Peter Hutton. At Sea, 2007 (still); DVD (transferred from 16-millimeter film), color, silent; 60 min. Testosterone abounds in Jens Hoffmann's handsome "Moby Dick," as it does in Melville's saga of vengeance and the sea. From Kenneth Anger's randy Fireworks (1947) to Adrian Villar Rojas's (with Alan Legal) My Dead Grandfather (2009)--a giant, impaled white whale of unfired clay--and Orson Welles' booming voice intoning Ahab's words throughout the galleries, male energy and hubris are in evidence everywhere. It is a Moby Dick of Shakespearean proportions, as Hoffmann leavens the tragic with the antic, and gives us some really great curatorial... Read More

Colter Jacobsen. Sp(out)er (In)nomine diaboli, 2009; oil on canvas. A boggy, soggy, squinchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant. - Moby Dick, Chapter 3 At the beginning of Chapter 3 of Moby Dick, Ishmael describes a unstretched painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn --an almost abstract torrent of grey, blue and black-- to be "so thoroughly besmoked", that one might take it to... Read More

L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz captured the American imagination immediately upon publication in 1900. The story of a young girl from rural Kansas, who liberates a magical city from a cruel witch and a mysterious monarch, has been told and retold over the past 108 years. What is it about this story that resonates so strongly? Wattis curator Jens Hoffmann, himself a stranger in the strange land of San Francisco, has tried to figure that out. The show includes several new, commissioned works based on the titular work; archival materials and visual culture associated with the book, stage... Read More

Artists--perhaps in response to the increasingly craven art market--are creating another art world that explores other ways to make culture. In league with progressive curators--or acting as curators--many artists are interested, among several other fields of inquiry, in the work of untrained, non-professional makers of visual culture. Amateurs is presented through August 9th at the CCA Wattis Institute by Ralph Rugoff, former director of the Wattis returning from his new home in London for one final project. Eighteen artists are included in the exhibition, which can be broken out into three general approaches to the subject. Artists archiving amateur artists'... Read More

"Agonism . . . a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation,"1 writes Michel Foucault in an essay about subject and power. Exploring this simultaneous 'mutual excitement and struggle' are the concurrent exhibitions at CCA's Wattis Institute, curated by Jens Hoffman with the Puerto Rican-based artist collaborative Allora & Calzadilla, and the solo exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at San Francisco Art Institute's Walter & McBean Gallery. In "Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War" at CCA's Wattis Institute, the exhibition is most brilliant... Read More

Radical Software, organized by Will Bradley, puts together the Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground. After an initial viewing I wanted more time, so I came back for second look. The show is free form, allows the viewer to dive into the material, and gives the viewer few opportunities to be told what to do. "Information wants to be free" RIGHT ON? LEFT ON! Okay take back the RIGHT. RIGHT ON! However the trade off for me, the viewer and a member of this Bay Area Art scene, is that I want to dig deeper. This was a treasure... Read More

Rick Guidice, Space Colonization Modules, 1975. (Photo courtesy of NASA.) This scrappy, provocative group show requires some effort to parse its logic. The themes are ambitious--the ability (or inability) to effect change, the ways in which we engage our surroundings, the construction of realities of all stripes: temporal, spatial, scientific, fictitious, local, global, utopic, dystopic. Yet no curatorial statement accompanies the exhibition, which is to the detriment of the artists and audience alike. In its place is a brochure excerpting the Philip K. Dick essay from which the exhibition's title is derived. Certainly Dick's essay is illuminating, but it... Read More

Beyond obsessive, BOMBASTIC! We are trapped in a bunker--10 seconds to implosion. Aesthetics spew and spew: Thomas Hirschhorn declassifies fashion victims as carriers of an imperialist virus. Wearing camouflage: style choice or signal of compliance with Bush's war? Hirschhorn: "Anyone wearing camouflage clothing, puts him/herself in the situation of a soldier who risks being killed. Factually it means that he or she accepts being part of an army and is ready to kill and ready to die. The ultimate nightmare."... Read More

The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) cannot be repeated. However, contemporary artist Artur Żmijewski does not have the same restrictions as a social psychologist on his research-based art project Repetition (2005). And so we observe how an artist can enter the back door and avoid ethical considerations in order to open up for us the limits of what art can and cannot do. With Repetition, Zmijewski aims to repeat the basic construct of that landmark research experiment, and therefore test its potential for successful repetition. Zmijewski's half-hour film depicts how he, like my father, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, created a temporary... Read More

A Brief History of Invisible Art brings together a range of contemporary artists and highlights some rarely seen conceptual works of the 1960's and 1970's. In the viewer it arouses a heightened sense of awareness of the installation and representation of art within an exhibition space.... Read More

Jen writes: I finally made it to the Wattis yesterday to check out "General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art, 1987 - 2005." I was struck by how perfectly this "idea" art fit into a gallery context -- almost as if it wouldn't have a life outside such an institution. As I wandered through the galleries I began to wonder about things like market forces, or other sorts of conditions, that might have caused the "Conceptual Art" of today to seem so different from the "dematerialized" art of the seventies. I can't say that Smithson's work was without its trace in the... Read More