“Openness” is a quality that has been much touted in recent years, particularly in circles where art is a center of interest.

As is usually the case when ideas become fashionable, a half truth, or a principle that is true perhaps half of the time, is made into a way of life. In fact, “openness,” like many another attributes of our ambiguous existences, has about as much to discommend as to recommend it.

It scarcely seems necessary to argue the virtues of confronting as much of experience as one can without the straitjacket of rigid stereotype and prejudice (not to be confused with judiciousness, or making judgments after the fact). Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” is probably the definitive testament to the tragic futility of holding… Continue reading...

Episode 7

Ash Clouds over Bushwick

Mari Ahokoivu and Anna Sailamaa are in the forefront of the burgeoning art comics movement coming out of Finland. Stranded in New York after the MoCCA Festival due to the volcanic ash cloud over Europe, they find themselves in Bushwick for an extended stay. Work Only takes them to the park for a conversation about their work, how to hang laundry, and how to describe those moments in which nothing happens. Continue reading...

Art of Conversation lives! Continuing the project to document the working practice of SF Bay Area artists, Christine Wong Yap joined me in an email-based interview in the first half of May, 2010.  Three numbered sections mark initial, separate topics…yet intricacies weave throughout the conversation.  Enjoy!

1. Steven Barich: Hello Christine.  Thank you for taking this interview, on the eve of your solo exhibition titled Irrational Exuberance at Sight School in Oakland, CA.  I’d like to talk with you about this exhibition in particular, in order to get a “preview of the artist’s mind,” as well as some other topics related to the activity of being an artist/writer/designer in

flip flip

flip flip… Continue reading...

Identifying the threshold, any threshold—the what, where and how of it all—begins with the challenge of identifying something other, something beyond what is current, what is given. Reaching that threshold, and furthermore crossing it, requires a certain…progression. Some say that a threshold—by its very nature—always remains just ahead, beyond, intangible and even attempting to cross it is irrelevant. There will always be naysayers…

In a recent panel talk titled Towards the Liminal, I had the chance to sit and speak alongside some eminent intermediaries of the Bay Area visual arts: David Huff of Pro Arts Gallery, Anuradha Vikram of… Continue reading...

It seems to be among the perversities of human nature that people can so often agree on abstract sentiments, and then part company altogether on their application.

In discussing art, one can converse at great length, and with impassioned enthusiasm, about the necessity for inspiration, vision, originality, energy. But eventually it will almost always turn out that one person is talking about Jackson Pollock and the other about Josef Albers, that one’s paragon is Mark Rothko and the other’s Max Ernst—twains that just will not meet.

Compounding the perversity, where there is agreement on specifics it is more apt to be “negative” than “positive.” One is more likely to find those who concur in the judgment that Willem de Kooning’s recent paintings are not as good as his… Continue reading...

1998 WAS A GOOD YEAR

From the spoils of hate—
into hate’s barn
unshackle a mouse of shame
Salt is one
mean keen blade,
my vision dries up on me tenfold
hate builds a reef, lips gleam like fine ice
yech, not a rusty crust
for the tongue in its cage, the air
the water, my eyes paint with
all things crystallized, salt is one thorough bug
It’s not as though every day is ice:
both before and after seem splendid—wild ice—
at the moment I’m a frenetic xylophone of fire
but as to… Continue reading...

Edouard Manet
He drew Baudelaire’s shoes
I found them beautiful
I found them in Clingancourt
He drew a clochard’s shoes

Like the king’s slippers
in Rabat
He climbs into the pumpkin patch

You can see Mexico
You can hear Quetzalcoatl
Chewing bread in the Zocolo

And the good people laughed at him
In fact they spit on him
For painting a bum… Continue reading...