Radio Tania

Levels of Intimacy

Neil Young's box set, titled Archives, was released a couple of months ago to great acclaim. Made up of 10 Blu-ray discs, each holding 50 gigs of information, it is truly Neil Young's life in a box. There’s a beautiful moment we stumble upon in the box set where we see a film showing Young leaning out of an old car on his property in the hills of California, a land that I am so intimately connected to from having grown up here and watching the subtle changes of coastal light, and he says, “No matter how many people are around me, I keep talking about all the things that go on inside me.” The joy and vulnerability on his face against the bright blue sky suddenly made me see him as a dreamer, as someone who followed the only thing that he could do and followed it fully, preserving all the evidence of that journey in his music.

Humpday is the winner of the 2009 Sundance Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence and screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival. I spoke with Lynn Shelton when she was in San Francisco and you can find that interview on the Radio Tania website.

 

John Baldessari has been called an LA artist, a conceptual artist, a pop-artist, but is quite simply and completely an artist. Winner of the  2009 Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, Baldessari is one of the most important artists living and working today. In October, he will have a retrospective at the Tate that will travel to Barcelona, Los Angeles and New York. Stay tuned for an article on him in The Times.

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43)

 

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.