2.23 / Best Of: Year Two

Best Of: Bean Gilsdorf

Image: Douglas Davis. The Last Nine Minutes, 1977; live performance for international satellite telecast. Courtesy of Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany.

Best Feisty Q&A: Laurel Nakadate, California College of the Arts, February 23, 2011

Laurel Nakadate's star has been rising high lately with solo shows, film screenings, and a ten-year retrospective at PS1. Her visiting artist lecture at California College of the Arts was what you might expect: she was well spoken and provided a lot of background detail on her work, but the Q&A at the lecture’s end was provocative. Several audience members asked loaded questions to which they clearly expected a particular kind of answer, which Nakadate refused to provide. In polite, measured tones, she steadfastly insisted on her rights and freedoms as an artist. I was impressed that she did not equivocate or apologize for her work. Her refusal to bend to political correctness, and even her view that the term narcissistic is not necessarily pejorative, was eye opening for me. In the span of five minutes, I was reminded that the artist is absolutely the authority of her own work.

Best Solo Show at SFMOMA: New Work by R.H. Quaytman, October 22, 2010–January 16, 2011

I had seen R.H. Quaytman's paintings in the last Whitney Biennial and was impressed with her cerebral and aesthetic sensibilities. When I heard she was coming to SFMOMA, I was excited about the prospect of spending more time with her work. Her paintings are smart and demand a lot of the viewer, both mentally and visually. She works site specifically and often subtly echoes the architecture of an exhibition space, inviting the viewer to look for clues and correspondences. In this case, Quaytman took her lead from the poetry of Jack Spicer, creating chapter eighteen of her perpetual series. About half of the silkscreened panels were composed with thin, tight stripes that made the work practically vibrate, while the others provided a space for the eye to rest. Quaytman's selection of Spicer as subject was smart and fitting, expanding the notion of site specificity beyond the architecture of the space. The show's meticulous amalgamation of concept with visuals was stunning.

Best Smarty-Pants Lecture: Glenn Adamson, Craft Forward, UCSF, California College of the Arts, April 1–April 3, 2011

The words “keynote conference lecture” rarely send chills down the spine of even the art geekiest among us. Yet Glenn Adamson's keynote lecture at the Craft Forward symposium, entitled "The Invention of Craft," brought his continually

evolving theories into the year 2011 with confidence and verve. Adamson is everything I want in a conference presenter: brilliant, articulate, and funny. He was definitely at the top of his game for this lecture, for which he very cogently laid out a treatise on labor, materiality, and object-hood in the twenty-first century by way of three metaphors adopted from traditional craft processes—the cutting edge of a tool, friction, and tension. I hope these ideas make an appearance in his next book.

Best Show That I Couldn’t Review: God Only Knows Who the Audience Is, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, April 21–July 2, 2011

I'm pretty strict with myself about conflict of interest so I wasn't able to review God Only Knows Who the Audience Is at the Wattis Institute for the Contemporary Arts on three counts: the venue is owned by my alma mater, I've exhibited there, and some of my friends curated the show. Thankfully I have this opportunity to say how impressed I was by the breadth and quality of the works included in the exhibition and by the overall treatment of the space. Many of the videos included in the show were ones I would perhaps never have seen otherwise, and I thought they were displayed in a way that invited longer and/or repeated viewing and some serious contemplation. I’m always impressed by an exhibition that combines good art with thoughtful design.

R. H. Quaytman. I Love — The Eyelid Clicks I See Cold Poetry, Chapter 18, 2010; silkscreen inks on gessoed panel; 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.

Best Fortuitous Education in Printmaking

Last summer I was with a group of colleagues having lunch in Berkeley, just around the corner from Paulson Bott Press, and we decided to quickly poke our heads in and see the space. What we ended up with, however, was the grand tour. First we met Pam Paulson and Renee Bott, and then they brought us into the printing room and we watched their team prepare the plates for a Chris Johanson print (his 2002 Two dimensional print of Casual Post-Post-Modern Sculpture). Then they printed the plates, all the while supplying us with the print’s backstory, some local artist gossip, and the technical concerns of printmaking. Finally Renee brought us into the storage area and showed us some of her favorite prints. This kind of passion and unexpected generosity is exactly why I love the Bay Area.