Phil Collins at SFMoMA and Detroit Prep

Hi. Sorry to be the slowest person ever-- I know I haven't posted in forever, and no, I still haven't finished transcribing my interview with Detroit artist and MoNA mastermind Jef Bourgeau, but I'm working on it. We're leaving bright and early tomorrow morning for Detroit, but I thought I'd say a thing or two before I disappear for another week.

I made the gallery and museum rounds this weekend and saw some good stuff-- including a show on food and activism at The Lab Gallery. (By the way, food is a hot topic in contemporary art these days...something to ponder.) Another highlight was a video by Phil Collins (no, not that one, the British artist who's up for the Turner prize this year). He had people in Istanbul sign karaoke to all Smiths songs, and the video is really funny and really sad, at times. Definitely worth checking out.

So, otherwise I've just been getting prepared for the Detroit trip, which I will report on fully when I return. For the moment, suffice to say that the week is really packed with tons of great things-- visiting galleries, MoCAD, collectors, etc. AND I'll be going to Canada for the first time ever-- exciting!

Correction: There was one other piece at the 06 Whitney Biennial that I liked

Yeah, I realized later today that I was mistaken-- in additon to Paul Chan's piece, I also LOVED Francesco Vezzoli's fake trailer for a remake of the Gore Vidal film, Caligula. Here's the Whitney's page for Vezzoli:

http://www.whitney.org/www/2006biennial/artists.php?artist=Vezzoli_Francesco

It's hard to understand how hilarious and brilliant it is without just seeing it. Anyway, I liked that too. Otherwise my synopsis of "Day for Night" (the 06 biennial) was "Oh look, more work by Robert Gober..." (I like Gober, but geez, he had a show at Matthew Marks last year that was up for months....

Paul Chan: National Philistine

This will be a quick one. Check this out:

http://www.nationalphilistine.com

This is a project by Paul Chan, an awesome video/ multi-media artist whose work was perhaps the only exciting discovery I made at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (I also liked the Wrong Gallery installation). Anyway, on this site, you can access fonts, audiobooks and videos that Paul Chan has made. It's a really great site, what an amazing artist. The piece of his that I saw at the Whitney was a black and white projection onto the floor (which reminded me of those lamps that kids have with rotating shades and shapes cut out of the lamp shade, so that shadows in the spapes of animals are projected onto the walls. In the Chan piece, silouettes of things from the street-- bicycles, telephone poles-- are floating into the air, toward the sky and then all of a sudden bodies fall, both up and down. I immediately thought of Sept 11, of course, but it was so much more thoughtful and beautiful than any other artistic production I've seen that came out of Sept 11. My other favorite Sep 11-related thing is the Sleater-Kinney song "Far Away", off the album One Beat. Very good stuff.