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

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...

Roberta Smith in the NY Times from Feb. 10th:

“Museum curators need to think less about an artist’s career, its breakthroughs and its place in the big picture and more in terms of an artist’s life’s work pursued over time with increasing concentration and singularity.

They have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field. They owe it to the public to present a balanced menu that involves painting as well as video and photography and sculpture. They need to think outside the hive-mind, both distancing themselves from their personal feelings to consider what’s being wrongly omitted and tapping into their own subjectivity to show us what they really love.… Continue reading...

Performance art has undergone an interesting metamorphosis in recent years.

It originated in the 1960s as a branch of Conceptual art and, in most cases, an extension of sculpture. Artists in the 1960s were seized with the urge to make a greater impact in the “real,” physical world. Painting grew bigger or turned into sculpture; sculpture became earthworks, environments, happenings. With performance, the artist became inseparable from his work.

Yet it remained ritualistic and hermetic, basically indifferent to the presence of an audience and to dramatic or entertainment value. Like sculpture itself, it was simply there. The viewer was permitted to “overhear,” but the event would have proceeded even without him. Continue reading...

A HISTORY OF THE ROSE IN EXILE

(BY WAY OF BILL BERKSON)

“Jay DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-1965), a thickly incrusted
impasto painting featuring a sculptured starburst motif,
is the visual masterwork of the Beat era, a painting whose
spiritual aura and commanding physical presence make it
one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.” *

Ten years it hung
in an art college classroom. No one wanted it,
no one wanted to get rid of it
either. Continue reading...

Wallworks, on view now at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, delivers true to its name: eight commissioned artists have created near-monumental wall-mounted art that occupies the lower and upper floor galleries. The curatorial premieur of Bettie-Sue Hertz, Wallworks—as presented in the literature of the exhibition—is both an “illumination” of the architecture of the YBCA building, created by Fumihiko Maki in 1993, as well as showcasing how artists might address either of two thematic challenges in their artwork: “split landscapes and culture color.” In viewing Wallworks, there are two main threads in which to analyze the exhibition, namely: the success in which the artists illuminate/manipulate/decorate the building and/or galleries, and Continue reading...

Jonathan Runcio’s solo show at Ratio 3 is very satisfying. Often pure abstract can feel like a cop out; lacking of extrinsic relation to the world, its forms often appear flagrantly capricious. This is not the case with “Capital Zero”. Runcio’s spray painted canvases (mounted paper mostly) are no doubt pleasing formally, but also have a locatable methodology. This justifies them intellectually beyond the merely decorative. At first look, the work is smooth and impenetrable, but on inspection, the mechanics of manufacture are evident. In the main series, a section is left uncovered during production so that we are afforded the trace marks excluded from the main image. This throws us out of picture and into a consciousness of the frame and staging.

Runcio takes a printer’s perspective to layering color Continue reading...

A few weeks back, an article in the East Bay Express titled Death of the Salesmen implied a looming economic downward spiral in the visual arts, here in Oakland. I, and a number of my colleagues, felt this article didn’t go far enough in taking a wider look at the alternatives to typical commercial art gallery business models, and this was most apparent by the non-inclusion of certain “alternative” art galleries here in the East Bay, such as Blankspace, the Compound Gallery, Rowan Morrison, 21 Grand, etc. These spaces—all run by artists with a vision to create their own publicly accessible art/business/social spheres—exemplify a Continue reading...

On Thursday of last week I made it out to Fort Mason for openings at the San Francisco MOMA’s rental/artists gallery. With its link to MOMA and reputation for promoting mid-range regional artists, not to mention its commoditized rental program, it is usually pretty low on the hip scale. But with a changing of the guard they are bringing in more diverse artwork and its publics. In addition to the main gallery presentation, the venue is experimenting with mixed results installing younger artists in the loft.

The main gallery featured Michelle Mansour in the front and Michael Hall in the back. Both of these artist are accomplished with cohesive bodies of work. Michelle’s paintings look like strings of beads or Tomaselli pills floating in briny fields of yellowing ether. They are Continue reading...