korean gongs,
and filipino kulintang), christopher ariza (live laptop electronics),
and ali sakkal (saxophones, percussion). while committed to the
preservation of musical traditions, kioku (japanese for “memory”)
acknowledges the plasticity of tradition and freely adopts musical
techniques found within improv-based and new music circles.

converging from oakland, san francisco and santa cruz are polly
moller, john moreira, and amar chaudhary, combining flute, bass flute,
voice, guitar, and electronics to create otherworldly improvisatory
atmospheres and backgrounds for polly's gripping text.

who is dajis? a dj with a selection of ambient and experimental music.

CatSynth pic: synth studio, with cat

Another from our friend Knox Bronson at SunPopBlue:

This is a rather abstract representation of his “almost all-analogue synth studio.” Mars kitty can be seen in the bubble at the lower right (and in the enlarged clip to the right). The overall composition suggests a blend of the CatSynth banner with my Music of the (Blue) Spheres graphic artwork.

The original photo is from 2002, and Mars has since passed away. You can also see a close-up video at the original SunPopBlue posting.