detail shot of Sydney Cohen’s studio

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at CCA. We met there last summer teaching painting  in the “Pre-College” program on the Oakland campus. Warm and unpretentious, we became fast friends commiserating about the joys and frustrations of teaching high-school students and connecting on interesting assignments. One of hers I particularly liked: “Make a dark painting. Now make that painting’s dreams.”

I quickly noticed that while she was generous in talking to (and about) her students, Sydney often shied away from talking about her own work or professional artistic experiences.  Researching her work online, I was amazed to find her work to be quite stunning. They were these small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces; each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision-making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, reveling in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes. But she didn’t exhibit them that often.

When I visited her paint-splattered studio, there must have been hundreds of paintings lying around and stacked in various states of finish.  Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days with many young abstract painters leaning towards a forced distance of restraint with barely-there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of  bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms.

Why so deflective? It was like she was working in secret. Or perhaps like a great actor fraught with stage-fright, she’s just incredibly shy when it came to showing her work. Only a handful of people I know who knew her were aware of her paintings. My programming slot at Right Window Gallery in the Mission was approaching so I asked Sydney if she would like to do a show. I was afraid she would say no, but she thankfully accepted. It’s up through May.  To get to know her and her work better, I asked her some general questions and was delighted by the roundabout airiness of her answers.

Q: How would you describe your work?

A: Pillow forts to have sex in. All-you-can-eat ice cream. A preference for the most indirect path. My friend was telling me the other day about some greyhounds we saw at the dog park. She said their owner told her that they have special neuroses, either they stack dishes and things on top of the refrigerator when they’re left alone, or they take things down off the refrigerator and make stacks around the house. She couldn’t remember which.

Q: Is there an artist or artwork that particularly speaks to you?

A: Oh, so many. Michael Disfarmer, Japanese Ceramics, woodcuts from Ukio-e. We talked a little about Édouard Vuillard. I’m really into the drawings of Emma Strebel, I’ve gotten to see her draw since she was in middle school. She goes to NYU now. My aunt Bonnie makes paper from mushrooms. I really like shapes.

Q: What are some of your favorite color combinations?

A: Sometimes when I’m walking around, I feel like i drop into extra deep color vision, that my eyes are tuned right in to color. So much of the time we are not really seeing color. Our brains make composites of colors, deciding for us to not focus on color, more to just take in general impressions, so as to navigate in the world and not get hit by cars or walk into trees. One doesn’t need to be an artist to experience the sudden awareness of color, as if the world just got turned on or tuned in, and that it feels like an altered state, makes us realize it is not how we usually operate. Yet color is happening around us all the time.

I am loving grey and green at the end of the day, and I’m appreciating unusual combinations—orange and purple together, mixed blue and rust shadows. Some colors that I used to find so ugly can start to be really interesting. Oh my God, purple, I’m sorry I’ve been dissing you all these years.

Q: What might people not know about you?

A: I was an extra in a Bollywood film, I played a drug addict. It was a long time ago.

Q: Does anything else inform your work?

A: I really like the internet. I love being able to look something up and that links to something else i want to know about and that to something else. It is supposed to be re-wiring our brains to go only shallow, but wide is another kind of deep.

Q: What advice do you give most to your students?

A: You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.

Sydney’s show “Some Other Need” is viewable through May at 992 Valencia St. in the right window of A.T.A. This Sunday (5/19/13) , there is an opening from 4-7pm. Go see it!

Image courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives

More on Woods’s student years from Daryl here.

Follow the Lebbeus Woods, Architect series here.

]]> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/missed-connections-spring/feed/ 0 http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/missed-connections-spring/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/u4ebXcaPr3s/ http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/san-francisco-art-invades-new-york/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 15:27:24 +0000 Chris Cobb http://blog.sfmoma.org/?p=51578

Trisha Donnelly, Tauba Auerbach, Alicia McCarthy, Xylor Jane, and others at Alicia McCarthy’s opening in Manhattan.

Sometimes in New York this thing happens – you are going out and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by folks you know from San Francisco. After a while you might pause, stare up at the sky and ask to nobody in particular, “Where are they all coming from?”

Even when you talk to complete strangers – if you talk with them long enough, chances are they know somebody you know from the Bay Area. This town can be an isolating place, so when it happens, it can be strangely reassuring.

Anyway, lately, I keep seeing people I know, sort of know and barely know from San Francisco.

In the booth at NADA with Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im of Et al. Works by Kate Bonner, Chris Hood, Andrew Chapman, and Adrianne Rubenstein.

This week, it was at the NADA (New Dealers Art Alliance) fair. I saw Aaron Harbour, Jackie Im, and Facundo Argañaraz, the proprietors of Et al., one of San Francisco’s newest galleries (not to be confused with ET AL., ETC. of Tokyo, et al projects of Brooklyn, or et al. and the rest (of it) from New Zealand). They showed a selection of sculptures and paintings and reportedly got a visit from the famous New York art critic Jerry Saltz.

Nearby I saw the Queen’s Nails booth with Bob Linder and Julio César Morales. Queen’s Nails always seemed less like a commercial gallery to me than a kind of anything-goes project space where artists could do whatever they wanted. In that sense then, it was a good surprise to see them representing at the art fair. The translation of risky art into sellable art is one tough one, but if it can be done, it can be done in New York.

Xylor Jane with Tauba Auerbach (Alicia McCarthy in the background) at Alicia McCarthy’s solo show at Jack Hanley’s gallery in Manhattan.

At the same time, just a few short blocks away Alicia McCarthy was having a solo show at Jack Hanley’s new gallery on the Lower East Side, which is where all the cool things are happening now in New York.

Her opening drew an impressive crowd. Tauba Auerbach was there as well as Xylor Jane, Trisha Donnelly, Christopher Garrett, Bill Jenkins, Sahar Khoury, Whitney Shaw, Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and many others that live or have lived in the Bay Area. Many were old friends or at least drinking buddies. In many ways it looked like a family reunion.

Bob Linder with Julio Morales at the Queen’s Nails booth. Works by Jonathan Runcio, Jason Kalogiros, and Bessma Khalaf.

Anyway, Auerbach and Jane are important practitioners of a kind of geometrical abstraction that is very popular today. But back in San Francisco, they were doing it ten years ago. So was Alicia McCarthy. From that perspective it was interesting to see them all together because they have followed their own personal and artistic paths and yet have remained friends throughout. The fact that those disparate paths all led to New York is amazing and cool, because it turns the trope of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’ on its head.

Matt Heckert, Kal Spelletich and Brian Goggin having a post-art opening meal at a Lower East Side night spot.

Speaking of the of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’,  just about a month ago another Bay Area artist, Kal Spelletich, was in town for a group show called Weird Science that got reviewed in the New York Times. He was here along with Matt Heckert, Brian Goggin, and Achenbach Foundation curator, author and all around raconteur,  Robert Flynn Johnson.

Like this past weekend it was also a Bay Area reunion – but from completely different social circles. At Weird Science, many people knew each other from Survival Research Labs, from RE/Search Publications and just from around the Bay. At that opening I also ran into Marshall Weber, the founder of Booklyn, as well as Bobby Neel Adams, who photographed most of the images for RE/Search Publications’ most famous book Modern Primitives.

Stephen Boyer reads from his new book “Parasite” at Williamsburg’s best book store, Spoonbill and Sugartown.

But you hardly need to seek out Bay Area folks because they seem to just pop up unexpectedly. For example, the other night I just happened to see former San Francisco poet Stephen Boyer reading at the one of the best book stores in New York – Spoonbill and Sugartown.

This book store, interestingly, is also a place I go specifically because they carry McSweeney’s books, the Believer, Maximum RocknRoll, and a variety of zines and catalogs including those about Xylor Jane, Chris Johanson, Barry Magee, Todd Hido, etc. Also – despite the terrible economy and the vanishing art scene there, it has somehow managed to stay open in the hipster dominated neighborhood of Williamsburg. It’s definitely the kind of place worth supporting.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are the opposite of language, and don’t need it. He talks about poetry, but only because he is talking about what’s ineffable, about what is beheld by the eyes, but also held inside of the body. His camera stares, and when, in the dark of the theater, the slow, silent images are illuminated by light, looking is doubled. What happens to duration in the act of staring, happens here. “Simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in search of precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation,” says Elaine Scarry.

Benjamin Fondane’s ciné-poèmes create this space inside one’s head. These films are made to be read. Here are the first eight parts of the 180-part ciné-poème Paupières mûres, from 1928.

1  a short shadow runs along an ominously lit wall
a sign with a pointing white hand runs alongside it

2  another shadow on the same wall
the hand briefly points in the opposite direction

3  the globe of a streetlamp with two candles, its two flames like human eyes

4  patches of light surrounded by darkness illuminate dull shapes left and right like a moving reflector
shop windows hover above

5  a large patch of sidewalk on which

6  a hat rolls

7  a fist punches

8  a white-gloved hand flails

The movement happens in the disjunction between what is supposed to be there, pictures, and what is really there, words. The experience becomes uncanny, we are tickled by our own participation, which somehow overthrows the authority of the auteur. Even as the pieces deal with representation, they are radically open. That is because the images project onto imaginative space, and the light that shines behind them is the infinitude of language.

Lawrence Weiner’s work is complicated, glamorized by its rendering in language. “Art is the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to human beings,” while literature is “what human beings feel about other human beings,” the artist said in 1982. Words here do not mean something large and wonderful, or mean anything outside the objects they stand in for. Slate indicates nothing more than a slab of stone, water signifies the element itself.

Weiner’s language describes one-to-one correspondences with things in the world. Language here is a denotation system for the aforementioned relationships. It is interchangeable and usable. Language is physical, marking. “Language was the best carrier, it could go all around the world,” the artist said in a talk during his 2007 Whitney retrospective. “Slate in the U.S. is the same as slate in Norway. This way of using language is democratic.”

Statements was his pivotal bookwork, the first piece to be composed entirely of language. He describes each statement as a receipt of bill (like the gas bill) occurring after the action. If this insistence on the correspondence between a thing and its name seems familiar, charming or naive, this might be because Piaget identifies this view of the world as a primary stage of childhood language development: “The name of the apple is written down inside the apple.”

Despite this use of language, the feeling of communication is in the room. It’s just one paradox among many. Language is used like a currency, a thing of definite and exchangeable value in the service of de-commodifying the art object. The authority of the logos is borrowed to insist on the primacy of physicality, the inscrutability of the object. Words are pure abstraction, yet their material presence hangs there like a fact. The artist intends to use words as mere placeholders, but the artworks produced are radically indeterminate. As with Benjamin Fondane, words have an absolute reference, yet one prismed through the infinitude of language.

As short narratives flash onto the screen in black letters, then off just as quickly, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries simultaneously produces the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of reading. The two could be said to be distinct pleasures. Looking happens all at once. It bears the trace of the original look, the trace of love. Its duration is radically different from the duration of reading, which, in Western alphabets, unfolds in a line through time. Here, language ludically breaks into hallowed gallery space. The letters are geometric and black, usually against a modernist white background. Direct, chatty narrative breaks through those graphic choices. That which is always present in the gallery but not often talked about, the personality of the artwork, is inflated here. Other artworks suddenly seem coy in comparison.

In a recent lecture, Johanna Drucker defended “aesthetics,” or as she put it, “aesthesis as a producer of experience,” without which, we cannot think (as we need experience to do so), à la John Dewey. She posited that all objects and events are “transactional,” a peculiar choice of word defined tertiarily as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.” Her aim was to uncouple art from politics, or at least defend a space in which they could be so. Her reason for this was to avoid closure, since “a positive agenda for an artwork affects closure upon the viewer.”

Even if looking does not exactly stand in for communicating, the viewer and the artwork are in the room as physical presences, affecting one another. The moment is always a social one. Against the backdrop of the way the other artists here use language, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries seem to be making a closing down gesture, one that collapses the infinitude of language. Yet, they redirect that same potential outward from the screen in a seemingly social act. The work feels subversive for the way it’s directly, and subjectively, communicating. That which cannot be resolved into closure, for Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, is its social face.

Two films by Nathaniel Dorsky recently screened at SFMOMA.

Young-Hae Chang‘s Pacific Limn recently closed at Kadist.

Johanna Drucker closed the Graduate Lecture Series at SFAI and has a solo show opening at the Center for the Book on May 24.

Christian Marclay, video still from <em>The Clock</em>, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound; twenty-four hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

SFMOMA closes twenty days from now and the museum is rolling out four days of festivities to mark the event, including performances, free art viewing, and one of several 24-hour viewings of Christian Marclay’s epic masterpiece The Clock—twenty-four hours of collaged film fragments that reference the time of day or night, synchronized with local time—which is serving as something of a countdown to the museum’s (nearly) three-year on-site hiatus. The museum’s progress to the finishing line finds poignant symmetry with The Clock’s hourly rhythms and crescendos. Before the clock strikes the hour in Marclay’s work, heralding deadlines, appointments, and showdowns, there is a flurry of activity: people rush to and from destinations, phones ring, and tension builds (suspenseful music gaining momentum) before dissipating at the climax. At high noon, when cowboys faceoff in Westerns, the clock seems to gong like a death knell, signaling beginnings and ends, and ushering in a new phase of the day.

In its 1440 minutes The Clock captures the frenetic pace of daily life; there are moments of reprieve—ebbs and flows—but one feels all the more attuned to the work’s motion for the lack of a cohesive plot. The momentum accrues and dissipates but reaches no ultimate conclusion, because in The Clock there is no end (or beginning). It manifests the fantasy of a “neverending movie,” as Marclay noted at the SFMOMA press preview. The cyclical nature of the film’s loop can be experienced as escapism (“When my clock stops ticking, I’ll die,” notes a character from The Twilight Zone) or entrapment (Molloy’s weary refrain, “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” though not referenced, continually comes to mind), depending on how you look at it—either way, it corresponds to the existential angst that pervades Marclay’s work.

Christian Marclay, installation view of <em>The Clock</em>, 2010; single-channel video with sound; twenty-four hours; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London; photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay

We are slaves to the clock, both bounded by and endlessly reminded of it. Time is envisioned as a sort of preoccupying madness beneath which lurk reminders of death. Among pepperings of well-worn expressions that center on time—“to stand the test of time,” etc. — Colin Firth laments becoming a washed-up old professor, Glenn Close worries about the wrinkles in her skin, and a boy I didn’t recognize blurts out with abandon, “Don’t you know you’re gonna die?!”

But The Clock is far from being a totally morbid send-off for SFMOMA. Amid currents of anxiety, it also projects an extraordinary celebration of human activity, drama, and labor. Threads of narrative are picked up and fused together with seamless editing, and scenes and characters are occasionally returned to, but we linger on them so briefly that plot becomes subordinate to the overall symphony of human action. This sense of effort and drama is mirrored in Marclay’s own Herculean task of researching, organizing, and editing in order to produce The Clock, the specter of which looms large over the experience of watching it. To watch it is to marvel at the marathon three-year process (coincidentally mirroring the museum’s period of closure) undertaken by the artist to bring the work to fruition.

“Time is the essence of music,” Marclay said at the preview, shortly before or after mentioning John Cage and James Joyce’s own twenty-four-hour epic, references that point to the more life-affirming aspects of The Clock. While Marclay’s work lacks, among other elements, Cage’s preoccupation with chance and the depth, complexity, and originality of Ulysses, it captures the musicality of daily life and some of the richness of human experience that those artists absorbed into their work. The Clock represents and honors the artist’s labor (beyond Marclay’s own work, how many more thousands of hours went into the production of each film referenced?) and, with its gesture toward encompassing a complete day, provides an apt conduit for reflecting on a museum’s work in addressing and enriching human experience through the arts.

Images of <i>Episteme</i> courtesy <a href=”http://www.littlepaperplanes.com/product/4236-episteme-book-and-record”>Little Paper Planes</a>

Artists often cite one another as influences; it is easy enough to name what inspires or repels us, creatively. But the many-pronged relationships between people and objects, places and daily routine, labor and creativity—these are much more complex and harder to articulate.

—Jessica Brier, foreword to Episteme

Earlier this year two Bay Area artists (and SFMOMA staff members) John Davis and Collin McKelvey collaborated on the publication Episteme. The book includes audio and visual elements and highlights their artistic practices as inspired by their everyday work environment (our museum).

Episteme gives a behind-the-scenes glance at spaces in their soon to be under construction workspace, as seen by John and Collin, desktop technician and exhibitions technical assistant, respectively. With a foreword by SFMOMA curatorial assistant in photography Jessica Brier, the project is one part book and one part record. Photographs by John are printed alongside corresponding stills from a video by Collin, inspired by the shifting light in the current SFMOMA building, throughout the day and throughout the year, as the seasons change. They each created sound recordings inside the museum for the LP. Samples from Episteme are featured here, with field notes from John about his photographs.

Episteme Sample A and B, processed field recordings from within the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art building. (Side A sample fades into side B sample.) A. Collin McKelvey; B. John Davis

<i>Episteme,</i> by John Davis and Collin McKelvey, pages 7–8. Left: Photo by John Davis (detail); Right: Video still by Collin McKelvey

Untitled 07: This photo was taken in the conservation studio and served as a test for a pneumatic staple gun. I liked the simplicity of the staples alongside the numbers (PSI measurements), in particular the residue from people running their fingers over the surface to gauge flushness to the wall. The staples and marks are centered on the wall with nothing else around them; for me it’s an interesting tension between the aesthetically appealing and the utilitarian artifact.

<i>Episteme,</i> by John Davis and Collin McKelvey, pages 11–12. Left: Photo by John Davis; Right: Video still by Collin McKelvey

Untitled 11: Also in the conservation studio, these vials of powdered pigments with titles interested me. I enjoy the ways science and art merge in conservation, especially in an environment where highly specialized processes mingle with workspace ephemera.

<i>Episteme,</i> by John Davis and Collin McKelvey, pages 29–30. Left: Photo by John Davis; Right: Video still by Collin McKelvey

Untitled 29: This photo was taken in the lighting closet in the Installation department, located in the basement of SFMOMA.

<i>Episteme,</i> by John Davis and Collin McKelvey, pages 38–39. Left: Photo by John Davis; Right: Video still by Collin McKelvey

Untitled 38: This photo is a good example of what I was interested in investigating with many of the photographs. The scene is in the museum’s lower-level paint shop, where over time color swatches were nailed up to create an informal record of corresponding paint colors and names for various exhibitions. On their own they make for an interesting installation, but with the addition of Honky Tonk Angel—an artwork by SFMOMA senior operations technician Walter Logue—the scene shows the idiosyncratic details proliferating behind the scenes. Given that many of the staff at SFMOMA are working artists or have studied art in some capacity, visual literacy is conspicuous everywhere, as one might expect, and it is interesting to see it particularly acute in various workplace settings of the museum.

<i>Episteme,</i> by John Davis and Collin McKelvey, pages 49–50. Left: Photo by John Davis; Right: Video still by Collin McKelvey

Untitled 50: Another example of my intention with the photographs: various layers, open to interpretation, about the way people who work with and are dedicated to art mark the workplace in idiosyncratic ways, both functional and personal.

–

Installation view of Constantin Brancusi’s _La Négresse blonde_ (1926) and Charles Sheeler’s photograph _Untitled (Photograph of La Négresse blonde)_ (ca. 1945)

The premise for the day was to experience five pieces of art in uninterrupted silence for ten minutes apiece. However, I slightly augmented our proposed requirements by having our group begin at Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture titled La Négresse blonde, or “the blonde black woman.” Starting there afforded us the opportunity to also view Charles Sheeler’s black-and-white photograph, displayed in the same area, of Brancusi’s seemingly flawless, shining golden sculpture. I decided to have us experience both the photograph and the sculpture for ten minutes—taking in both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums in silence.

The process of slow looking brought into focus things that I hadn’t planned to look at. For example, I noticed that Sheeler’s photograph might be as much a subtle, unwitting self-portrait as it is a documentation of Brancusi’s sculpture. I asked myself, Is that his image reflected in the sculpture’s surface and recorded in the photo? This prompted me to turn and look at the images reflected so perfectly in the surface of the blonde négresse’s face. The flawless surface of the blonde black woman’s face helped me to look at people looking into its reflective surface—an experience that I wouldn’t have had without slow, silent, prolonged viewing. Images of Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Erykah Badu, and Beyoncé coiffed in blond kept coming to mind as our allotted ten minutes came to an end and we moved on to view Mark Rothko’s No. 14, 1960 (1960).

Pop singer Rihanna

Constantin Brancusi, _La Négresse blonde_ (1926); © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

It is remarkable how the artwork being viewed can change your experience of the passage of time. Each piece was viewed for ten minutes, but in my estimation and the estimations of some of the participants, some felt longer than others. With its ambient feel, the Rothko—that artist is definitely the Brian Eno of the canonized abstract expressionist group—seemed to be just a few moments’ viewing and made for a meditative experience, while the Fred Tomaselli piece Field Guides made me feel each minute of its viewing. Not that the Tomaselli piece was any less enjoyable. In fact, I came to appreciate it more as the time elapsed and I became lost in its details. We hadn’t planned for Trisha Donnelly’s sound piece in the adjacent gallery to be such a prominent part of the experience, but it seemed to break the silence at dramatic moments in our slow viewing and made the Rothko piece, for example, feel like the sun setting over a body of water. However, the rising electronic crescendo of Donnelly’s piece made the Tomaselli seem even more manic and teeming with life.

Fred Tomaselli, <i>Field Guides</i>, 2003

As many years as I’ve spent going to galleries and museums, I’ve never had the experience with art pieces that I had while slow viewing. I’ve resolved to go back and experience other pieces that I’ve enjoyed over the years. I realize now that I rarely have the opportunity to do gallery viewing uninterrupted for several minutes in silence. And when I do, the piece opens up not just its own subtle, surreptitious minutia but also opens to other associated experiences. Full attention gives the art piece the power to become a catalyst for a larger experience.

Take away the clocks and you’d still have a complex and maybe more mysterious work.

See the north side of the Bay Bridge in an old film noir, before its current animated lights; we can’t not juxtapose it with a recollection of the current bridge, now with the light array. One of the clock’s basic units: world war once, as in “the war between now and what once was.”

The early morning hours are dominated by people being awakened over and over and over. By alarm clocks — often being alarmed themselves because they’ve overslept — and they or the camera then turn to and gaze out of windows.

It’s a kind of narrative that involves cumulative repetition. It’s musical, in that the downbeat is the appearance of the clock. The fill is human biological and cultural behavior, the making of a metanarrative that might be called “how/when/where we sleep.”

As in: this bit of narrative is over, and it’s marked by the appearance of a clock. Next chapter. And that chapter is a variation on the theme that all the other chapters have set out, just a little different, moving the story forward minutely, into the overall narrative, which is a Human Day, or rather, a Human Day as told to us by Hollywood in real time. In the 20th century. Long and drawn out, obscure and tedious, addictive and sweet: an artificial life form with a life expectancy of 24 hours.

Life happens when we are engaged and stops when we look at the clock.

A literary speed of 60 chapters an hour. (Actually more complex because some minutes have multiple sections, multiple clocks like double time or triple time).

Marclay offers new ways to measure time: How long does it take to fill an ashtray with cigarette butts? How long does it take to make love until the partners cum simultaneously? A bathtub to fill then empty? A tulip to drop its first petal? A liquor bottle to empty, shot by shot (sic)?

The image of the clock is the foot hitting first base, safe. By the way, have you noticed time is passing, your life is passing, you’re soon going to be out at the plate. Time is a machine, a time machine is a monkey wrench.

The pulse of black and white, then color, is the dualism of past and future. Bette Davis in 1960 in b/w dials a call on the phone, and a young Latino in color in the 21st century answers.

You can walk through a doorway, but not you, someone else, probably a different gender, from a different era, will exit. Peter Sellers opens the fridge door, and a young woman peers in. When you turn and look at something, what you see will be across decades of time and space, and you will have become someone else.

It’s a study of social infrastructure: what do we do with what and when? In this artwork, in the last century, we lit matches to light cigarette after cigarette, candle after candle, in an assembly line of quotidian living. The clock and the telephone wedded, next to each other like couples in bed, fetishes of time and space. Also: we’ve got a thousand lamps and light bulbs, record players and glasses of water. “This preoccupation with clocks makes me crazy!” someone actually says.

“We are traveling through time in a machine constructed for this very purpose,” says Rod Taylor, but we, and the machine, and the purpose are different than he thinks.

There is one audience, and we are all sitting in it, always, along with Woody Allen and Doris Day, and everyone who has ever seen.

Photo: Georgie Devereux (Artwork depicted: Henri Matisse, _Portrait de Sarah Stein_ (Portrait of Sarah Stein), 1916)

What’s your name?

Monica S.

Where are you from?

Originally from Chile, just moved to San Francisco

What brings you to SFMOMA today?

I am a glass artist, came for inspiration.