Edition #26, Davis Guggenheim, It Might Get Loud
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First broadcast September 28, 2009
Tania Ketenjian in conversation with Academy Award winning filmmaker
Davis Guggenheim
(An Inconvenient Truth) about his most recent film, It Might Get Loud,
which brings
together three of rock's greatest guitar legends—Jimmy Page of Led
Zeppelin, The Edge
of U2, and Jack White of The White Stripes. Without any talking heads,
critics, or
musicologists, we travel from the streets of Dublin where U2 first
formed, to country
houses in England where Led Zeppelin produced some of their most
famous albums, to
Tennessee, where we see Jack White make a guitar out of a glass bottle,
a string and a
piece of wood, proclaiming, "Who needs to buy a guitar?" The film
ultimately arrives
at a meeting of these three performers where, as you will hear in this
interview,
words were pushed aside once they began communicating through their
instruments.
Guitar is their language, one that they understand
like nothing
else (24 minutes).
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Edition #25, Henry Urbach, Sensate
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First broadcast September 21, 2009
Tania Ketenjian speaks with San Francisco MoMA's Henry Urbach, curator of Architecture and Design, about his exhibit Sensate: Bodies and Design. The show features artists, designers, and architects, working in a variety of mediums. Highlights include a slowly inflating vinyl house, a giant wall of bulbous shapes, and photographs of distorted body parts. The exhibit explores the notion of buildings as bodies, an idea that goes back to the Roman architect Vitruvius. Urbach believes that
architecture is a concrete representation of the body: the way it stands, the way it grounds itself, and way it is often described from the outside.
Henry Urbach was appointed curator of San Franciso Moma's Architecture and Design in 2006. Urbach came to SFMOMA from New York, where he owned and directed Henry Urbach Architecture, a gallery of contemporary art and architecture that he founded in 1997 (30 minutes).
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Edition #24: Mike Judge, Extract
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First broadcast Sept. 9, 2009
Tania Ketenjian's Sight Unseen series continues with a conversation with Mike Judge, creator of cult classic Beavis and Butt-Head, award-winning King of the Hill and numerous films such as Office Space and now 2009's Extract. Looking at all the work Mike Judge has produced, it's remarkable how vast his skill set is. He is a producer, animator, writer, director, actor, composer and he has a background in the sciences, having studied physics in college. His first great success, Beavis and Butt-Head was a seminal TV program on MTV depicting two socially and intellectually inept teenage boys who spend most of their time laughing at ridiculous things like the word butt and making fun of others and each other. That was followed by what several major publications have called one of the best TV shows of all time, King of the Hill. Now, with his film Extract, he revisits a topic he seems to love, the strange idiosyncrasies of everyday life. We spoke about the different blue collar jobs he has had in his life, how a film is like a blank canvas and why he doesn't like to be asked whether his parents approve of what he is doing with his life (23 minutes).
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Edition #23: Sandra Phillips, Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946—2004
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First broadcast August 10, 2009
Tania Ketenjian speaks with Sandra
Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, about the 2009 exhibit Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946—2004. The exhibition spans Avedon's entire career, from fashion
photography at Harper's Bazaar, where Avedon began working at the
age of 22, to his more recent works, among them his iconic images of
politicians, bee keepers and celebrities. Phillips takes us through the entire exhibition and
here explains how Avedon captured the infamous shot of the Duke and
Dutchess of Windsor (30 minutes).
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Edition #22: John Baldessari
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First broadcast July 27, 2009
Tania Ketenjian speaks with artist John Baldessari, whose work has been classified as everything from conceptual to Pop, but is quite simply and completely of its own distinction. Winner of the 2009 Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement at the Venice
Biennale, Baldessari is one of the most important artists living and working today, one whose pieces manage to sell for millions of dollars even as he refrains from hewing to any particular aesthetic or conceptual codification.
John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective, on view through November 2009 at San Francisco's Legion of Honor, is a survey of his prints from the 70s until now (30 minutes).
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Edition #20-21: Looking In, Robert Frank
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First broadcast July 9 and 16, 2009
Robert Frank's The Americans, one of the most important photography books in history, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its
publication in the United States. In the current exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans" - on view through August 23 at The Museum of Modern Art in San
Francisco -, all of the original images are on display, along with exhaustive supporting
materials, Frank's earlier work and even his typewritten application
for the Guggenheim Fellowship that provided the means for his work on The Americans. In the first of two interviews, SF MoMA curator
Corey Keller walks Tania through this massive and brilliant exhibition (Pts. 1 and 2: 30 minutes each).
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Edition #19: Pico Iyer, Pt. 2
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First broadcast 2009-05-18
Tania Ketenjian continues her discussion with Pico Iyer, who has written eleven books, the most recent of which is
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama.
Based on his travels with the Dalai Lama over the past
30 years, The Open Road has received praised from, among other sources, The New Yorker, which stated, "The
bracing virtue of Iyer’s thoughtful essay is that it allows us to
imagine the Dalai Lama as something of an intellectual and spiritual
adventurer, exploring fresh sources of individual identity and
belonging in the newly united world." Iyer himself
comes across as an intellectual and spiritual adventurer and, when
speaking with him, one witnesses the wisdom of experience and the
innocence of curiosity (30 minutes).
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Edition #18: Pico Iyer, Pt. 1
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First broadcast April 5, 2009
Tania Ketenjian speaks with Pico Iyer, a journalist, writer, traveler, biographer and speaker.
He has written eleven books, the most recent of which is
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama, which is
based on his travels with the Dalai Lama over the past
30 years. The two met upon the insistence of Iyer's father, a philosopher; Iyer was 17 and the
Dalai Lama was virtually unknown. Tania wonders what Pico Iyer was like at 17 and how that first meeting set him off on this life-long path (30 minutes).
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Edition #17, Sight Unseen: Christian McBride
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First broadcast April 20, 2009
Tania Ketenjian interviews
Christian McBride, one of the most acclaimed bassists today and
surely one of the youngest. He has played with the leading jazz musicians and
aritsts of our time - among them Freddie Hubbard, Joshua Redman, McCoy
Tyner, Pat Metheny, Diana Krall and James Brown - and seems able
to navigate a whole host of musical genres, having performed with the likes of
Sting, Queen Latifa and Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and Kenny Garrett.
According to McBride, it is in the few hours of performance that he experiences a kind
of spiritual awakening, a reminder of the glory of what he does and
the capacity of jazz to open ones mind and soul. He speaks here about the transcendental power of jazz, explores the essence of spirituality and shares stories about the early days of meeting his wife (31 minutes).
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Edition #15: Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy
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First broadcast March 30, 2009
Tania Ketenjian talks to filmmaker Barry Jenkins about his first full-length feature film, Medicine for Melancholy, which examines issues of race in San Francisco, the city with the smallest proportional black population of any major metropolitan area in the United States. Jenkins speaks about how he feels about San Francisco, how he made this film and how he understands his own identity
(28 minutes).
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Edition #14: Oakland
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First broadcast August 21, 2006
Oakland is just across the bay from San Francisco but has long been known not so much for its art work but more for its higher level of crime and its lower income population. What many seem to forget is that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Oakland was a bastion for music, specifically jazz, what many believe to be America's only original art form. But as Oakland became more and more neglected, many of these clubs that attracted artists from all over the world were forced to close. Art is now having a resurgence there. San Francisco is simply too expensive for artists; space and time are what artists need to produce their work. How this affects a community, what art brings and takes away from culture and how this manifests specifically in Oakland are some of the topics we visit in this interview.
Sampling Yerba Buena Center for the Arts gives a glimpse of the emerging work from Oakland. Tania Ketenjian spoke with curator Berin Golunu, along with the owner of one of the older art spaces in Oakland, Kevin Slagle of Ego Park and Nicole Neditch of Mama Buzz Café.
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Edition #13: Larry Clark
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First broadcast November 6, 2006
This week, the voice of Larry Clark, photographer, filmmaker, and social voyeur. In 1995, Larry Clark came out with his first film titled KIDS. It followed a group a teenagers in New York City and revealed a life of sex, drugs and general debauchery. Ten years later he emerges with Wassup Rockers, a film chronicling the lives of a group of Latino punk rock skaters from South Central Los Angeles.
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Edition #12: FredriksonStallard
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First broadcast October 23, 2006
In this edition our San Francisco correspondent visits the East End of London and spoke with artists FredriksonStallard, a duo whose work and life seem inseparable and glorious. Their wonderful Web site is also a journey through their vision.
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Edition #11: Masculinity
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First broadcast October 9, 2006
It seems like issues of gender roles and identity continue coming to the forefront, especially in the art world. As we look back on history, it was the male artists that always took the lead, women were not meant to be artists. They were the subject of great art works but as artists themselves, they faded in the background. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a series called New Work and this year, curator Joshua Shirkey has chosen three young male artists who directly look at notions of masculinity and the ways in which these manifest through image and medium.
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Edition #10: Wim Wenders
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First broadcast September 25, 2006
In this segment, the voice of filmmaker Wim Wenders whose film, Don't Come Knocking, is hitting theatres fall 2006. Wim Wenders is best known for such films as Paris, Texas, Buena Vista Social Club and Wings of Desire. Wenders shares his love for his work, the American landscape and the magic of film.
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Edition #9: William Pope.L
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First broadcast July 24, 2006
William Pope.L is a performance artist, sculptor, painter, writer, and social critic. His performances range from crawling on the streets of New York City to sitting in Wall Street and ingesting the Wall Street Journal. He says "social conundrum drives his work" and thus everything he does reflects on our social structure within the context of class, race, and consumerism. Pope L and host Tania Ketenjian discussed the purpose of art, the power of death, the evolution of his work, and the strength of performance.
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Edition #8: Paraconceptual Design
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First broadcast September 11, 2006
This edition features the voices of New York-based paraconceptual designer and artist Tobias Wong and curator Philip Wood of Citizen-Citizen. Tobias and Philip discuss the importance of imbuing meaning into objects, the boundaries of conceptual design and terminology, and the power of irreverence and context. For more information on Citizen Citizen, please visit www.citizen-citizen.com. As for Tobias, google, just google.
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Edition #7: Illegal Entry at Galeria de la Raza
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First broadcast June 26, 2006
A couple of weeks ago, President Bush sent the National Guard to the Mexican Border and just a couple of weeks before that, immigrants across the country took to the streets to demonstrate for their rights, for amnesty, equality, justice. Host Tania Ketenjian spoke with three artists who have taken part in a show titled Illegal Entry at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. They are Nora Raggio from Argentina, Consuelo Jimenez from Mexico and Robin Lasser, from California. Also, this edition begins with a sound piece by Nora Raggio titled What Side Are You On?, with sounds from the Mexican/American border. (30.5 minutes)
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Edition #6: Mark Horowitz
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First broadcast May 23, 2005
Mark Horowitz created Dinner with Mark out of a serendipitous event: he snuck his cellphone number into a photograph for a major mail order catalog. The minute the catalog went out, he started receiving phone calls. Since that time he has received over 15,000 phone calls which he has parlayed into dinner with people all over the United States. Horowitz has made an art out of simply meeting people, making a connection, and making people feel seen and appreciated (with the help of a cameraman and a documentarian).
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Edition #5: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video
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First broadcast April 4, 2005
Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video, was on view in early 2005 at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. The show presented video works by artists from over 20 different countries. By bringing together recent works that were structured around a single situation, action or individual, Irreducible offered pieces that re-visit and reinterpret video created in the late 60's and early 70's when video cameras first emerged. Artists were using the camera to document themselves working or performing or, in certain cases, simply walking across their studio. The new generation of video artists tends to use the medium to create art that represents and reflects upon the social and psychological landscape of the place they are from. Irreducible includes work from Romania, Scotland, Peru, Poland, Korea, Israel, and Norway. Ralph Rugoff, director of the Wattis Institute and curator of Irreducible, spoke with correspondent Tania Ketenjian as they walked together through the installation.
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Edition #4: "Noir City" and the Castro Theater
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First broadcast Feb. 14, 2005
Are repertory film houses succumbing to Hi-Def TV? Host Tania Ketenjian gathers three people steeped in the experience of American art-house cinema to pump up its volume in one of the hungriest film-going cultures in the world.
Anita Monga was for many years the historic Castro Theater's chief programmer and is one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic film historians in the west. Eddie Muller created the popular "Noir City" film festival three years ago for the historic Castro Theater. Last year, after new owners relieve Monga of her job, he moved the festival to Gary Meyer's almost equally historic Balboa Theater, its new home in San Francisco.
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Edition #3: Home Galleries
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As Tania Ketenjian tells the story, while New York artists priced out of Manhattan were moving to Brooklyn in the late 90s, a similar spike in San Francisco real estate values forced a number of artists and made it difficult for galleries to stay in business. Almost intuitively, she says, people started making galleries in their homes. Suddenly a domestic address would become a place for openings, a home for artists of different media, and the lines between home and art space blurred.
Chris Perez created his first gallery in his Williamsburg apartment while working as an assistant curator on the 2002 Whitney Biennial, organizing a "stealth biennial" with artists he knew and admired. When he returned to his native San Francisco, he continued the practice and opened the showcase Ratio 3 Gallery in one room of his apartment, where Irish painter Conor McGrady recently had a solo show. Chris Sollars transformed his entire house, from the basement, up into 667 Shotwell, a homestead gallery that artists completely transform every month into new installations that are attracting serious collectors and crowds.
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Edition #2: Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations
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Tania Ketenjian spotlights "Soy y Que: New Chicano/Latino Representations," one of three new exhibitions on view at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (through January 9, 2005) featuring work by artists and collectives from California and Tijuana who treat portraiture as metaphor. Tania speaks to the Bay Area's Faviana Rodriguez, L.A.'s Shizu Saldamando, and exhibition co-curator Berin Golonu.
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Edition #1: Aaron Ximm & Ralph Rugoff
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Bay Area correspondent Tania Ketenjian opens the debut show of her program with a visit to the quiet storm of sound artist Aaron Ximm, host of San Francisco's weekly "Field Effects" concert series - flush with his field recordings - and Ralph Rugoff, curator of "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" at the California College of the Arts, which not only dares to reopen the East Coast/West Coast divide but attempts to redefine "regional" contemporary art in a global culture.
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