Cairo, Sonoma, 2006; Xerox print; 53 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, and The Project, New York. Ari Marcopoulos marks his world through lens-based images. The beauty of his work lies in the remnants of experience delicately outlined in a snowy landscape or a bodily wound. His narratives--for the most part populated by male physicality--are full of music, art, skateboarding, snowboarding, New York City, Sonoma, and his family. Rachel Williams (1993) directs her skater-torn arms at the camera, a bandage carelessly hangs from an elbow. Bike Crash 11 (2002) displays a close-up of two... Read More

Storytelling has been offered through a combination of visual, textual, and verbal forms throughout centuries and cultures. Bending the Word in the MATRIX gallery at the UC Berkeley Art Museum brings four young artists together to look at the use of narrative in current visual art practice. Patricia Esquivias, Folklore II, 2008 (still) Patricia Esquivias' two video projects, Folklore I (2006) and Folklore II (2008), combine 20th century reporting techniques to create a surprisingly engaging and contemporary take on oral history. In Folklore I, the handheld camera shifts back and forth over Esquivias' handwritten journal and cut out photographs while... Read More

Traditionally the power of science fiction has been to offer a concrete view of what the world would look like if a technological breakthrough occurred that changed everything, or if the natural world were constructed with a few basic building blocks completely different, like if the sky were red and blood were blue. With Neuromancer, an irresistible page-turner by William Gibson in the 80s, the whole game changed. That novel recognized that a technological breakthrough had already happened while almost nobody noticed, that was to change everything, predicting not only the digital communication explosion but globalized culture. Trevor Paglen's exhibition... Read More

A dirty handprint on the pristine white wall of an exhibition space is usually something to cover up--not call attention to, but the five-fingered smudge beneath the frame of When Paradise Arrived, the anchoring image in Enrique Chagoya's Borderlandia exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum, was so fitting I had to wonder whether it was intentional. The hand and the tracks of its direct contact with charcoal and paint is a signature symbol in Chagoya's visual lexicon--a riotously idiomatic language in which one super-added sign deserves another. That the print was still there on a subsequent visit a few days later... Read More

The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, showing at the Berkeley Art Museum until July 20th, is Joan Jonas' second retrospective at the university's art museum; in 1982, the museum (then the University Art Museum) organized Jonas' first video and performance retrospective as well as published the first monograph of the artist's work. In this second retrospective of her work, Jonas considers the Hopi snake dance, which she first experienced in the 1960s during a trip to Arizona in relation to an essay by the German art historian Aby Warbur (1866-1929), who also observed Hopi tradition during a... Read More

Along country lanes and urban crossroads, an itinerant apprentice offers ideas and articles of all sorts traditional and revolutionary, abundantly crafted in exchange for skillful demonstrations and sociable company.--Allison Smith, the Notion Nanny Cry At the back of the Matrix Gallery's long narrow space, a life-sized china doll dressed in a quaint bonnet and cape proffers a basket full of hand-crafted goods. Additional objects surround her on a simple platform, suggesting that she brings an abundance of useful things to share or sell. A table nearby displays other crafts, as do watercolors on the walls. Many of the things presented... Read More

I have to add to the Berkeley Museum Nauman article clutter. This show is stuck in my mind. Heavy and immobile like the space under the chair in which I type, as my arms are bound they increase in length at 10 inch intervals, with my knees imbedded in wax as all of it is recorded on video and relayed into a corridor. 2 Words ring for me. Studio Practice. Studio Practice is one thing that I have seen SUFFER in this turn of the 21st century Art market boom. Where can you be Free to: GET PISSED GET STUPID... Read More

bbbrrruuuuccccceeee ARRANGES FLOUR I caught the bruce Nauman show a bit late, so this is more an afterthought than a review. What was most striking to me, meandering through these streams of images, is their clarity. A page of the zen calendar that I keep around tells us : "Night comes so people can sleep like fish in black water. Then day. Some people pick up their tools. Other become the making itself." If we follow the word poetic back to it's greek origin it leads to "making". So what is bbbrrruuuccceee making? or, does it matter, besides the occasional... Read More

There are landmark exhibitions. Sometimes it's because the curator pulls together a group of artists, slaps a name on what he thinks of as their commonality, and that is how their work and they are forever thought of afterward. (Peter Selz did this 35 years ago in his Funk show at Berkeley). The other kind of landmark exhibition marks a psychological or historical turning point for an institution or a region (think Helter Skelter by Paul Schimmel at LA MOCA in 1992 that galvanized an LA aesthetic). Bruce Nauman's show at Berkeley, organized by Constance Lewallen, is the latter kind... Read More

When I was young I liked to make friends play a game with bad clothing catalogs. We'd flip through the catalog together and from all of the awful outfits on each page we'd have to pick the one we would wear (for a full day at school) if forced to do so. A perhaps more grownup version of this game can be played at galleries . . . which one of the artworks on exhibit would you display at home? Picking from things you like is fun, but ideally this should be played with unappealing art.... Read More