Rodney Graham, How I Became a Ramblin’ Man, 1999, 35mm film transferred to DVD, 9 minutes loop. Courtesy of 303 Gallery.

Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth, interviewed Rodney Graham for Bomb Magazine in 2004. The article, recently reposted on their website, finds Gordon and Graham speaking about the role of music and sound in Graham’s work. 

Gordon: While most of those artists eventually focused their careers exclusively within a visual realm, letting music influence them subliminally, Graham has always kept the question open: Am I a musician trapped in an artist’s mind or an artist trapped in a musician’s body? 

Anthony Discenza is the current artist on display as part of the Last Billboard project in Pittsburgh, PA. If you’re in the area, visit the sign at Highland and Baum. See past projects here.

Los Mutantes, Pedro Reyes, 2012

On view this weekend at KADIST San Francisco, as part of Representation and its Discontents

Hours: Saturday & Sunday 12-5pm

Zachary Paul Levine, assistant curator at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York, posted a nice write-up on Wallace Berman’s work on his blog: 

yumuseum

From YUM’s curator (follow his Tumblr at zcurator):

A RADIO THAT SHOWS BUTTS? WHAT IS THIS MAGIC?!

No, it’s one of Wallace Berman’s Varifax collages (named after Kodak’s Verifax copy machine which Berman used to make his work). Peering deep into the future (into our present) Berm depicts four, then ubiquitous, portable AM/FM radios. However, instead of a speaker projecting sounds, Berman presents the radios projecting an image — football, cigarets  a naked butt. Nevertheless, all of these could have likewise projected their respective familiar sounds live, on radio!

Thought of as one of the father’s of contemporary collage — reminds me of a great Hannah Hoch exhibition I saw at LACMA in ‘95! — Berman drew on images and practices employed by Beat artists and poets and earlier surrealists.  Berman was interested in Jewish mysticism and created several works that present Hebrew letter combinations that he found in Kabbalistic texts.  

Wallace Berman, Verifax collage and synthetic polymer with prestype on paperboard, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Charles Cowles, 1988, Accession Number: 88.31

Simon Starling, Inverted Retrograde Theme, (2002). 

via artruby

(via sisifo)

Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007.

Tonight join Kadist Paris for a conversation with artist Nalini Malani. Malani lives in Paris in May 1968 and in tonight’s conversation, she will evoke this period described as a “prise de conscience.” Malani will be joined by political analyst Jyotsna Saksena and art historian Elvan Zabunyan. 

This talk is in conjunction with the exhibition L’exigence de la Saudade, on view through July 28. 

J. John Priola, Switch, 1999. Gelatin-silver print. 40” x 32” framed

via nicoonmars

Ben Kinmont will reactivate his piece On becoming something else in six Bay Area restaurants in collaboration with SFMOMA. 

For the original presentation of the piece at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kinmont made a broadside reproducing seven paragraphs he had written, each devoted to an artist who had become something else. Long interested in antiquarian cookbooks, the history of gastronomy, and restaurant culture, he then invited seven Parisian chefs to each create a recipe, based on one of the paragraphs. Each dish served as an homage to the corresponding artist’s decision to leave the art world. The public was invited to each chef’s restaurant to literally consume these representations of the paragraphs, effectively moving the work outside the traditional spaces of the art world.

Kinmont will be working with Bar Tartine, Rich Table, State Bird Provisions, Outerlands, Bar Jules in San Francisco and Camino in Oakland. Each restaurant will be creating a dish about artists who had become something else. 

For more information about the project, click here. 

Althea Thauberger, Kandahar International Airport, 2009

Catch Althea Thauberger’s Marat Sade Bohnice on view at Kadist SF as part of Representation and its Discontents. The video documents the staging of Peter Weiss’s 1963 play Marat/Sade at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, a facility undergoing institutional reform. 

See Representation and its Discontents this weekend, 12:00-5:00pm Saturday and Sunday.

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Fran Herndon, King Football, 1962
Collage on masonite, 24 3/4 x 21 1/4 in.

via goldteefthief