Cake Walk 2007

Winners of this year's Art Show Cake Walk (a.k.a. my personal favorite art sightings of 2007)


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.

Hands & Feet, Standing & Falling

In the installation by Douglas Gordon at SFMoMa, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. To be seen on monitors, some with headphones, others run silently, and all simultaneously, there is a video of a hand, palm forward, abruptly coming at the camera, again and again. There are a lot of hands in Gordon's works, but this one reminded me directly of Bruce Nauman's piece of himself bouncing into a corner. I saw that one installed in the basement of the Berlin contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof as part of the Flick Collection. [see photos above] Nauman falls back into a corner and bounces back upright and then into the corner again; again and again. Gordon is obviously, probably, most likely—why not—influenced by Nauman's early work, straightforward videos documenting performance. Maybe it doesn't matter if he were influenced or not, but more to the point they are in the same conversation of repetitive movement, the body, the gesture, on film. They could be in the same room, falling and bouncing and turning and gesturing, simultaneously together as they are in my head.



In the Bahnhof basement there was also Nauman's video of himself slathering himself black. Remember Gordon's piece, The right hand doesn't care what the left hand isn't doing? His hands are lathered in shaving cream and one hand shaves the other.


Displayed side by side, Nauman's films showed the continuity of the artist's body as work in much the same way as this installation of some 50 of Gordon's works in one dark room wove together, reflected and conversed together, a new whole that is the artist's body of work, work using body, movement, expression. I wonder if he was surprised, looking over these individual pieces done over the last 15 years, to see how repetition in one reflected the same movement in another? How they danced so well together, the shell-shocked man falling, the elephant falling, the hands gesturing, the hands and eyes opening, closing? It was beautifully choreographed as though on purpose which just goes to show the purposefulness of a person's being, of an artist's perspective, that streams through her life-work, the hidden intention.