Radio Tania

Art Basel Miami

Art Basel Miami is like a mini city of artists, designers, photographers, curators, journalists and collectors that just springs up in the middle of Balmy Miami for a week, and it's extraordinary. A couple of the pieces shown here are works that I especially appreciated from the show (particularly Charles Guice's Gallery and Josee Bienvenu) except for one, the one of the boat on the water. I just happened to fall upon it because it's by fellow journalist and Armenian, Nubar Alexanian (who also shares his name with that of my Grandpa, Noubar).

kiss

I saw this beautiful Constantin Brancusi sculpture in person at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The manager of the museum store said that countless times, men have called the museum to reserve a spot in front of the sculpture so that they can propose to their wife to be. When I came home, my friend Michael gave me a similar sculpture, in miniture form, one he had discovered in the mountains of Peru.

how disposable is it?

My studio mate Gage invited us over for dinner a couple of weeks ago. He lives in the neighborhood I grew up in, an area that has changed dramatically over the last years, both aesthetically and culturally. In fact, a German friend staying with us talked about how much his neighborhood, St. Pauli, in Hamburg had changed in the 15 years he was there (much like the East Village in NY). He so wished he had tracked the changes, through video or photography. But alas, the evolution is only evident in his memory. But back to Gage. We had gone to get some beer and the shopping bag from the corner store was a collage of discarded medical records from the medical school near by. Why had someone taken the effort to create such disposable items as paper bags...I found the intersection of something so impersonal as a shopping bag and something so utterly confidential as a discarded medical record (albeit an anonymous one) infinitely interesting.

spiders in the mist

Today I was spraying water on one of my plants and I noticed a tiny little spider scurrying under his tiny little web, as a sudden downpour of water came to surpirse him under the morning sunlight. A few years back, I did a story on massive sculptures, bigger than life, that accentuated the more mundane aspects of our experience. A large squrrel made of collected images of squirrels, a ship made out of manila envelopes.  Questions of sapce and  the relativity come to mind,  like being a child in a place and revisiting that same place and thinking how small everything now seems. The little spider's world is so much smaller than mine and yet I can easily place myself into his experience, knowing what small felt like to me before.

Mouse in the wild

A close friend suggested I make this blog more personal, offer a sense of experience rather than ideas. "Bring me in", he said, "it seems a bit like a textbook, too explanatory". I realized how easy it is to hide behind thoughts and how much more difficult it is at times to reveal experience. But also how much more liberating it can be. So this being a blog (what an odd word) about art, I figured I would associate my own experience with experiences I have had with art. Philip and I bought a house. It's from 1892 (quite old for a city that suffered two major earthquakes). The other day we walked into the kitchen and there was a little mouse nibbling at nothing on the floor. I asked Philip to capture him and liberate him into the wild wilderness of San Francisco. The mouse did a little roll over, muck like dogs do when they want to be petted, and soon found himself in a new environment. It reminded me of Bruce Nauman's work at the Dia:Beacon. A multi paneled video piece tracking the movements of a family of mice in his studio at night. The Beacon has placed it in their basement (where I got into trouble for taking pictures) and it seemd like the ideal place, a very well chosen location for this work of video art. Some images of Nauman work and pictures I too.

my country my country?

Laura Poitras, a Peabody award winning filmmaker, who credits her vision to that of Frederick Wiseman and the brilliant Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, travelled to Baghdad on her own, without protection, contacts or knowledge of the language, to make a documentary about the elections there. She got inimitable access—in one scene, she is filming a black market arms deal between an Australian mercenary and a Afghani.

look more closely, or maybe just watch

The work of Sarah Bostwick is unassuming, from far you may not even be able to recognize what she is revealing. Here titles, of course, give it all away. Her work is reminiscent of Arp reliefs, of Gordon Matta-Clark, who at one point purchased all the spaces between buildings in a section of New York, or even Rachel Whiteread, who observes the surfaces of places, the edges, dents, contours, removing the interior to reveal the ever more fascinating exterior. Bostwick does much the same, reminding us of the things we miss when we think we are looking so closely.

Mexico is somewhere down there

This week I am doing an interview about the photographs of (and love affair between) Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. The images were taken during the several years they lived together in Mexico. They're very pretty, very quintessential Mexico. And an insightful friend asked, "What are these images NOT showing?"

What happens when you fuck up the environment?

A few years back, artist Brandon Ballengee was dedicated to exploring the wetlands in America. He would find malformed amphibians and bring their decline to our attention through beautiful photographs....but the beauty is just so distracting.

A whole new world

When you go to see an exhibit of Thomas Hirschhorn's work, you are entering an entirely re-constructed space. In fact, it almost feels like you are stepping into his brain and it's almost difficult to navigate. He lends meaning to the term, a new way of seeing.