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Christina Catherine Martinez
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Ready, Set, Art Fair!
by Christina Catherine Martinez
at artMRKT San Francisco
May 16th - May 19th
Posted
5/15/13
This week, San Francisco will be treated to not one, but two contemporary art fairs. ArtMRKT San Francisco and ArtPadSF will both take place May 16 - 19th, and it behooves an art lover to visit both if they want to get a compressed but authentic feel for the art scene in the Bay Area. A good rule of thumb is to take in artMRKT during the day and party down with ArtPadSF at night.
This will be artMRKT’s first year at Fort Mason Center in the Marina, a beautiful but unfortunately less-accessible venue than last year... [more]
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O the sleeping bag contains the body but not the dreaming head
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Alice Channer, Aaron Flint Jamison, Anicka Yi at Altman Siegel Gallery
April 18th - June 1st
Posted
4/30/13
In an intriguing gesture of enticement, the information provided on Altman Siegel’s sparse four-part installation is limited to the poem by Matthea Harvey, from which the exhibition borrows its title.
Everything Must Go
Today’s class 3-Deifying:Godgrass, godtrees, godroad.
A sheet of geese bisects the rainstorm.The water tower is ten times full.
We practice drawing cubes—That’s the house squared away
& the incubator with Baby.The dead are in their grid.
Oh the sleeping bag c... [more]
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Don't Let 'em See You Sweat: Notes on Work
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
4/12/13
In the mind’s eye hangs a poster of a discomfitingly adorable orange-and-white kitten clinging perilously to a tree branch by a single paw. In thick bubbly script are the words "Hang in there, baby!”
I don’t know much about what my friends have accomplished this year, but we are all exceedingly familiar with what we’re in the middle of doing, and more obliquely, what we intend to do.
We know exactly how hard we’re working.
***
Eight undergraduate students nurse Monday morning coffees, s... [more]
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Don't Let 'em See You Sweat: Notes on Work
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
4/6/13
In the mind’s eye hangs a poster of a discomfitingly adorable orange-and-white kitten clinging perilously to a tree branch by a single paw. In thick bubbly script are the words "Hang in there, baby!”
I don’t know much about what my friends have accomplished this year, but we are all exceedingly familiar with what we’re in the middle of doing, and more obliquely, what we intend to do.
We know exactly how hard we’re working.
***
Eight undergraduate students nurse Monday morning coffees,... [more]
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Light on a Surface
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Garry Winogrand at SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
March 9th - June 2nd
Posted
3/24/13
It’s hard to clear one’s head of all the preconceived notions and packaged analyses about an artist before going to meet their work for the first time. I made the mistake of reading other reviews before seeing Garry Winogrand’s photographs at SFMOMA (where I’m counting the days until it shutters for redevelopment, and I’ll be left a few old friends shy). One included a particularly barfy comparison of his New York period in the 1960s to the popular television program Mad Men. On the f... [more]
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Meet Will Brown: Meta-Curating
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
2/15/13
Although “meta” is often misused as dismissive shorthand for the self-referential, it is, in its most fruitful sense, a tool for critical distance. Will Brown’s second exhibition was a history of black monochrome painting that included requisite, museum-quality copy and literature, but the paintings themselves were merely signified by chalk outlines on black gallery walls. The shapes creeped over moldings and ceiling space, overlapping in ways that made it clear that even if the proprietor... [more]
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INSTITUTIONAL HASHTAG
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Taryn Simon at John Berggruen Gallery
January 16th - March 30th
Posted
1/28/13
If the New York Public Library’s circulating picture library were constructed according to the popular tastes of the denizens of Instagram, then there would only be three folders:
Food
—> (subcategory) macaroons
Dogs / Cats
Cleavage
—> (subcategory) “duck face”
The NYPL’s library—a mere 1.2 million mainly photographic images culled from books, magazines, adverts, and grouped according to some 12,000 subject headings—seems quaint compared to the amount of visual information an online searc... [more]
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Overlapping Histories: Curatorial Practices in San Francisco
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
11/29/12
Yes, thanks to the Philistines of Cyberspace the word CURATOR is being stretched to the very limits of semantic significance, but rather than join the chorus of affronted cultural elites pointing fingers at every blogger or boutique-owner who dares to don that hallowed mantle, I thought it might be more productive to speak with two persons right here in the Bay Area who hold inarguable rights to the title yet work in vastly different contexts. Even when confined to the concerns of the art world, t... [more]
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The Optometrist and the Wallpaper Designer.
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Charles Burchfield, Ralph Eugene Meatyard at Fraenkel Gallery
September 6th, 2012 - October 27th, 2012
Posted
10/19/12
I like that Fraenkel Gallery doesn’t present the pairing of the two artists featured in their latest exhibition with an overwrought thesis. Burchfield / Meatyard is its own kind of poetry. The painter and the photographer do have a “shared sensibility” of nature that’s maybe summed up by a shared preference for peace and quiet, a place to go and think about looking. Burchfield said that an artist “must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there.” I dig deep to try and reco... [more]
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Let Them Eat Pop
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
9/29/12
I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.
—Andy Warhol on why he chose to paint soup cans
If these musings prove nothing more than the paranoid ramblings of someone who finds poetry in grocery lists and weeps at the sight of octogenarians in matching hats, then so be it, but... something is off about this soup. There are consumer choices enough without worrying if one’s groceries are accurately reflecting some elevated cultural sensib... [more]
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McGee and Me
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Barry McGee at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
August 24th, 2012 - December 9th, 2012
Posted
9/13/12
The end of summer is a strange moment. The energy of back-to-school jitters permeates everything. Fashion releases its flimsiest glossies in preparation for the cinder-block September issues. Galleries shutter, giving their artists and proprietors a chance to check in with the Midwest and assure their families that they’re getting enough to eat and thus return to September a few pounds thicker for the fall previews. New York and Paris turn into sweaty metropolitan ghost-towns, those with means hav... [more]
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Par Infinity: Earth Putt // Putt Works at Will Brown Gallery
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Water de Maria, Ant Farm, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Long, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Smithson, James Turrell at Will Brown
July 1st, 2012 - August 12th, 2012
Posted
8/10/12
“The par is three for every hole,” we were told matter-of-factly, “except number two, which is par seventeen, and number seven, which is par infinity.” I didn’t like the sound of that, but the potential embarrassment of swinging into the night was outweighed by the shame of giving up. We’ll deal with it when we deal with it. Land art is not an exclusively American phenomenon, and neither is miniature golf, but we have muscled ourselves into being primarily associated with them. Land art (o... [more]
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Identity Outfitters
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Cindy Sherman at SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
July 14th, 2012 - October 8th, 2012
Posted
7/26/12
Snaking through the rooms of SFMOMA’s recently opened Cindy Sherman retrospective, I felt disturbingly underwhelmed by portrait after portrait of the artist acting as her own costumer, make-up artist, hairdresser, and photographer, becoming in each photograph, a different woman. Whispering into their recorders and to each other, the critics sound-byte thesis statements echoed off the walls like sage axioms: “pictures are misleading,” “identity is a social construction,” “photography is impli... [more]
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Conceptual Consumption
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Michael Delucia, Liam Everett, Ruth Laskey, Arik Levy, Sam Orlando Miller, Clare Rojas, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Anna Sew Hoy, Sara VanDerBeek at Hedge Gallery
June 21st, 2012 - September 1st, 2012
Posted
7/15/12
Usually, exhibitions organized around a technique or medium rather than a concept tend to come off as crafty rather than curated—the whole enterprise tends to knock ideas a notch (or two, or three) below form. But fetish craft revivalism and the weird, zeitgeisty impulse to BRAND BRAND BRAND make the consumption of technique and material a somewhat reluctant political activity, imbued with any and as much concept as you like. Some people relish this. They think of thrift-store shopping as a for... [more]
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It Never Really Goes Away: An Interview with Daniel Clowes
by Christina Catherine Martinez
2012-07-01
San Francisco, June 2012: "Is that a comic book you're reading?"
I'm sitting on an AC Transit bus in Oakland, reading a collection of Daniel Clowes' early short-story comics. I nod at the elderly gentleman and he seems pleased. "Good for you!" he says, "what kind of comic is it?" I look down. The panel I happen to be reading at the moment depicts a baseball player holding his own giant dick in lieu of a bat, part of a larger strip about the sublimated, homoerotic ritualism of professiona... [more]
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Lady Business
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Hannah Wilke at Gallery Paule Anglim
April 4th, 2012 - April 28th, 2012
Posted
4/25/12
First, an etymological complaint:
We have yet to designate a word for female genitalia that falls squarely between the crass (pussy) and the clinical (vagina, “female genitalia”). We’ve got the upper part covered. Somewhere between tits and breasts, you have your casual, everyday boob (oh shoot, I spilled mustard on my boob [or “bewb” if typing through social media]).
Hannah Wilke’s sculptures of abstracted forms resembling a cootch oscillate visually between those two poles. They have gestural, almost happenstance quali... [more]
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Magazines
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
4/16/12
I think I hate book culture. I was having coffee with a friend the other day, like you do, when our talk turned to magazines; what we’re reading, which ones we’d like to read, why that one goddamn glossy from the UK costs $15, etc. At some point, I absentmindedly wiped my chocolate-scone smeared hand on the copy of San Francisco Arts Quarterly that lay on the table between us. Sacrilege, I know, but I had a few backup copies under my arm. Since SFAQ is free, I usually pick up several at a time... [more]
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Enigmatic Signposts That Bear an Eerie Resemblance to Words
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Alice Tippit at Important Projects
March 2nd, 2012 - April 1st, 2012
Posted
3/22/12
I’ve heard tell of a really great trick for blocked art writers called “The Throwing Up of the Notes,” which entails carefully transcribing ones’ hurried, handwritten chicken-scratches onto the computer screen. I’m not sure what’s so special about this technique other than neglecting to edit grammar and punctuation. Being an overgrown undergrad, I’m well aware of the importance of transcribing notes. Some jargon about hands and ideas and memory and jogging. Writing something down onc... [more]
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Invaluable Objects
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Jeremy Blake, Nayland Blake, Mathew Brady, Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, Kate Gilmore, Chris Johanson, Martin Kippenberger, Harmony Korine, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, Andres Serrano, Roman Signer, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems at Will Brown
January 27th, 2012 - March 4th, 2012
Posted
2/28/12
An honest-to-god list of works of art that I have touched when no one was looking: Mary Cassatt's The BathVan Gogh's Room at ArlesandSkull with Burning CigaretteRoy Lichtenstein's Meatassorted Picassosmaybe a Rothko or twoa very old bust of Nefertiti
We all have ways of giving release to our sense of anomie. As a child—young, eager, completely overwhelmed by the systems of power that sanction value among inanimate objects—I exercised a feeble sense of power by touching anything that I was... [more]
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Notes on Style, Violence
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
2/19/12
“Style is the answer to everything... To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it “ --Bukowski “Style is violent, and I am not violent”--G.R.
With Gerhard Richter’s retrospective currently meandering across Europe, I’m reminded of the above quote, one of his more quotable quotes. When repeated at me, it’s done so in response to some aesthetic gesture on my part, the quoter delicately embellishing it with a tone of reproach, like a slap on th... [more]
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Lost Articles #6
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
1/17/12
A voicemail left on my phone over the holiday season...
Hi Daniel, this is your mother. M-O-T-H-E-R. I feel like hell, I have for a whole week. I’ve had headaches, I’ve had bladder infections, every time I go peepee it’s like peeing fire. I’m just so tired of it. We weren’t invited out this year, so Dad went out to get the fixins to make Christmas dinner. He said we’d have turkey, and stuffing and casseroles and stuff that we’ve had in the past, and he’s gonna be working ha... [more]
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Hesh and Fresh
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Frank Marshall at Bekris Gallery
November 19th, 2011 - January 27th, 2012
Posted
1/17/12
I think I missed music.
Be it that a love of sound was subordinated to a love of books, some sort of social void carved out by a homeschool education (leaving that one for you Psych 100-types to chew on), or perhaps that my elder siblings—so often the source of one’s earliest musical allegiances—were lost in their own worlds of computer programming and mixed martial arts (again, for you types, go at it); I somehow missed music. As I made my way through the latter half of my education in... [more]
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Lost Articles #5
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
12/19/11
There is no “end” to art. The end of art history can be anticipated only as the end of art historians; maybe it will happen in a freak accident at a wine mixer. I can’t predict these things, I just take them as they come. And so, it is with a moderately heavy heart that I admit defeat against the tide of pamphlets, flyers, posters, handmade literature, “found art” and artifacts of visual culture that has metastasized at an alarming rate since the beginning of the Occupy movement in the Bay... [more]
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The Other Others
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Lawrence Jordan, Fred Martin at Ever Gold Gallery
December 8th, 2011 - January 6th, 2012
Posted
12/19/11
I generally take umbrage at the fervor proponents of Beat culture embrace the movement’s otherness as an extension of their own, a permanent boho earnestness that leads to a degree from Naropa, a hankering for hitchhiking, and a plaintive (often unearned) nostalgia for five-points jazz bars. Naturally, a few buzzwords in the press release for "Beat by the Bay" at Ever Gold Gallery immediately touched off the cynicism of this Los Angeles-native, my own pet brand of otherness. I can’t even... [more]
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Touched or Turned-On?
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Blake Little at SF Camerawork
November 17th, 2011 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Posted
11/15/11
SF Camerawork is hosting a signing for photographer Blake Little’s latest book, The Company of Men, a series of portraits that simultaneously celebrates and undermines traditional archetypes of masculinity. Each subject is shot in his own home or nearby, and they stare out at the viewer with a quiet, disarming self-composure that complicates the sexual undertones of their poses and/or states of undress. Am I to be touched or turned-on? Is this book even for me? Blake’s subjects represent a cross... [more]
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Available Alternatives
by Christina Catherine Martinez
at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
November 16th, 2011 7:30 PM - 9:03 PM
Posted
11/15/11
Add Occupy Cal to the three movements already taking place on both sides of the bay (Occupy Oakland was just dismantled for a second time this weekend, but a few hangers-on remain in the trees. Literally). Space is a tricky field of discourse right now. If you can make your way through throngs of undergrads in illicit pup-tents, I highly recommend Space is the Place: Recent Avant-Garde Shorts and the Berkeley Art Musem and Pacific Film Archive on November 16th. No, it is not a screening of the... [more]
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Lost Articles #4:
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
10/11/11
The Atomic Professor is the polemical short story of a history teacher at the posh, fictional Oceanside University, located a few miles north of Los Angeles. Author Ronald Raydon’s protagonist is the exasperated Richard Maslin, “middle-aged, slightly built, with thinning gray hair and glasses,” who appears to be the sole figure on campus that refuses to sign a petition put together by the Ban-the-Bomb Coalition, a group set on acquiring as many signatures as they can for an official (by wh... [more]
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The Parts of the Parts Do End Up Making Up All of the Parts
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Frances Stark at Mills College Art Museum
September 15th, 2011 - December 11th, 2011
Posted
10/10/11
I forgot most of it. And I’m going to resist looking over any notes and exhibition literature here, because The Whole of All the Parts as Well as the Parts of All the Parts is quite concerned with my forgetting. It was made clear from the start that I would forget most of it, and though I’ve forgotten whether it was articulated in a tone of bitterness or resignation or celebration, I remember somewhat a question that was asked of us there, shuffling around the darkened gallery, chasing movi... [more]
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Lost Articles #3
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Posted
9/6/11
Diplomatic relations between what I’d like to believe is a personal spirituality and the cultural residue of a religious upbringing tends to come off without much conflict, even though the uncomfortable prick of Sunday School edicts can still be summoned at the slightest provocation. Chick tracts used to scare the hell out of me. I haven’t read any in years, but I was greeted by one at the bus stop the other day, left on the bench by an ostensibly well-meaning but elusive disciple. Gun Slinge... [more]
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Bill Fontana’s Sonic Sculptures
by Christina Catherine Martinez
Bill Fontana at SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
November 20th, 2010 - November 6th, 2011
Posted
6/6/11
The texture of a city can be difficult to get a handle on. But once grasped, it becomes a special pleasure to run your hands across it; the anxiety of inarticulateness is assuaged by material expression. I’m speaking here of the actual textures of a city that we take for granted, the stucco or clapboard, pavement or cobblestone, real brick and mortar, that is only thrown into relief once we left behind, but one may view art itself as a sort of manifest antidote to the insufficiency of language.Bi... [more]
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