More Barney! The Cremaster Cycle in it's entirety. Because you can never have enough Barney! (I know he believes this too, else his works wouldn't be so Big and Long, yah?) Since I hadn't ever seen them all, this was a real treat. (Thank you Red Vic Theatre.) Revisiting the endless car-crashing/smashing was good—like old friends so indelibly rubbed and rammed into my head (Cremaster 4.) But the motorcycle race (Cremaster 3) around the island, the yellow and blue, oh that was the best. Crawling up the entrails of the land. Oh he has tap danced his way deep into my heart.
An honorable mention goes to Matthew Barney: No Restraint the film by Alison Chernick that revealed just what was happening to Matthew and Bjork below the waist, below the surface, in his film Drawing Restraint. It was almost like being back there on the big whaling ship extending the Barney love-fest into a second year following on his residence at SFMoMA in 2006. We miss you Barney—oh 'tis true. A gold star for The Red Vic Theatre for showing great films.
Kate Garner show (at Varnish Gallery) of large loud photographs of UK club stars knocked me out. The portraits of Identitists (ID - identity artists) Leigh Bowery and Booby Tuesday (see pic) were super—superhuman—bigger than life, breathtaking. Besides for the bold makeup-mask-total body transformations, there was a cut up of bits and parts of the very image making the images dance on the page. What's real, what's not? I loved it.
A Rose Has No Teeth —Bruce Nauman's early work from the 60s at the Berkeley Art Museum was a great show. There was latex sculptures, neon, plates of steel, and video, such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square which was completely engaging. There was also his Performance Corridor a tight 20 inch wide, corridor constructed of plywood that you could walk down just like he did getting the experience of narrowness first not just second-hand.
And then, speaking of second-hand, there were old works reworked into new works: stills of his face-pulling videos now self-portraits, second-hand. (Infrared Outtakes: Neck Pull, Opened Eye, Cockeye Lips, Hands Only, (photographed by Jack Fulton), 1968/2006)
There's something so marvelous about these rough-and-ready works, so stripped down and direct. It's been how many years now, and still they leave bite marks.
Zidane: A Twentieth Century Portrait It was after the World Cup, so I actually knew who Zidane was before seeing this incredible film by Douglas Gorgon and Philippe Parreno made using multiple cameras located all around the field. I loved the slowed motion, the repetition, the use of film not as narration but revelation.
Speaking of revelation, getting to see a Marilyn Minter in person made me ecstatic. I missed her big show at SFMoMA in 2005 being out of the country (a good excuse if there is one), so I was happy to see the piece—Strut— the museum acquired. Her painting of a bejeweled high heeled slipper is just exquisite in a romantic Cinderella sort of way. This is the flipside of Zidane, painting that is sharp, cinematic and wryly narrative.
Berkeley Art Museum hosted new work by Abbas Kiarostami other than his incredible, moving, spare feature films. His still photos of trees and rain and hillsides are like the best of his filmmaking—the presence of the land, the elements, the living breathing non-human. Pacific Film Archive then took the cake by showing Five his sequence of five short films of a seaside: stationary camera, single shot, lean; a steady gaze on what happens in a space and within a time frame. There was nothing so thrilling as sitting in a theater watching a black screen listening to a frog sing. A black screen. Not for a few seconds, but for as long as it took. This man is a powerful visionary.
Best Of Lists are sort of boring mostly—things I've seen and liked, things you might not have seen, so what? But don't you like the way these pictures go together? The wild hair-headdress/face mutilation thing going on in the first two, the gritty men's faces, the leaning feet n trees, rain n mud-? I did it on purpose. Now it's not so boring.
