Frances Richard at the Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics launch party, Mar 14, 2019, Curatorial Research Bureau, San Francisco. Your newest book, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics, was just published by the University of California Press. Congratulations! How are you celebrating its arrival? Two excerpts have been published, at Flash Art and Places Journal. We held a [...]
On the street where I’ve lived for many years, my favorite moment is when plum blossoms first appear in the gray of midwinter. While plum blossoms vary in color — from white to deep pink — the ones that thread through San Francisco are a delicate pale mauve. Their presence, in a minor key, is [...]
David Melnick, ca. 1970s. Back in the late aughts, when Silliman’s Blog served as something of a hub for certain lineages of experimental writing that interested me, I stumbled across a mention of David Melnick, who Ron Silliman knew when they were both living in San Francisco. My burgeoning voraciousness for weird writing led me [...]
Vito Acconci, Command Performance, 1974 In the late 1960s, poet Vito Acconci began exploring single-channel stationary video works within the context of conceptual performance, taking a psychologically vivid, self-reflexive approach. Command Performance (1974) follows a series in which the artist speaks to an off-screen actor; with varying degrees of dominance, Acconci provides instructions, demands, and [...]
Hiroshi Sugito, Crossing the Sea, 1998 In 1855, the novelist and short story writer Herman Melville published his novella Benito Cereno in Putnam’s Monthly. The story of an American sea captain who comes upon a marooned Spanish slave ship, Benito Cereno should be viewed as part of a concerted effort: Putnam’s, which had come under [...]
Angel Jesus Perez (senior artist), The Displacement of Beauty, the Migration of Gentrification, 2018 [Note: All answers by Sally Hindman. —Eds.] When was Youth Spirit Artworks founded, and why? Youth Spirit Artworks was founded by long-time Quaker and homeless activist Sally Hindman in 2007 as a response to the dire need for jobs and job [...]
In 1968, the environmentalist Wendell Berry wrote an essay called “A Native Hill,” in which he describes his relationship to a hill he grew up near (and later returned to). Berry uses the relationship to articulate a type of environmental responsibility and emotional investment in place. Dwelling on the difference between a road and a [...]
In response to Session 4, March 26 Preset: Glittery golden fabric draped over a table. A casual Sage tea ceremony: Keith invites the early birds to ingest the Indigenous herbs of the land. My distilled reading of tonight’s performance-pedagogy score: 1) breath, 2) body, 3) earth, 4) spirit, 5) mind, 6) spirit, 7) all at [...]