Matt Sussman

Luke Butler

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Luke Butler

arts@sfbg.com

"It’s so hard for me to figure out where it begins and ends with Shatner," comments artist Luke Butler on the man who, arguably, could be called his muse. "He’s a genius," Butler continues, "not because he is a great actor, but because he has this unstoppable quality. His vulnerabilities are on the surface for all to see."

Butler has spent a lot of time thinking through what William Shatner reveals and withholds on his most expressive surface: his face. For his Enterprise series — hung as part of "Captain!," his recent solo show at Silverman Gallery — Butler meticulously painted and repainted the freeze-framed countenance of Shatner as Captain Kirk.

Roland Barthes famously rhapsodized over Greta Garbo’s face, noting that, at a time when onscreen representations of beauty were changing, her visage "assures the passage from awe to charm." Butler’s paintings propose an alternate shift in regard to the uses of pop culture in contemporary art: from something ironic or quotable to a strange, new affective model — especially where masculinity is concerned.

Isolated against their gray backgrounds, devoid of context, Butler’s faces invite projection on what’s causing the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise to look so pained, or languorous, or nervous. In space, no one can hear you scream, but Butler is still trying to listen.

Which brings us back to vulnerability. Kirk is described in text on Silverman’s site as a "model of vulnerability" — one no doubt enabled by Shatner’s borderline-hammy yet entirely committed acting style. "I think vulnerability is a better way for people to be," Butler reflects. "I think that it’s the best, most productive form of strength."

It’s an observation carried out most fantastically in Butler’s collage series "Leaders of Men," also displayed in "Captain!," in which the heads of Cold War politicians appear seamlessly grafted onto the glistening, well-endowed bodies of contemporaneous gay beefcake. While humorously resonating with the recent eroticization of the body politic (think of those shirtless pics of Obama swimming or Putin fishing), Butler’s jarring juxtapositions are more than a one-trick sight gag. They offer that most sheltered, scripted, and paranoid of creatures — the politician — the chance to literally let it all hang out.

"It was no big deal to show Saddam Hussein being hung to death. But if his cock had popped out — that would have been a real crisis," Butler explains, expounding on our culture’s double standard toward depictions of violence versus male nudity. "It’s such an awful contradiction. My collages don’t solve this problem, but run into it head on."

www.silverman-gallery.com

Seamy dreams

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Seamy dreams

arts@sfbg.com

Sex and violence are old bedfellows in art cinema. A line can be drawn from the sliced eyeball in Un Chien Andalou (1929) through A Clockwork Orange (1971), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and David Cronenberg’s earlier films, right up to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s clitoridectomy in Lars von Trier’s latest provocation Antichrist. The quickest way to expose the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality still seems to be the willful conflation and graphic depiction of bodily harm and bodily pleasure.

The late ’60s and early ’70s films of Koji Wakamatsu — showcased in Yerba Bunea Center for the Arts’ thrilling retrospective, "Pink Cinema Revolution" — present a fascinating case for the political uses of gratuity. Extremely low-budget, alternately frenetic and plodding, frontloaded with sexualized violence, grizzly killings, S&M and rape, and pulsing with the radical politics of their era, Wakamatsu’s films are disturbing, messy, and electric. When, by a fluke, Secrets Behind the Wall (1965) got past Japan’s film rating board and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival that year, the audience couldn’t have prepared themselves for the sight of a stifled housewife hungrily licking the keloid scars of her lover, a Hiroshima survivor.

Although he was a contemporary of Seijun Suzuki, Shohei Imamura, and Nagisa Oshima, Wakamatsu doesn’t slot so easily into the cannon of the nuberu bagu, Japan’s response to the cinematic new waves churning across Europe at the time (noted Japanese film scholar Donald Richie still contends that Wakamatsu "makes embarrassing soft-core psychodramas"). A farmer’s son who had worked odd construction jobs and served time before ever stepping behind a camera, Wakamatsu fell into filmmaking without the formal training or academic background held by many of his peers. Hired by Nikkatsu in 1963, he quickly started churning out pinku eiga or "pink films," the highly profitable genre of soft-core quickies that often displayed wild creativity in the face of a the (still-standing) taboo against onscreen genital realism.

Wakamatsu eventually quit Nikkatsu (after the studio, fearing government action, gave the potential embarrassment Secrets a low-profile domestic release despite the acclaim it received in Berlin) and formed his own studio, Wakamatsu Pro, using the pink film industry mainly as a distribution network for his increasingly extreme experiments, which could barely be described as "soft-core." In Violent Virgin (1969), men and women brutally subject a young couple to all manner of sexual degradations, resulting in the woman’s crucifixion; Violated Angels (1967), based on Richard Speck’s 1966 killing spree, ends with the killer surrounded by a bloody rosette of his flayed victims; Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) follows the strange, nihilistic love that develops between two abused teenagers.

Paralleling the growing output of Wakamatsu Pro was the off-screen rise of the radical left wing and student movements. Extremist political groups like the Red Army Faction, and the closely related Japanese Red Army and United Red Army (whose twisted genealogy and downfall Wakamatsu follows in his most recent feature United Red Army (2007), which closes out the series), held the Japanese government accountable for aiding and abetting the U.S. in Vietman and demanded a complete overhaul of the standing social and political structure by any means necessary.

While one can see in the radical assaults on the status quo of sexual relations, filmmaking, and normative citizenship staged in Wakamatsu’s films as being in concert with the rhetoric of the extreme political left, he was not above pointing out its ridiculousness as well. More often than not, the leftists in Wakamatsu films are a confused bunch whose political motives are frequently (and humorously) cross-wired to their libidinal impulses. In Ecstasy of the Angels (1970) the hormonal militants (named, perhaps in a nod to G.K. Chesterton’s anarchist satire The Man Who Would be Thursday, after the days of the week) spout secret code meaningless even to them in between having sex at the drop of a hat.

A fitting close to the series, United Red Army finds Wakamatsu taking a sober look back over the era that fuelled his most prolific years as a filmmaker, accounting for both the revolutionary promises and grim dissolution of Japan’s student protest movement. Combining documentary footage with staged reenactments, United Red Army is a stylistic 360 from Wakamatsu’s earlier work. The grueling, three-hour history lesson spares no detail in documenting the titular faction’s descent from idealism into the sadistic purging of its own members to its highly publicized last stand at a mountain ski resort.

Much like Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, another recent film that examines ’60s political terrorism, United Red Army is difficult to watch because of the factual nature of its exposition and its refusal to judge, even when depicting the URA’s darkest hours. It’s a surprisingly objective coda to the wild, dark films that precede it in "Pink Cinema Revolution," which are as much documents as products of their time. As Jasper Sharp writes in his recent survey of pink cinema, Behind the Pink Curtain, Wakamatsu’s films are, "not only visual testimonies to an era of new sexual frankness and a deep uncertainty in which oblivion seemed to lurk around the corner," but they also offer, in retrospect, prescient glimpses of the underlying forces that would propel the radical left to its own dissolution.


"Pink Cinema Revolution: The Radical Films of Koji Wakamatsu"

Oct 8-29, $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

A blip in Northern Sky

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DVD REVIEW If a Viking takes a shit in the woods, will anyone care? I asked myself this after watching Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, an admirable if somewhat aimless and altogether odd duck of an independent film. Believe me, I wanted to love this movie more. The press release couldn’t have made it sound any cooler: Vikings lost in the New World in 1007! A black metal soundtrack! They terrorize Irish monks! It’s in Old Norse! Duuuuuude!

All those elements do come into play in this shoestring historic epic, but Severed Ways ultimately becomes as directionless as its stranded protagonists. At the very least, director Tony Stone, who also wrote, edited, and stars in the production, deserves credit for his dogged persistence of vision, even if the final product feels like sitting through the collected outtakes of reenactments from a History Channel documentary.

Based on the real expedition by Thorfinn Karlsefni, an Icelander who planned to settle in the New World, Severed Ways follows errant warriors Orn (Stone) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) as they set out into the wilds of North America in hopes of finding others of their kind, having narrowly survived a raid by indigenous peoples (whom they call "skraelings"). Most of the film consists of Orn and Volnard wandering, and then wandering some more. In lieu of a narrative, Stone instead focuses — almost obsessively — on the crude, dull, details of day-to-day survival: we see the Vikings fell trees and build lean-tos; Orn sloppily beheads and butchers an actual chicken; and, in what has to be the film’s biggest WTF moment, we also see him take a gargantuan dump, using nearby foliage as TP.

In its strongest moments, Stone’s warts-and-all aesthetic and borderline-vérité commitment to realism evokes Herzog circa Fitzcarraldo (1982) or Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972). Stone’s two cinematographers — shooting in digital — capture some lovely shots of the wild beauty of the Viking’s alien surroundings. And the film’s unhurried editing and tableau-like shots convey both the uncertainty and monotony of the Vikings’ experience as lone strangers in a strange land.

However, these moments are few and far between. And if Stone harbored any loftier intentions of conveying the emotional and spiritual depths of roughing it, they are hamstrung by the film’s heavy metal frippery, most notably a hilarious but totally random shot of Orn headbanging and some awkward translations of the Old Norse dialogue ("We’re toast if we stay here"). And it is here that Stone’s taste in black metal should be questioned. The much-hyped soundtrack is a disappointment, with the majority of the synth-strings heavy ambient metal tracks simply not suiting the film’s po-faced tone. Some harder, more buzz-filled and, well, genuinely darker, selections would’ve been appreciated. A map wouldn’t have hurt either.

‘Time’ passages

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DRUG MUSIC "We attempted to dissolve time." That’s how the late John Balance, half of the now disbanded British experimental musical duo Coil, described the aim of their 1998 release Time Machines (Eskaton). Balance said this with such matter-of-factness that you hardly notice the ludicrousness of his claim. No mere sensation-hungry dabblers when it came to tearing down the doors of perception, Coil certainly had reason to stand behind their assertion. Having logged countless hours drifting in the lapping tides of Time Machine’s slowly unraveling synthesizer drones, I can tell you that Balance and musical partner Peter Christopherson definitely succeeded in their attempt.

Coil’s m.o. with Time Machines can be best summed up by the title of Spacemen 3’s 1990 demos compilation Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To (Bomp). Starting from the premise that hallucinogens can remove oneself from one’s temporal reality, Balance and former Throbbing Gristle member Christopherson (with assistance from William Breeze and Drew MacDowell), set out to synthesize music that would catalyze and tease out the temporally-disruptive effects of specific chemical compounds.

If that sounds a bit dry, there is indeed an aura of scientific self-seriousness to the release. Each composition is titled with the chemical name of the substance it has been designed for — track one, "Telepathine" (an earlier term for the compound found in Ayahuasca or yage, popularized by Burroughs and Ginsberg); track two, "DOET/hecate"; track three, "5-Me0-DMT"; and track four, "Psilocybin." But for Coil, science was another form of magic, something driven home by the album’s cover design: a black, glossy oval that alludes to the obsidian "scrying mirror" of Renaissance magician and astronomer John Dee, who supposedly used the stone to conjure spirits. (A limited number of albums also came with a set of stickers that when placed on top of each other depicted Dee’s sigil, the Hieroglyphic Monad).

I should confess, with much embarrassment, that for the many times and many different contexts in which I have listened to Time Machines, I have yet to experience any of the tracks while on the substances for which they were specifically engineered. That said, the album’s transportive effects are noticeable even while listening sober (and are certainly heightened by strong doses of THC). My experience has largely been subtractive: it is hard to do anything or to think about anything with much success, or even "actively listen," while Time Machines is playing. It is the aural equivalent of an isolation tank, in that you don’t even notice the vessel falling away, you’re so immersed. Turn it on, tune in, and dissolve.

Walk like an Egyptian

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"Wonderful things." So said Howard Carter in 1922 when the archaeologist was asked what he saw upon peeking into the just-opened tomb of boy-king Tutankhamun. Almost a century and many world tours later, King Tut’s wonderful things — enough beautifully crafted, jewel-encrusted, and gilded loot to last a dynastic ruler through the afterlife and beyond — still hold their allure.

At least that is the belief underlying "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," Tut’s latest greatest hits global tour (it started in Los Angeles in 2005), which has made a penultimate stop at the de Young Museum on its encore run of U.S. venues. Displaying 50 of Tutankhamun’s burial objects, along with artifacts from the tombs of his royal predecessors, family, and court officials, Golden Age aims to give a broader picture of the good life in the 18th Dynasty (1555–1305 BCE). But really, it’s all about the booty.

And while Tut’s famous golden funerary mask is not on display (it has been deemed too fragile to travel, and like the pharaoh’s mummy, coffins, and sarcophagus, it will never leave Egypt), there is still plenty to "ooh" and "ahh" over: The scarab shaped pectoral amulet inlaid with lapis lazuli and other precious stones, a jewel encrusted canopic coffinette for the king’s viscera that resembles his more famous gold sarcophagus in miniature, and two nested coffinettes that morbidly contain the remains of fetuses whose relation to Tut is still being determined.

Given our current depression, nothing seems simultaneously more fantastically alien, or more apropos a reminder of our last gilded age, than the glittering horde on display. Although, perhaps because of Tut’s enduring celebrity (there’s something endearing about watching groups of school kids press up against the display cases, having once been a self-appointed junior Egyptologist myself), Golden Age pleasantly lacks the undertones of clueless class condescension that hung about the Legion of Honor’s recent "Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique" exhibit like stale perfume. Or perhaps Dede Wilsey just doesn’t have a canopic jar to graciously loan, as she did with her own Fabergé egg for that exhibit. Then again, when admission for a family of four amounts to a week’s worth of groceries, something’s not right.

Lately I’ve been thinking of another deceased king, also remembered as forever young, in relation to Tut: the King of Pop. Michael Jackson once cast himself as a shape-shifting stranger who woos Iman’s Queen Nefertiti with his dancing prowess in the ancient Egyptian-themed video for 1992’s "Remember the Time." But I feel it would have been more fitting for him to play the Boy King. In many ways he already was the Tut of our time.

The comparison is underscored by the Julien’s Auctions exhibit of Jackson’s possessions, which retroactively seems an augury of Jackson’s untimely death. The rococo furniture, the self-aggrandizing effigies, the five-figure gewgaws: Jackson’s royal treasury held hideous things, but they are wondrous all the same. The universe is strange. NBC Chicago recently reported on how a 3,000 year-old bust of an Egyptian woman at the Field Museum has been receiving unusual amounts of attention because of its resemblance to the latter day visage of Jackson. Maybe one day, and perhaps only in a future envisioned by the likes of Bruce McCall, Neverland will come to the de Young.

“Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004”

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REVIEW I saw my deceased grandfather before I saw Groucho Marx. In Richard Avedon’s 1972 photograph of the aging comedian, Marx’s push-broom mustache, here a baleen of gray bristles, is the only obvious identifying feature in what otherwise looks to be a portrait of an elderly Jewish man. Marx’s eyes — like Marilyn Monroe’s in Avedon’s famous 1957 portrait of the star seeming to want out of her skin — avoid the camera, looking off glassily toward something in the distance. Or perhaps they are trying to look at nothing.

Of all the faces in "Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004," the first large-scale retrospective of the late photographer’s work that makes its only U.S. stopover at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ones crumpled with age, the ones closest to death, hold my attention most. The ubiquitous white backdrop and large format camera used in many shots allow the viewer an intimate look at the liver spots, wrinkles, fleshy furrows, stray hairs, scars, and other accumulated physical tallies that testify to what Susan Sontag called photography’s ability to depict "time’s relentless melt."

As in my encounter with the Marx portrait, you often notice the physical attributes of Avedon’s subjects before you register who they are. John Ford, replete with eye-patch, resembles a pumpkin caving in. Isak Dinesen (uncannily resembling Little Edie Beale in a brooch-adorned knit cap) is all hollowed cheekbones and cracked lips, and to quote Geoff Dyer’s wonderful catalog essay, "looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world — about 2,000 years ago." The exhibit contrasts Avedon’s portrait of Andy Warhol’s scarred torso, gnarled into a Weston-worthy bell pepper by Valerie Solanias’s gunshots, with the Apollonian perfection of the male superstars in the famous panorama of Warhol and his Factory Avedon shot prior to the artist’s near death experience.

Death has been a subject for photographers since photography’s invention, as much as it has developed as trope within writing on photography. Sontag certainly touched on photo-mortality, but it was taken up most melodramatically by Roland Barthes, who declared: "All young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death."

It would be foolish to brand Avedon with such a label, but there is something to be said for his willingness to allow his subjects’ place on this mortal coil to show through so clearly. Avedon was probably the most unsparing of 20th century photography’s great portraitists. But in their calculated presentation of their subject’s imperfections, his photographs manage at the very least to seem uncontrived — perhaps the best compliment a photograph can attract.

RICHARD AVEDON: PHOTOGRAPHS 1946–2004 Through Nov. 29, $9-$15 (free first Tues. and half-off Thurs. evenings). Mon–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 10 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

Dead ends

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Clean Hands Go Foul (Hydra Head/Dymare), the posthumous release from doom metal supergroup Khanate, has been sitting with me for a while. But its potency only increases over time. With each successive listen, I feel increasingly like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists — characters who unwittingly gamble away their sanity as they attempt to piece together the horrifying totality of a universe controlled by beings not of their time or space. I’m not sure what I am losing when I listen to Khanate, but I feel lost nonetheless.

There are few moorings on Khanate’s slate sea of negativity — none of metal’s usual signifiers, no lyrical invitations to trample on sacred institutions, no head-banging riffs. The four tracks on Clean Hands are emotional dead ends where vocalist Alan Dubin’s howled protests of rage, disgust, and futility are left to fester in the gutters built by guitarist Steven O’Malley, bassist James Plotkin, and drummer Tim Wyskida.

Composed of material improvised during the recording sessions of 2005’s Capture & Release (with Plotkin editing in Dubin’s vocals later on), Clean Hands plays more like a belated précis for the group’s deconstructed yet unrelentingly crushing interpretation of metal than a coherent album. Like Keiji Haino’s renowned power trio Fushitsusha, Khanate understood that metal’s heaviness could be chopped and screwed into different shapes without diminishing its brutality.

Some of Clean Hands‘ tracks are more successful at conveying the band’s protean dynamic than others. "In That Corner" — a staggering, Haino-worthy dirge — starts out at full blast before quieting down into a series of mournful echoes of itself. But it is album closer "Every God Damn Thing" that best displays the group’s propensity for grueling duration. Taking up close to half the album’s running time, it pairs 30 plodding minutes of input jack/cord buzz, bass rumbles, scraped guitar strings, the occasional feedback howl, and random bits of percussion with Dubin’s long-form, bile-filled disquisition on the title phrase. (Some sample lyrics: "Everything poison. Even flowers disgust"; "Out there, someone is dying. Hopefully, it should be all of them.")

Dubin is Khanate’s secret weapon. Other than Die Kreuzen’s Dan Kubinski or Swans-era Michael Gira, I cannot think of a vocalist whose rasp is severe enough to make you feel skinned alive and whose lyrics convey the vicissitudes of antisocial sentiment with such uncomfortable immediacy and — at times — surprising poetic force.

"It’s all bad, again!" Dubin screams at the close of "Every God Damn Thing." Such a statement of futility is fitting for a track that seethes in anticipation of a climax yet falls short of delivering the goods in its final paroxysms. An uneven postmortem, Clean Hands proves Khanate was never interested in giving listeners the satisfaction of a climax. The forces that compelled it toward such uncompromising, bleak musical extremes were also, unsurprisingly, what led to its breakup. Hell is indeed other people — including your bandmates. "Man’s greatness resides in knowing himself to be wretched," Pascal once said. With this final nail in the coffin, Khanate has proven itself to be so great.

“Intricacies of Phantom Content” and Trickle-down: Yours for the Mining

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REVIEW Diamonds are certainly Hilary Pecis’ and Elyse Mallouk’s best friends. But even though the sparklers in their complimentary exhibits at Triple Base Gallery let off a familiar, enticing shine, do they reveal new facets?

Like antlers, rainbows, and feathers, gemstones and crystal-inspired geometric forms have bobbed to the surface as a motif of the zeitgeist, as seen both on gallery walls and the loud prints and new rave colors that adorn the merchandise at Urban Outfitters (not to mention Lady Gaga’s day-to-day wardrobe). I don’t fault Pecis’ art for its timing. Her untitled ink, collage, and acrylic laden panels, which intertwine black and white geometric patterns, gems galore, and cutout twists of metal and hair into eye-shredding nebulas, are indeed beautifully executed and easy to get lost in. But I wonder if their very au courant palette doesn’t time-stamp them to their disadvantage. Her acrylic paintings — all kaleidoscopic close-ups of Krypton-like surfaces, mostly in shades of gray — make a stronger case with their restraint. The continued influence of the original class Mission Schoolers (Alicia McCarthy, please raise your hand) have on younger local artists is striking.

One has to descend into the bowels of the Earth, as it were, to see Mallouk’s punnily-titled video installation Trickle-down: Yours for the Mining. A bare bulb scarcely illuminates a stack of diamond drawings (which viewers are invited to take). With the flick of a switch, the drawings come to life as the blackened space suddenly, literally, drips in a video projection of sparkling animated stones. Like the rhinestone cascade in the opening credit sequence of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life — itself already redone by filmmaker Matt Wolf in the sweet short Imitation of Imitation — Mallouk’s diamante mirrorball cannily reflects the emotional and material investments we make in artifice; art itself notwithstanding. Space may be the place upstairs, but I’m gonna side with Etta James on this one: in the basement, that’s where it’s at.

INTRICACIES OF PHANTOM CONTENT AND TRICKLE-DOWN: YOURS FOR THE MINING Through July 26. Triple Base, 3041 24th St., SF. (415) 643-3943. www.basebasebase.com

Hello sailor

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By Matt Sussman


a&eletters@sfbg.com

Revolution seems to be on the minds and in the hearts of many in LGBT folk these days. The desire for change is palpable at the marriage equality marches that have now become regular occurrences, even if one isn’t marching under the banner of marriage equality. Indeed, the large and sustained outpouring of grassroots activism that has sprung up since Proposition 8 "passed" last November has been hailed, however ill-fitting the comparison, as "Stonewall 2.0."

Stonewall is undoubtedly a milestone — and its resonance with our current historical moment is underscored by the fact that Frameline 33’s closing night happens to fall on the 40th anniversary of the New York City riots. But Stonewall is not our only example of queers taking power into their own hands (San Francisco’s own Compton Cafeteria Riots of 1966, in which transgender people fought for their right to occupy public space, immediately comes to mind.) Nor are the social justice movements and underground film culture of the Stonewall era — both subjects touched on in a swathe of ’60s and ’70s-related films at this year’s festival — our only historical models for envisioning and enacting change. There are other histories, other battles, and other scenes to explore.

Local filmmaker Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men — a stunning black and white historical fantasia on the possibilities, pleasures, and perils of revolution — proposes such another scene. Set in a mythologized postrevolutionary Russia but based on actual historical events, Maggots marshals early Soviet cinema, the gutter erotics of Jean Genet, and what at times seems like a transgender cast of thousands to build its case for the necessity of queer utopias. "I made a school boy movie, Phineas Slipped [under the name Kerioakie, in Frameline 26], so the next logical step was to make a sailor movie," says Cronenwett, explaining the germ for his film over the phone. "I wanted to make a film that created another world."

Maggots dramatizes the events of 1921, when the sailors of the seaport town of Kronstadt (whose failed 1905 revolution would be immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925’s Battleship Potemkin) drafted a resolution that supported the factory workers on strike in St. Petersburg. Deeming the sailors’ declaration of solidarity and demands for food and greater autonomy as "counter-revolutionary," the Bolshevik government launched a propaganda campaign against them, eventually sending the Red Army to take their island stronghold by force. The Bolsheviks eventually won the two-week long battle, in which both sides suffered heavy losses, killing or exiling the remaining sailors.

Told through the fictionalized letters of sailor Stepan Petrichenko (played by dreamboat Stormy Henry Knight, aptly described by Cronenwett as "the transgender Matt Dillon") to his sister and the performances of agitprop theater group Blue Blouse, Maggots repurposes the aesthetics of socialist realism to both pay tribute to the Kronstadt sailors’ quashed communal experiment and to use that same history as a means to engage with contemporary transgender lives and radical politics. "I’m wrapping together my different fantasies," explains Cronenwett. "There’s the sexual, kinda homoerotic utopia and then there’s this sort of communal utopia, where you have a society based on mutual respect."

If Maggots were a poem, it would undoubtedly take the form of an idyll. The sailors engage in a bucolic routine of communal farming and exercise, angelically sleeping in hammocks, carousing with the local ladies, and occasionally engaging in some alcohol-fueled sex with their fellow mates. Flo McGarrell’s gorgeous production design and composer Jascha Ephraim’s accordion-rich original score certainly contribute to the film’s reverie-like passages, but much of what is beautiful about the film is due in no small part to the handsome chiaroscuro visages of the film’s primarily trans-masculine actors. Cronenwett is as quick to cite Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950) and James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1968) as he is Eisenstein, as influences — and it shows.

But Cronenwett has other things, aside from "dirty sailor beefcake," on the brain. As he points out in a follow-up e-mail to our conversation, the trans actors in Maggots don’t just rewire the long history of the sailor as subject of homoerotic image-making in terms of gender, but also reframe the homosocial world of Krondstadt in terms of anarchist politics. "It’s not just cute butts that turn me on — it’s also ideas, and people’s politics. Not politics, like chatting about Obama or whatever, but people that are into creative ways of living and aren’t into non-consensual domination."

These politics were put into practice, as much by necessity as design, over the course of the four years it took to make the film. Shooting sporadically in rural Vermont (a frozen Lake Champlain uncannily summons the wintertime Baltic captured in photos of the Red Army’s 1921 advance); San Francisco backyards and gallery spaces; and Battery Boutelle in the Presidio and Battery Mendell in Marin, Cronenwett describes making Maggots as a "highly collaborative" process that involved the talents of friends, DIY artists, political organizers, nonprofessional actors, and anyone else who could be tapped via word-of-mouth (the film also received financial support from the Frameline Film and Video Completion Fund). At times, the filming even started to take on the communal can-do atmosphere of Kronstadt itself. "People slept on the floor and took cooking shifts, and helped make costumes," remembers Cronenwett of the Vermont shoot.

As much as Maggots is a homoerotic pastoral, the film doesn’t shy away from exploring the difficult, sometimes painful, realities attendant to any act of self-determination. As its very title — itself a reference to the rotting meat that sparks the sailors’ mutiny in the first act of Potemkim — suggests, the consequences of our actions can fester within us. "The sailors are still lugging around the violence from the revolution with them," writes Cronenewett. "Even in the salad days the violence is there just under the surface."

This violence takes on a different cast in the context of transitioning genders, something which the actors’ own mixed gender expressions continually underscore. "Transitioning is, hopefully, a liberating, positive experience. But it can also have some elements of violence associated with it. That can be a literal kind of violence — like chopping off body parts — or can be something more ethereal, like squashing aspects of ourselves to fit into either gender category."

The film is careful, though, not to hold up the sailors’ bloody defeat as a cautionary example of revolutionary hubris, just as it stylistically evokes Russian cinema of the ’20s and ’30s while avoiding that period’s penchant for egregious hero worship (flirting with martyrdom can be a slippery slope when engaging with the Soviet realism). In a sense, Maggots‘ restaging of history captures the full allegorical meaning of "utopia" — a social ideal that doesn’t exist and yet, nonetheless, remains an ideal. But, as Maggots also proves, film gives us the means to envision such ideals. At a time when our "revolutionary" moment seems blinded by tunnel vision — and has largely become defined by terms we never dictated — Maggots‘ kino eye reminds us that our past and our present are full of radical possibilities. *

MAGGOTS AND MEN

Sun/21, 1:30 p.m., Castro


The 33rd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 18–28 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $8–$10) are available at www.frameline.org.

Looking at ‘Looking In’

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More on SFBG.com:
>>Johnny Ray Huston’s take on the epic SFMOMA Robert Frank retrospective

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"All original art looks ugly at first," Clement Greenberg wrote in defense of modern art. Implicit in Greenberg’s statement is the sense that time would eventually vindicate what was seen as anathema to prevailing tastes. Such has been the fate of The Americans, Robert Frank’s once reviled, now iconic photographic poem that traces the warped, smudged, and tattered fabric of our nation. Now 50, Frank’s odd little book (initially published in France in 1958 and brought to these shores the following year by Grove Press) of old glories, hardened faces, ghostly jukeboxes, in-between moments, and public rituals that captured the social inequalities and strangeness entrenched in the everyday of postwar America still cuts to the quick.

Frank, in collaboration with curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has given his magnum opus something of the CSI treatment in "Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans." As its title suggests, "Looking In" offers an expanded view of the original volume’s 83 photographs (displayed in their original order, with each of the book’s four sections in its own gallery), incorporating contact sheets and other behind-the-scenes artifacts from the Guggenheim Fellowship-funded cross-country road trips Frank made with his wife and two kids in 1956 and ’57, as well as selections of Frank’s earlier and later photographic projects. But so much context and annotation to what was, even in the strictest sense, a self-contained work, often results in more noise than signal.

Frank pared his final choices from 20,000 frames, ordering the images in such a way to form daisy chains that relay visual puns, common themes, shared details (a decorative star motif or the position of a hand), and stark contrasts among them. A personal favorite occurs in a series of photographs that touch on driving, in which the tarpaulin covering a ride in Long Beach deflates in the next photo into the cloth draped over a car accident victim in rural Arizona. As with all art, the power and pleasure of viewing The Americans comes in discovering these subtle affinities and motifs by oneself. At times the interpretative cues offered by the explanatory texts all but erect a neon sign directing you toward significance. Some interpretive breathing room would’ve been nice.

Conversely, Frank’s conflicted relationship to his most famous work in the decades following its subsequent reappraisal and canonization by the art world — when he started to turn his attention to filmmaking — is shoehorned into a tantalizing but all too brief section, "Destroying The Americans," at the exhibit’s close. (Sarah Greenough’s excellent catalog essay of the same title goes into further detail.) It is curious to end a retrospective that largely adds to the hagiography already surrounding Frank’s work on such a sour, doubt-filled note. But perhaps it can be read as a warning to those who would be quick to call The Americans merely a reflection of its time. Frank’s "sad poem," as Jack Kerouac dubbed it in his introductory text to the American edition, may no longer look as ugly as it once did. But we are still a nation riddled by racism and poverty, worshipful of false prophets and political theater; a nation of gullible consumers, fervent believers, and drifters forever tethered to the horizon. As Frank himself said in response to initial criticism of the book, "It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness."

Senses and sensibility

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"Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker," filmmaker Nagisa Oshima wrote in a 1961 essay. Oshima’s declaration of restlessness presages what would become a four decades-long career defined by that continual struggle to "confront circumstances" — to challenge postwar Japan’s stagnant social order by pushing filmmaking into new areas of form and content. "In the Realm of Oshima," the first major U.S. retrospective of the director’s work in more than 20 years, is a staggering reaffirmation of the now 77-year old director’s persistence of vision. Frequently hailed as Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima’s reputation and stature among a certain generation of cinephiles has often dwarfed the unavailability of all but a handful of his films (Oshima would later counter, saucily, that Mr. Godard should be known as the Oshima of France).

Like his French counterpart, Oshima’s output grazed on familiar genres, such as youth-gone-wild and domestic dramas, while freely incorporating elements from avant-garde and documentary practices. As much as he sought to break from what he saw as the sentimentalism of the previous generation of Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Oshima also spent a great deal of time dissecting the struggles and failures of the radical left, as vertiginously condensed in the debates between disillusioned former comrades of Night and Fog in Japan (1960). But Oshima’s larger interest has been with, to borrow the title of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the limits of control — and those who infract upon the social order. Fittingly, the series comes to a close with Oshima’s most extreme film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), whose Sadean lovers, Sada and Kichi, are perhaps the most terrifyingly literal embodiment of Oshima’s quest for "constant self-negation."

IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA

May 29–July 18

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Reel Talk

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At last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, in his State of Cinema address, Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly spoke of a media landscape inundated with screens, in which you’re as likely to watch a movie on your PDA, or even a grocery checkout screen, as you are in a theater. The message was clear: the way in which we create and consume films is changing. To some extent, we have been living in this brave new world for some time, so SFIFF’s choice of photographer Mary Ellen Mark to deliver this year’s State of Cinema address carries with it an implicit nostalgia for cinema’s old world. Mark, who has frequently turned her camera on marginal subjects — Indian prostitutes, homeless American teens, circus performers — has also periodically worked as an on-set photographer over her four decade career, capturing moments of behind the scene candor on the sets of directors such as François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Milos Forman, Tim Burton, and Francis Ford Coppola. The images, collected last year in Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographing on Set (Phaidon), present Mark as an anti-Annie Liebovitz. She manages to catch her subjects unaware — as with the hilarious image of Dustin Hoffman making faces behind a quite serious Sir Laurence Olivier between takes on 1976’s Marathon Man. Others — among them Marlon Brando caught with a bug resting on his bald pate on the set of 1979’s Apocalypse Now — seem to square off with the camera. Incidentally, two of this year’s major SFIFF honors are going to Coppola and fellow child of the ’60s Robert Redford, so there’s a bit of a love fest for the era going on at this year’s fest. Undoubtedly Mark has as many fascinating stories as she does compelling images, but hopefully her talk won’t just be a stroll down memory lane.

"STATE OF CINEMA ADDRESS BY MARY ELLEN MARK"

Sun/3, 1 p.m., $12.50

Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

The new razzle dazzle

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More on SFBG:

>>Q&A with artist Nick Cave

>>A guide to artists with famous namesakes

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Where is the center of the Earth? According to artist Nick Cave, it lies somewhere between a night out at Taboo with Leigh Bowery and a Brazilian Carnaval parade. It can be found in Liberace’s glittering stage getups and Yoruba ceremonial hunting dress. Other possible coordinates include Yinka Shonibare’s Africanized rococo costumes, Cockney pearly suits, the hautest of haute couture, and the fun fur tribes of Black Rock City.

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Thankfully, for us, Cave’s crocheted, sequined, bedazzled, embroidered, dyed, and encrusted vision of the heart of the world can be found locally. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "Meet Me At the Center of the Earth" presents the largest exhibit to date of the Chicago artist’s work, which straddles the realms of sculpture, high fashion, body art, and dance with a visual ferocity and level of workmanship that is alternately stunning and inspiring.

Cave’s art practically dares you to play chicken with your thesaurus. One would have to borrow a page (or several) from the descriptive reveries of Thomas de Quincey or Ronald Firbank to fully convey the cluster fuck of beading, psychedelic hair furs, plastic tchotchkes, yarn, tin toys, buttons, second hand sweaters, and enough sequins to cover a thousand ’80s cocktail dresses that he has quixotically and painstakingly pieced together.

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The centerpieces of "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" are undoubtedly Cave’s Soundsuits — wearable sculptures that take their name from the sounds created by their movement. They fill YBCA’s largest gallery like some other-wordly pantheon of gods and monsters. Arranged in an X-shaped configuration with paths running down the center of each axis, the suits form a giant visual nod to the exhibit’s title. X, of course, marks the spot, and hanging above the room’s center is the Earth itself, swathed in several shades of inky sequins. On the adjacent walls hang two huge and possibly glitzier tondi — the Italian Renaissance term Cave uses for these round hangings — which serve as flattened counterparts to the globe.

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The display lets you explore the Soundsuits from every angle. Designed to cover the entire body, the suits hide any individual traces of the wearer by creating a second skin, and then some. The suits with towering, festooned cage structures — which bring to mind both Balinese funeral pyres and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers — still have a vaguely human outline at their core, whereas the suits patterned in all sort of brilliantly colored fur-like human hair could very well be studies from an unrealized Jim Henson project. This lycanthropic aspect of the Soundsuits is explored most humorously in Cave’s more recent pieces, which take the reverse tactic of fashioning knitwear pelts for taxidermy models of bears and beavers.

While much of Cave’s work, to quote New York Times critic Roberta Smith, "fall[s] squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed," it also begs to be heard. It is unfortunate that YBCA wasn’t able to more fully integrate the sounds of the suits into their display. Although there is an adjacent gallery that shows several videos of the Soundsuits in action — including great footage of Cave and a posse of pom-pom covered lion dancer-clown hybrids inciting massive dance parties in public — the suits themselves stand silent. The audio/visual divide enforced by the two-gallery layout seems to point to the larger issue of static mannequins being the curatorial norm for costume and textile-related exhibits. I guess we’ll have to wait until May, when choreographer Ronald K. Brown stages his Soundsuit performances, to see Cave’s creations in action.

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Cave writes in an artist’s statement for the show that he hopes "we will dream together" One would have to have a heart of stone not to take up the challenge and the invitation delivered by Cave’s art — and implicit in the exhibit’s title — to create another scene, to go beyond what’s familiar, and to transform oneself. I left YBCA dreaming of raiding craft stores, thrift shops, and fabric outlets. I dreamed of painting the town red, cerulean, silver, magenta, and neon green with sequins and glitter. I dreamed of dancing. I’ll see you at the center of the Earth. I’m halfway there.

NICK CAVE: MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Through July 5, $3–$6 (free first Tues.)

Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org


All photos by Jim Prinz

Go into the light

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In an online interview, experimental filmmaker and violin drone pioneer Tony Conrad relates a story: one night, underground drag superstar Mario Montez wandered into the apartment Conrad shared with filmmaker Jack Smith, and at Smith’s behest began an impromptu performance. When Smith flicked on a beaten up 16mm projector to serve as a makeshift spotlight, he and Conrad became transfixed by the play of light that reflected off Montez’s sequined outfit. While it would be glib — and certainly fun — to declare that 1960s structural film was born from the glittering gyrations of a drag queen, Conrad’s anecdote is but one development in his longstanding fascination with the excessive sensory effects of shooting light out into the void. Conrad’s 1965 16mm film The Flicker is perhaps his purest and best-known manifestation of this — 30 minutes of black and white stroboscopic bliss (or hell) that cast its long shadows over Brian Gysin’s dream machines, and more contemporarily, Anthony McCall’s striking digital light and fog projections. You’ll have the chance to see how much flashing light your eyes can take when San Francisco Cinematheque presents screenings of Conrad’s films in conjunction with the New York-based polymath’s weekend-long residency at the concurrent Activating the Medium Festival. While Sunday night’s program features The Flicker, it also puts it into context as a jumping off point for Conrad’s subsequent process-based films and public access video works, in which activities such as electrocution and cooking take on a rhythm as mesmerizing as staring into the pulsating light of a film projector.

TONY CONRAD: FLICKERING JEWEL

Fri/3, 5 p.m. (Program One: "Window, Perspective Shadow")

Sat/4, 8 p.m. (Program Two, with Conrad in performance)

Sun/5, 7:30 p.m. (Program Three: "Flicker and Process Films/Works on Video"), $15

San Francisco Art Institute, 300 Chestnut, SF

www.sfcinematheque.org

“Yan Pei-Ming: YES!”

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REVIEW James Elkin starts off his wonderful book What Painting Is (Routledge, 1998) with the simple statement that "painting is alchemy," an elegant encapsulation of the process by which combining oils and pigments, applying that mixture onto a canvas, and generally getting one’s hands dirty results in something as ethereal as one of Monet’s Water Lilies. Elkin’s words came to mind while looking at Franco-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming’s massive watercolor and oil paintings. Yan’s paintings are alchemical double exposures: we are asked to view them simultaneously as palimpsest-like records of their material creation and as indexes of their subjects. Their visceral emotional impact comes from the tension between these two ways of seeing, a tension that is present in every brush stroke and paint globule.

Take Yan’s portrait of our new president, painted last year. Obama regards us cautiously. His sober visage and weary gaze — the products of roughly brushed, smeared and daubed blacks, whites and grays — seem to anticipate the disappointment that will invariably accompany the enormous, near-impossible task before him. The spattering mist of paint droplets that streak his face and suit make the canvas look as if it has been left for the birds, so to speak. This is not the face of the Great Progressive Hope enshrined in street art hagiography. This is not a presidential portrait. This is a portrait of a man — a rightfully exhausted and undoubtedly doubt-filled man — who happens to be the president. The aggregated crudeness of Yan’s technique is not in the service of caricature or grotesquerie. Rather — much like Yan’s earlier portraits of Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, anonymous prostitutes, and himself — Obama displays the battle scars of a forceful struggle with portraiture itself.

The political resonances of that representational struggle echo resoundingly throughout this solo exhibition, and the struggle is often one of life and death. On the wall adjacent to Obama, there are four equally large black and white oil portraits depicting unnamed U.S. soldiers and veterans. Each is ambiguously titled Life Souvenir, followed by a different date. Do the numbers mark when these people returned home, or the hour of their death, or both? A morbid terminus is suggested, metonymically, by Returning Home (2008) which depicts the flag-draped coffins of the recent war dead; an image that the Bush administration so pointedly tried to remove from the public domain. A similar ambiguity suffuses the more recent "New Born, New Life" series: I couldn’t help but think of the gore porn photos used by anti-abortion extremists when looking at Yan’s watercolors of newborn infants emerging from murky pools of placental red. Even Obama faces a presidential memento mori in the massive watercolors of U.S. currency on the gallery’s upper level, each mottled denomination bearing the portrait (in this context, rendered worthless as legal tender, while being worth quite a lot, since Yan tends to receive blue chip bids at auction) of a "great man" who has come and gone.

YAN PEI-MING: YES! Through May 23. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 749-4563, www.waltermcbean.com

She’s a magic woman

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SECA ART AWARDS




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There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002’s Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005’s Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television’s Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let’s raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.

From Cindy Sherman’s faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy’s return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman’s work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006’s Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.

"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don’t see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd’s response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman’s work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it’s not hard to see why.

However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman’s rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece’s hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman’s art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.

This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF’s Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.

The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other’s homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman’s delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy’s and Mike Kelley’s assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."

Holman’s collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television’s most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country’s current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.

In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN

Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Import Export

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REVIEW E.M. Forster’s plea to "only connect" is given a scathing work-over in Ulrich Siedel’s Import Export, which makes its U.S. theatrical premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Siedel provides more displays of our species capacity for spite, indifference, and brutality than all the Saw films combined, though nary a drop of blood soils the screen. Siedel has no need for Rube Goldbergian gore machines — the chips dealt by the fall of the USSR to the residents of the Ukraine, now parasitically exploited by its wealthier Western neighbors, are enough. That the film’s title coldly describes the movement of goods and services as well as the cross-border trajectories of its two main characters is no accident: no attempt at empathy or conscientiousness on their part goes un-snuffed under the grind of capitalism. Olga, a pretty Ukrainian nurse who makes money on the side working as a webcam girl, heads to Austria hoping to improve her lot in life. After being fired as an au pair, she winds up working as a cleaning lady in an eldercare facility, where she tentatively attempts to befriend the bedridden patients who are treated no better than used furniture. Olga’s narrative is intercut with that of Pauli, a muscled Austrian hood who aspires to become a security guard but winds up helping his lecherous father-in-law deliver outmoded gaming machines to Ukrainian housing blocks after being humiliated on-duty by a gang of toughs. None of this is easy viewing, and there are several moments — particularly with the elderly cast members who appear to be truly mentally ill — when one wonders if Siedel is in some way contributing to the grotesqueness he’s setting out to document. It is a question perhaps only answered by repeated viewings. That is, if you have the stomach for it.

IMPORT EXPORT plays Thurs/12–Sat/14 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. See Rep Clock.

“Takako Yamaguchi”

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REVIEW For anyone who has attempted to stare down one of Bridget Riley’s hypnogogic vortices or contemplated the point at which two color blocks mesh in a Rothko, Takako Yamaguchi’s recent set of paintings at Jancar Jones Gallery should produce some pleasantly familiar sensations. Upon entering the shoebox-size space, one sees five three-by-four-foot canvases that form a seemingly continuous horizontal vista of graduated lines and patterned strips done in earth tones and blues, with the occasional wink of metallic shimmer. (This panorama effect is offset when one realizes that an outlier has been sneakily hung in the back office area.)

Viewed individually, Yamaguchi’s warm bands of color and geometric repetition start to take on the cast of Southern Californian geography — oceanic expanse, suburban sprawl, and stretches of desert. Interlocking white donuts and intestinal curlicues suggest clouds; hills and waves roll ad infinitum; distant mountains have the repetitive crenulations of a side-scrolling video game; the faintest line of gold leaf could demarcate city lights twinkling midground, or a sliver of sunset. And yet your eyes never fully adjust to the precise play of blurred and crisp elements, which is especially forceful in the two halves of Strangely Familiar. What looks fuzzy in your peripheral vision sometimes stays that way when studied head-on, just as Yamaguchi’s palette toggles between subtle abstraction and figurative hooks. In this sense, her canvases are Magic Eyes in reverse: if you stare long enough, the geographic reference points start to flicker into the background, like unstable mirages. So meticulous and subtle are the gradations of color — so light is Yamaguchi’s brushwork — that at times you forget you are looking at a painting. (This is underscored by the way in which each landscape continues around the sides of the canvas, as if the image were sprayed onto it and then stretched onto a slightly too-small frame.). Jancar Jones may be the smallest gallery in the city, but from the vantage point of Yamaguchi’s landscapes, you can see for miles and miles.

TAKAKO YAMAGUCHI Through Feb. 28. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, suite 120, SF. Thurs–Sat, noon–6 p.m. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com

“Who Got the Chickens” and “Love Can Build a Bridge”

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REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.

The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.

Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.

WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Play it again

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Why spend your New Year’s Eve blowing a lot of money to get drunk with douchey strangers when you can curl up with a bottle of Cook’s and some good movies? Here’s my short list of movies I was glad to see receive the DVD treatment in ’08:

•<\!s>White Dog (Criterion) If you missed the Castro’s revival screening of Sam Fuller’s 1982 animal drama, here’s another chance to watch Paul Winfield attempt to retrain a German shepherd that attacks black people. One of the strangest and most profound antiracist films ever made. For a double bill, you can also check out Winfield’s Academy Award–winning turn with a much kinder pooch in 1972’s Sounder (Koch Vision) — but that film is totally Cicely Tyson’s show.

•<\!s>Goodbye Uncle Tom (Blue Underground) Speaking of race, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s infamous 1971 "doc" (the duo kicked off the shockumentary craze with 1962’s Mondo Cane) about the horrors of America’s original sin may indeed be, in the words of Roger Ebert, "the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary." But the film’s hideousness is only matched by its hubris — you really have to see it to believe it.

•<\!s>The Last Laugh (Kino International) If Cristi Puiu’s Mr. Lazarescu had a forefather, it would be Emil Jannings’ sad-sack hotel porter in F.W. Murnau’s 1924 classic of German silent cinema. Watching a man lose his last shred of dignity has never looked so good, thanks to Murnau’s innovative camerawork and Kino International’s loving scrub-job.

•<\!s>Sleeping Beauty (Disney DVD) I totally wanted to be Maleficent as a child, and her devilish hauteur and magenta and black robes have never looked better thanks to Disney’s Blu-ray edition of the studio’s last hand-inked feature film (1959). Watch it on mute and get lost in the Sirk-ian palette.

Honorable mentions: Criterion’s reissues of notable Max Ophüls works, Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket (1996), and Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985); Paramount Home Entertainment’s The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (original film, 1972); Fox Film Noir’s release of Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948); and Lionsgate’s Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve box sets.

MATT SUSSMAN’S TOP TEN LEADING LADIES (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

Julianne Moore in Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, Spain/USA/France, 2007)

Juliette Binoche in Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

Sylvia Miles in Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA, 2007)

Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, USA)

Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Ann Savage in My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007)

Asia Argento in The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA/UK/France)

Jun Ichikawa (as the Harajuku witch) in Mother of Tears (Dario Argento, Italy/USA, 2007)

All the women of In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain, 2007)

For a new cinema

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Commenting on the relationship between his identity as a filmmaker and his identity as a novelist, the late Alain Robbe-Grillet told the New York Times, "We are friends, but never collaborators." Like many of Robbe-Grillet’s pronouncements concerning his own work, the statement is pithy and guarded, and cannot be taken entirely at face value.

Robbe-Grillet is primarily known as one of the chief proponents and practitioners of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), which sought to extricate literature from its formal, stylistic, and historical precedents. But he was also a prolific filmmaker, and film frequently creeps into the discussions in his essay collection, For a New Novel (1963), as both a frame of reference and as a kind of practical model. Viewers will get a chance to decide for themselves how in cahoots Robbe-Grillet the filmmaker was with Robbe-Grillet the novelist during "Enigmas and Eternity: The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet," a series curated by Joel Shepard of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts which includes several films directed by Robbe-Grillet that have long been unavailable in the United States.

Ironically, Robbe-Grillet’s first foray into film was his much-lauded collaboration with director Alain Resnais, as the screenwriter for his landmark 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (which is part of the series). Marienbad received plenty of acclaim upon its release, netting a Golden Lion in Venice and an Oscar nomination for Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. It also generated nearly as much controversy. Claiming to have sat through the entire thing — let alone, that one "got it" — became a kind of shibboleth for the ’60s intelligentsia.

Two years later, Robbe-Grillet would step behind the camera to direct his first film, L’Immortale, in which Marienbad‘s influence is still fresh. Like Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet’s directorial debut is a gorgeous, obtuse math proof that doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Its characters are merely new variables being plugged into a familiar equation — a man ("N") tries to track down an enigmatic woman ("L") and convince her of their previous meeting against an exotic backdrop — that is designed to shuffle them through time and space. The palaces of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim have been swapped out for the souks and mosques of Istanbul. As the femme fatale, Françoise Brion in Nina Ricci replaces Delphine Seyrig in Chanel, doing her best catalog poses as she insists to her pursuer that the ancient capital around them is, "not a real city, but a musical set for a romantic comedy."

L’Immortale is in some ways Robbe-Grillet’s screen test. Cribbing a few moves from Resnais while trying out a few new tricks, Robbe-Grillet seems to be playing around with, as he describes in a 1956 essay in For A New Novel, the cinematic image’s ability to "suddenly (and unintentionally)" restore the reality of "gestures, objects, movements, and outlines." When watching any film, our field of vision is always bounded by the camera’s frame. But Robbe-Grillet exploits this technological feature, forcing us to focus on the objects and people on screen to the extent that what they signify becomes secondary to their presence.

This makes for lots of shots of empty chairs (Robbe-Grillet has a thing for empty chairs), frozen crowds out of Marienbad‘s manicured gardens, and several "impossible" continuous pans in which the same people keep remarkably reappear in front of the slowly sweeping camera. Despite however many times Brion asserts that "everything is fake," Istanbul is the most obstinately present thing about L’Immortale. The Turkish merchants, maids, souvenir hawkers, and child guides who appear on the sidelines are largely oblivious to the inchoate memories and stifled desires of the film’s European ciphers. In a possible proto-swipe at Orientalism, Robbe-Grillet seems to be saying that Istanbul itself — that survivor of multiple Crusades, invasions, and reconstructions — will continue to endure, outliving the Istanbul of European fantasy.

True to the spirit of Robbe-Grillet, I can only tentatively state to what extent L’Immortale is representative of the rest of his filmography (as of press time, only one other film, 1966’s surprisingly funny meta-noir Tran-Europe Express, was screened). No doubt, he’d be self-conscious about the air of canonicity necessarily implied by a retrospective. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," he writes in one essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history." Undoubtedly, there are times when Robbe-Grillet’s work shows its age — Marienbad in particular has become fodder for countless perfume commercials and parodies of pretentious art cinema. Robbe-Grillet also recognized that prescience could be a double-edged sword. As if writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, he observes,"[Novels] survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future." This idea equally applies to his films.

ENIGMAS AND ETERNITY: THE FILMS OF ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

Through Dec. 18

$6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Beauty, reappraised

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First look by Matt Sussman:

The deYoung Museum’s retrospective of the late, great Yves Saint Laurent’s 40-year career designing haute couture comes at an awkward moment for fashion and its fans. With the country facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, “recessionista” is the buzzword du jour and Vogue and its ilk are trading their trend watches for old bromides such as “investment pieces” and “necessary luxuries.”

This strange timing is certainly no fault of the de Young, which had the foresight to begin planning this massive retrospective (and to ensure that SF was its only US stop) in 2002, well before the designer’s untimely passing last June. Amid the profligate bailouts, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” not only offers up a snappy lesson in fashion history, it provides a necessary helping of that luxury so often promised, but debatably afforded, by public art institutions: beauty, reappraised.

Saint Laurent collected beautiful things — his homes in Paris and Marrakech were exquisitely appointed with Louis XVI furniture and paintings by Picasso and Goya — and he made the creation of beautiful things his life’s work. One can walk through the exhibit and simply appreciate this — the jackets that flawlessly capture Van Gogh’s brushwork through sequins; the evening cape that’s a cataract of autumnal feathers. But Saint Laurent is a master because he consistently made all the paillettes and feathers and evening gowns and safari suits telegraph what Tim Gunn likes to call “a point of view.”

Saint Laurent’s point of view was that beauty is a form of power and nothing is sexier than confidence. “The body of a woman is not an abstract idea,” he once said, “[A dress] is not made to be contemplated but to be lived in, and the woman who lives in it must feel herself beautiful and right in it.” Even on unobtrusive mannequins, you can see how Saint Laurent’s silhouettes were always conscious of — and gracious toward — a woman’s body. Many garments would be as flattering on a 20-something gamine as on a woman in the fullness of middle age. Perhaps this is why Catherine Deneuve has continuously worn YSL since 1967.

This is immediately apparent in the two rows of garments, backlit in soft blue, that form the entryway to the rest of the exhibit. Here are all the Saint Laurent hallmarks: transparency, androgynous tailoring, the perfected detail — all executed with a sly playfulness and flair for drama. A 1968 evening gown of sheer black silk chiffon, with a ring of ostrich feathers discreetly placed just below the navel, shocks first with all that it leaves exposed, and then with its elegance. A more modest 1991 two-piece evening ensemble dedicated to ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire (to whom Joseph Cornell also paid homage), evokes the casual ease of a dancer’s cool-down outfit — save for the exquisite bugle bead embellished hems. Several examples of Saint Laurent’s signature Le Smoking ensembles — his feminine remake of the tuxedo — are also on display, each one a master class in fit and proportion.

The “Yves Saint Laurent revolution” was not merely a matter of taking cues from street style and changing social mores and gender roles. Like Coco Chanel before him, Saint Laurent’s prerogative was to make clothes for women who wanted to dress for themselves, and not for the Social Registry circuit that still dictated the shopping habits of couture clients when he took over Dior, at the tender age of 21, in 1957.

Granted, many of Saint Laurent’s repeat customers — those names printed on the bottom of the exhibit’s explanatory cards like cartouches in an Egyptian temple — still went to charity luncheons, galas, and season openings. But clad in YSL, they could cause tongues to wag, cluck disapprovingly, or flutter with lust. Saint Laurent’s 1971 ’40s-inspired collection initially struck a sour note with fashion critics, who turned up their noses at what they saw as tasteless “Vichy chic.” But looking at that collection’s signature piece now — a sumptuous, acid green fox fur jacket with shoulder padding befitting a linebacker, or Joan Crawford — one sees a kind of social armor. It says, “don’t fuck with me,” in the classiest way possible. No wonder Naomi Campbell wore the jacket (with just a pair of tights and heels) in Saint Laurent’s farewell retrospective.

“I’m the last couturier,” Saint Laurent intones in a voiceover near the beginning of David Teboul’s intimate 2002 documentary Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris. It’s hard to scan how serious the gently self-deprecating Saint Laurent is being — although his visible physical frailty belies the sharpness of his instincts and his eye as he designs his final spring/summer collection.

Since Saint Laurent’s death, fashion has become yet more rapaciously capitalistic and pragmatically democratic: houses have become branches in multi-brand luxury conglomerates, designers sell to both Target and Barney’s, and haute couture has largely become an accessory to advertising. Saint Laurent’s “last couturier” statement comes off as a declaration of purity in the face of such seismic shifts. A palliative for these sour times, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” grants us unprecedented access to the beautiful world he crafted, whose dignity he sought to protect until the end.

YVES SAINT LAURENT: 40 YEARS OF FASHION

Through April 5, 2009

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF

www.famsf.org

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Second look by Kimberly Chun:

Menage A Trois: Looking And Longing And “Yves Saint Laurent”

TAKE ONE The flat, pop, almost banal brilliance of Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) hinges not on tragically trite dungeon-mistress corsets but on the critical tension between the silently exploding, sexually exploratory interior life of Severine (Catherine Denueve) and her frigid-to-frozen good-bourgeois exterior, impeccably framed by Yves Saint Laurent’s prim-chic uniform-esque daywear. These costumes continue to inspire imitators’ collections today — who can forget the jingle-all-the-way opening scene, where Severine rebuffs her handsome surgeon husband during a carriage ride? Her suave Prince Charming abruptly orders their coachman to roughly drag his resistant, now-struggling bride into the fairytale forest — the brass buttons on the men’s coats perfectly rhyme with those on Severine’s five-alarm scarlet wool suit — where they tie her up, tear off that perfectly tailored jacket, whip, and molest her. Bien sur, this is just Severine’s idle before-bed rape and violation fantasy, made all the more pungent by the perverse spoiling of Saint Laurent’s exquisite getups.

At this point in his career, the designer was fully occupied, dreaming up four full collections a year — two for ready-for-wear and two for haute couture — composed of as many as 100 ensembles. Yet he still loved to design for stage and screen. This job led to a lifelong friendship with Deneuve. One iconic frock from Belle de Jour — the sublimely austere, black wool barathea A-line with proper white satin collar and cuffs — is on display at “Yves Saint Laurent,” the exhaustive YSL retrospective at the de Young. An ever-so-slightly-hip-slung black patent belt nearly disappears beneath an invisible front placket closure: black on black. There may be more memorable outfits in the film — particularly the buttoned-up Severine’s protective-shell outerwear — but this piece, redolent of maids, nuns, schoolteachers, and other archetypal images of traditional female service — throws the distance between Severine’s desire for debasement and her icy, blue-eye-shadow-frosted hauteur into stark relief. It’s a study in contrasts: puritanical, yet in its girlish, unconstrained, almost innocent lines — also found in the gray trapeze dress Saint Laurent dreamed up for Christian Dior in 1958 — it eschews the predictable sexuality of the previous era’s “New Look,” with its nipped waists and full womanly skirts.

TAKE TWO Saint Laurent never shied from fantasy, and the Orientalist/colonialist dreams of the designer, who was born in Algiers and spent much of his later life in Morocco, are in full effect at the de Young — Jean Paul Gaultier dined out on the hyper-exaggerated cone breasts that Saint Laurent first conjured in his 1967 African collection. But equally fantastic, if pegged to more utilitarian, workday pursuits, are the examples of women’s wear influenced by salty Mediterranean seafarers, pin-striped swells, and animal-skin-clad hunters. Saint Laurent takes the functional and elevates it until it is almost painfully, acutely sensuous: witness 1968’s suede thigh-high boots accentuating an all-legs Amazon, accompanied by a figure-masking suede tunic and visor-ed hood. Nearby is his first safari jacket from 1968, laces descending from the neckline above a hip-riding ring belt, shorts, and tall boots. Tom Ford borrowed such insouciant lacing to revive moribund Gucci in the ’90s. Veruschka famously struck a pose in this outfit for the fashion press, but I can’t help but imagine longtime Saint Laurent muse and his femme counterpart Betty Catroux as its genuine inspiration.

Less lioness than angular blonde whippet, perpetually booted, putf8um blonde, and a permanent member of her and Yves’ imaginary band Les Saints (Catroux’s maiden name is Saint), the androgynous Catroux — who haunted the exhibition’s media preview at the de Young — was a mannequin for the house of Chanel when Saint Laurent spied her at a nightclub and insisted she work for him instead. A year after their meeting, Saint Laurent designed his first smoking jacket or tuxedo for women: “It was his first step in the exploration of masculine dress within a feminine framework,” writes Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Back Bay, 2006). “The idea of girls dressing like boys and the tensions and attraction that could evoke was a daring new concept in fashion after a decade characterized by graphic, doll-like dresses, white tights, and bouncing hair.” This huntress is the flip of Belle de Jour‘s anti-heroine — aggressive, sexually liberated, and ready to loosen those lacings.

TAKE THREE Bridal gowns inevitably close couture shows, and while some fabulist fashionistas might prefer Saint Laurent’s opulent 1980 tribute to The Merchant of Venice-style Shakespeare or his outrageous but borderline gimmicky 1999 bridal Eve in a pink silk rose bikini, flower ankle bracelet, and train, I prefer the laugh-aloud audaciousness of his “queen baby” infanta/infantile 1965 bridal sock. Call it a divine bride-in-a-sack. Wittily foregrounding the untouchable yet phallic purity of bride-as-fantasy-virgin, Saint Laurent wraps his imaginary maiden in an intricately hand-knit, fisherman-style, ivory wool swaddling. The knobby knit encapsulates her head. Her arms disappear behind poncho-like slits. The designer’s beloved ribbons and bows punctuate her face, waist, and ankles, and pilgrim-buckled shoes poke out beneath. This is bride as a baby bottle cozy, ready to pop — evoking some creamy, dreamy, organic future, as well as some alien yet recognizable, marriage-as-Iron Maiden past.

Art star for a day

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Any retrospective of participatory art is a curatorial gamble that raises a host of questions. How do you encourage engagement? How do you physically display and arrange pieces that depend on the viewer’s actions, interactions, or interpretations? And how broadly do you define participation?

SFMOMA curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling has recognized and embraced such risks in organizing the timely survey "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now." The payoff is an open-ended terrain that is alternately challenging, gimmicky, and surprisingly fun. Critic Lucy R. Lippard loosely defined ’60s and ’70s conceptual art as "work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’." This definition can double as a nice general description for many of the pieces Frieling has selected.

Formative minimal, conceptual, and Fluxus experiments fill the exhibit’s first two galleries. Many are embodied by photographic or filmed documentations of actions, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965). Others involve a notable absence of action — as with John Cage’s infamous 4’33" (1952), here represented by the double-whammy visual pun of David Tudor’s blank transcription of the score and the unattended piano the piece is performed on daily.

Some artists within "The Art of Participation" directly solicit input, although it should be said that browsing online art in a museum is kind of a drag when there’s so much else to see. Reproductions of Lygia Clark’s ’60s dialog objects allow viewers to physically explore what the artist calls "tactile propositions." An elderly couple generated some unintentional comedy when trying on Clark’s Terry Gilliam-esque, two-headed 1968 viewing apparatus Dialog: Goggles. Erwin Wurm’s delightful One Minute Sculptures (1997) double dares viewers to join the ranks of his subjects — photographed in varying fantastic and ridiculous situations that involve household objects — by following microscopic posing instructions scrawled on a white platform and the gallery walls.

The accumulated scuffs and scrapes of past visitors’ attempts at becoming art that surround One Minute Sculptures brought to mind Cage’s comment that Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) — which inspired 4’33" and are displayed near the perpetually silent piano — are "airports for dust and shadow." So, too, is the museum in the age of electronic reproduction, as more and more people participate in aesthetics via YouTube and Flickr. "The Art of Participation" recognizes and democratically celebrates this shift, even as it sometimes stubbornly clings to old, institutional habits and material objects.

THE ART OF PARTICIPATION: 1950 TO NOW

Through Feb. 8, 2009, $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

kino21

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There is an Alfred Jarry quote at the top of kino21’s Web site: "It’s always those who can’t who try." Jarry’s pithy observation might seem like a backhanded compliment on what motivates the underdog, but it also nicely encapsulates the risk-taking and politically provocative sensibility that kino21 founders and organizers Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner bring to their screenings. "We wanted people to see films as a community, to talk about them as you see them, rather than about them, privately," reflects Steiner over the phone. "It’s always hot and cold — it depends on the show. It’s hard to say if the goal is ever reached, but the point is that we have consistently been showing these films."

Leimbacher and Steiner joined forces in February 2007 to create a more moveable and multivalent forum for the kind of curatorial work they had been doing together at San Francisco Cinematheque from 2003-06, when Leimbacher was associate curator, and then artistic director, and Steiner was on the curatorial committee. Since their inaugural screening of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980), a freewheeling personal investigation of the psychic and political fallout of violence, kino21 has presented films by canonical members of the avant-garde such as Chris Marker and Warren Sonbert. They’ve also expanded cinema through events such as the New Talkies or Neo-Benshi Cabaret, and their multimedia reinterpretation of Jarry’s The 10,000 Mile Bike Race.

While kino21’s array of events is certainly eclectic, Leimbacher and Steiner pay attention to the order of things when filling out their calendar: the question of how different screenings will resonate with or deflect off each other is always kept in mind. One example: Schindler’s Houses (2007), Heinz Emigholz’s meditative portrait of modernist architect Rudolf Schindler’s constructions, was screened on the heels of a double bill consisting of Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof (2006) and James T. Hong’s This Shall Be a Sign, which both investigate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by way of architecture and urban development.

Even when programming older work, such as last April’s screening of Bruce Baillie’s rarely-exhibited 1970 Quick Billy or Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1973), Leimbacher and Steiner aren’t, in Steiner’s words, "trying to recuperate or resuscitate someone’s reputation, but to show their continuity with the present moment." As he puts it: "To draw historical work back and make it relevant, rather than nostalgic — that’s what we hope to accomplish."

Kino21’s most ambitious and certainly timely project is the current five-part "How We Fight" series. Evoking Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series of World War II-era propaganda films for the United States, "How We Fight" presents international works that investigate the various ground truths of those doing the fighting. "We wanted to show films that looked at war, but not from some specific ideological or moral perspective," Leimbacher explains. "Instead [they] actually explore and visually convey the experience of what it means, in the short and long run, to be a soldier." From Joseph Strick’s historic interviews with My Lai veterans, to recent footage shot by soldiers and mercenaries on the frontlines of Iraq, to Stefano Savona’s controversial, diaristic portrait of Kurdish terrorists, the films in "How We Fight" demand an honest emotional as well as critical response.

A forum for this sort of critical engagement with aesthetics, in fact, is exactly what kino21 creates. "There’s an aspect of art where we use it to better our lives. But there’s another aspect where we use it to investigate our lives," Steiner says. "We try to do the latter."

www.kino21.org

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