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I N T E R V I E W S TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE RADIO TANIA NEWSLETTER PLEASE CLICK HERE SIGHT UNSEEN Sight Unseen is a weekly, half hour arts program that speaks with contemporary artists of all different mediums about the ways in which they see the world and the fundamental aspects of the human condition they are trying to unravel through their work. Sight Unseen is unique in public radio in America and airs both in San Francisco and in London. Every week, it asks poignant questions and engages listeners in an intimate dialogue with the artist and themselves, observing the cultural context we live in. The program airs weekly on Fridays from noon to 12:30 p.m. PST on KALX in Berkeley at 90.7 FM and on Resonance FM in London on Sundays at 11:00 p.m. GMT. To listen to a show, click the title of the show.
Last week, I went to see a dance performance from ODC, or Oberlin Dance Company. Although San Francisco is one of the epicenter's of dance in the US, I rarely go to see dance performances. I think, maybe I won't get it but after seeing the performances from ODC, I discovered it's not about getting anything, it's about having an extraordinary experience. Brenda Way has been dancing since she was 3 years old and dance has always been a means of expression for her. But at the height of the 60s, when political and social movements were high and boundaries were being broken in the arts, Way realized that movement could mirror and further express her political ideals. Trained as a formal dancer, she began breaking new ground while living in NY. She was invited to Oberlin College to teach and that was when she started the Oberlin Dance Collective, ODC. She came with the collective to San Francisco in 1976 with 16 people. She now is the co-director of ODC Dance Commons, a 33,000 sq. ft space, with 180 classes a month, 200 performances a year, and above all else, a deep sense of integrity, community and strength, the ideals she started with in the 60s. Lee Friedlander, photographer and artist, was born in Washington State in 1934 and discovered photography early in his life. He was inspired by Robert Frank and Walker Evans, truly American photographers who observed and captured American life. With this in mind, Freidlander took a different path in a similar genre, adding irreverence and humor to his work, a very witty and seemingly unself conscious style that became the inspiration for many great photographers to come. Friedlander was one of the first to elevate the snapshot to an artistic work. And he snapped all kinds of things, people at parties milling about, himself in a hotel room or a shop window, women in the street, NY scenes, workers, models, nudes and his family. There's a strength in the playfulness of these images, a sense of exploration, freedom and the discovery of a love—Friedlander's love for the medium of photography. Two years ago, the Museum of Modern Art in NY put together an extensive retrospective of his work. That show has come to San Francisco. Today on the show, the words of senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips speaking about the exhibition aptly titled Friedlander which takes us on a journey through his work from his earliest days to now. FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN—PART ONE FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN—PART TWO This week, I watched a series of documentaries that I didn't realize would change the way I looked at the world, at gender and at myself. But it did. I had read about the series in the New York Times several months ago. The article explained how a woman took a camera all over the world filming herself and other women talking—sharing stories, observing their lives, revealing their thoughts and experiences around sexuality, relationships, choices and fears. I was immediately intrigued so when I heard that the series was coming to San Francisco, not only did I have to see it but I wanted to interview the filmmaker. So I did. Here, youwill be listening to the words of filmmaker Jennifer Fox whose film, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is opening across the country and the world. Flying takes viewers on a trip to NY, South Africa, Germany, England, Pakistan, India and 12 other countries inviting us into the intimate spaces and lives of women Fox met on her travels. The inspiration for Flying was that Fox realized that women speak differently than men, especially when brought together. Beyond that, Fox was, well, a seemingly free woman, unmarried, without children and in her 40s. So different from many of her counterparts, this left her wondering who she was as a woman, wasn't she supposed to be married and what was the universal experience around not just sharing stories but understanding ones womanhood. Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is playing this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Daria Martin has shown extensively around the world in the few years that she has been making films. This year alone, she will be in a touring solo exhibition in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Her work has been seen at the Tate in London and in galleries and museums all across Europe. She writes, speaks and performs and now she is teaching as well, Daria Martin was once a painter but turned to film for many reasons, one of which is that she loved its collaborative qualities, the fact that the creation of a film is not a solitary experience but one that includes not only a multiple of people but a vast variety of references and mediums. She is from the Bay Area but is now living in London, working as an artist and teaching at Oxford. She is having a brief stint here at the California College of the Arts, teaching, ironically, in the sculpture department. She initially came to the University by invitation from Jens Hoffman, director of the Wattis Institute and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. That was where he learned of Martin's work and invited her to present some of her films at the Wattis Institute. A professor took a leave of absence from CCA and wanted Martin to fill the spot for the semester. It was in the sculpture department and although a filmmaker, Martin associates sculpture with film in that, much like film, sculpture has a structure that moves, at least in our eyes, since we are doing the moving so to speak. Even though film is a two dimensional medium it has a 3 dimensional sense. In her course, Martin is exploring the internal sculpture of film not only physically speaking but sensically as well as she observes and shares with her students the ways in which film can offer senses beyond sight and sound. I spoke with Daria Martin in her 1940s flat where she is living temporarily that is right across from the CCA campus. The myth of the Academy Awards seem to loom much larger than that of any of the festivals including Cannes or Sundance. Winning an Oscar is the ultimate achievement in filmmaking. So it came as no surprise to see the joy and excitement on director Stefan Ruzowizsky when he was doing the rounds across the country for his film The Counterfeiters, nominated for best foreign language film. The Counterfeiters did in fact win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film however I spoke with Ruzowitzsky when he was nominated. Based on a book by Adolph Burger, it tells the true story of largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. The film opens with Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, master counterfeiter, who minutes into the film is captured by the Nazis and later put to work, with a group of other prisoners, to create false British sterling and American dollars. He does so with great precision and in so doing saves the lives of him and his co-workers, so to speak. But his work helps those who are killing his people as a concentration camp with dire conditions exists behind the walls of the counterfeiting operation. Stefan Ruzowiztsky tells the tale simply, starkly and skillfully. When Paul McCarthy first started working as a performance artist in the mid-1970s, he was inspired by the Vienna Actionists, performers who used blood and excrement in their work. McCarthy himself did several pieces in which he replaced blood and excrement with ketchup, mayonnaise and chocolate sauce. In a piece titled 'Penis Painting', McCarthy paints with his penis, and in others with his head and his feet. He poured ketchup on his genitals and had them disappear between his legs in a piece called "Sauce" and In Sailor's Meat, from 1975, he copulated with raw meat, dressed in lingerie. In 'Class Fool' (1976) McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup spattered classroom and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. Some people may claim, "what is artistic about that" but the essential foundation of work for McCarthy is that it change your perception. And these pieces surely changed the immediate perception of ones existing environment. One would never guess when looking at McCarthy that he chose to push boundaries in this manner. He stands at about 5 foot 8, a long white beard, rounded fingers, jeans and a fleece jacket. He's a grandpa and he uses Santa Claus in his work but there is nothing square or reserved about the sculptures and performances McCarthy has been involved in. When the Wattis Institute approached Paul McCarthy to do a show, he decided to create a group show that reflected the memories he had of his early work. The exhibition Low Life, Slow Life: Part 1 has opened at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco and it is based on a series of lists McCarthy had compiled over the years—lists of artists, works and events he valued. In its entirety, it will ultimately include the work of 35 artists from such well knowns as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Marcel Duchamp to seemingly more obscure artists such as Paul Cotton, John Heartfield and Allan Midgette. Part 1 looks at McCarthy's early years, investigating his student years in Salt Lake City to his early career in the Bay Area during the 1970's. In 2009, Part 2 will address his work from the mid-70s to today. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is presenting At The Origin of Performance which chronicles the life of postmodern dancer and performer Anna Halprin through videos of her dance performances around the world, images of her daughters, drawings made by her students and, for me, most affecting of all, a series of photographs of Halprin herself in her 80s. It's a series in which she melts into the elements of the California coastal environment. In one shot, she has covered her entire naked body, from head to toe, in molasses and hundreds of fine bits of tree bark as she becomes a chameleon with a redwood. In another shot, she is wrapped in a white fabric, moving with the frigid Northern California tide, like a long piece of white kelp that has found itself on the shore. How does a woman in her 80s so fearlessly engage with the world around her. Well, Ms. Halprin is hardly a fearful person. She was one of the first people to ever use nudity in dance, to contemplate death through performance and to combat her own disease with cancer through movements and approaches she created herself. I spoke with Anna Halprin when she was at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts previewing the exhibition created in her honor. In the early 1900's, 99% of children in America were born at home. Today, 99% of children here are born in hospitals. The most fundamental aspect of life, birth, has had a diverse and at times shocking history. From such things as twilight sleep, a process employed in the 1930s that drugged women and restrained them during childbirth to the use of Thalidomide in the 1950s that led to serious birth defects, to the current dramatic rise in c-sections, women have been struggling to fight for a sense of empowerment around this very basic right—to have a child. In the 1970s, during the women's movement in America, a sub-movement was happening around birth where home birth was being encouraged and a culture of home birthers developed. However, these women were far from the mainstream and the choice was still viewed as an outlandish one. Now, childbirth, the medical establishment and the impeding fear of lawsuits and insurance companies has brought the issue of empowerment around childbirth to the forefront and people across America are voicing their frustrations and confusion around the process of giving birth. The Business of Being Born is a documentary by Abby Epstein and Rikki Lake and it brings the discussion of childbirth to the mainstream spotlighting the challenges women face in a hospital setting and the strength of homebirth as an empowering and very possible choice. Rikki Lake is famous for her roles in John Waters' films and as an American talk show host however after giving birth twice—once in the hospital and once at home—she discovered something that had great meaning for her, the movement around delivering babies in America. So she made a film and it is reaching across america to sold out theatres. The Business of Being Born looks at the hospital industry, looks at the role of midwives in American society, it follows the births of several women and reveals a history that is shocking to many who have not researched this topic. LAUGHING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Laughter and humor are fundamental binding experiences. One cannot underestimate the joy felt at a baby's first smile, the connection we have when we laugh with a stranger or the sense of comraderie that humor establishes between friends. When it comes to art work, humor allows for an entry way into understanding what often is a deeper, possibly darker message. This is quite true for contemporary art where ore often than not a piece makes you laugh through its title or subject matter. Some find this infuriating, wondering why they can't get the joke while others simply enjoy the process of enjoying themselves. Laughing in a Foreign Language curated by Japanese native Mami Kataoka and is being shown at the Hayward Gallery in London. It is a group show with over 80 works of art, all centered on one central there, laughing. It opened on the 25th of January and runs through April, 2008 and while seeing the show would be brilliant, the concept of it raises enough questions and ideas to explore in contemporary art, which Mami and I did in this coversation. I spoke with Mami Kataoka when I was in London in early January. Under our conversation are the sounds of a video piece at the Hayward. We spoke about the duality of humor, the notion of the outsider, and how she actually found all these works. Gannet has a disability called Mowat-Wilson Syndrome which essentially means that his right and left brain have trouble communicating and thus he can't really integrate what he sees and hears. He drools, he has trouble eating, he can't speak and it's sometimes hard for him to see. But one thing he definitely does do is enjoy sound, enjoy life and people, and express love. When filmmaker Robert Arnold first met Gannett, it was through his friends from the Art Institute where he had studied. Robert's friends who were painters and musicians and sculptors were also caregivers and some were taking care of Gannett. You would see them in the neighborhood, a young, hipster looking type, walking slowly with a disabled person. It was already unusual to see a disabled person on the street. Here in America, and possibly in most of the western world, disabilities are not necessarily public and thus our comfort level with disabilities is shallow. Robert Arnold did not set out to make a film about a disabled person, he wanted to explore the inner world of someone who could not communicate externally the way we can. And he discovered someone so full of life and emotion. The Key of G is a documentary that tracks the mundane things, Gannett eating, showering, dressing but it reveals the extraordinary. And it shows how Gannett moves from his mother's house into a home with a group of artists who make him part of their community. Mario Ybarra Jr. may be called a Chicano artist but when the LA Times suggested that, he responded by saying “I make contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles. It’s not my goal to learn Nahuatl but to speak Cantonese.” What I believe is so telling about that statement is that Mario's mind is expansive, he explores a myriad of sides to a single idea and when speaking with him, you get that keen sense of a brain digging deeper and making connections we so often don't. Ybarra comes from LA, his family is from Guadalajara, and he has been practicing art for most of his life. He and his wife Carla founded the art collective Slanguage in LA and he has worked with numerous aspiring artists offering them opportunities they otherwise would never had. And he's only in his early 30s.Ybarra has been part of the Tijuana Biennial, he has shown work at the Tate in London and the ICA in London. He has just been accepted into the Whitney Biennial and he just completed a residency at the California College of the Arts, the product of which is a large mural that covers the walls of the entrance at the Wattis Institute, the gallery housed at the college. The mural was initially supposed to be up for 3 months, but Ybarra wanted it to remain there for 300 years! It's time has been extended to 3 years with a possibility for much longer. I interviewed Ybarra about one single thing, his mural at the college. This is the most unusual interview I have conducted because as you will notice in the next half hour, I ask only one question. Ybarra is a storyteller, an orator and although he spoke straight for nearly an hour, everything he said was absolutely fascinating to me. I hope it will be to you as well. This is part one of a two part conversation with artist Mario Ybarra Jr. speaking from the Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Right now, as I speak, hundreds of thousands of people are communicating on chat rooms. They are talking about their day, their views on politics, their innermost feelings, voicing their anger, looking for love. In fact, they are doing any number of things. The one consistent premise of chat rooms is not the topic at hand but the mere act of reaching out, of wanting to connect, of doing everything to get a sense that someone out there, in the ether, understands you and your experience. I have never personally experienced a chat room and neither had sound artist Ben Rubin when he decided to create Listening Post with a statistician named Mark Hansen. They wanted to reflect a social phenomena through sound and the result is extraordinary. I would love to describe it but it really needs to be experienced and thankfully it can be, right now, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Essentially, it's a visual and aural representation of chats going on in the world right now. It has six scenes, each reflecting a different, say, genre of chat and it's arresting and beautiful and sad and intriguing and many other things I am sure. These are just some of my own personal reactions. Listening Post has been purchased by the San Jose Museum of Art but is currently traveling all over the world. When Hiroshi Sugimoto was a young man, he was slated to take over his father's business. The first born son in a Japanese family, Sugimoto could have been a successful business man but business did not speak to him, it was far from how he wanted to spend his life. In fact, what captivated him was the fundamental issues many of us grapple with, issues of life and death, of time and history, the ways in which we see the world and how that differs from the ways other people see the world. When Sugimoto was 12 years old, he started using a camera and realized that photographs are like a time machine, a way of documenting and recreating memory. One of his most famous series of works is titled Seascapes and part of the reason Sugimoto created it was to recapture his very first memory, the site of the horizon. Sugimoto is a trickster of sorts. He loves to make the viewer think they are seeing something real and he furthermore loves to play with the notion of what is real. As he says, photography used to be used as a means to gather evidence. But now, it can be so manipulated that it hardly tells the truth. Hiroshi Sugimoto has a large retrospective here in San Francisco at the de young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He chooses to hang his shows himself so the exhibition is not only striking in its content but glorious in its context. As you enter the gallery space, you are warned that you are entering a very dimply lit space, virtually black, and you may have trouble seeing the people around you. This allows for a deeper focus on the images and it further brings to life this pictures that seem to be asking questions about what life is. The first image we see looks much like a painting, as many of Sugimoto's works do. But, as he said, painting is a much more ancient medium and has much fewer limitations. Sugimoto loves the challenge of photography and the many contradictions it inspires. I spoke with Hiroshi Sugimoto when he came to San Francisco for his opening. We walked through the exhibition together. Filmmaker, writer, actor, cinematographer, artist, collector and producer John Waters has always been a performer. When he was in highschool, he put on puppet shows for kids and later, finding himself a bit bored by the cleanliness of the shows, decided to throw in some blood and guts....He knew what his calling was from early on and he had the community and the stamina to bring his calling to fruition. His first film, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, was made when he was 18 years old but the film that made him infamous was the one that came 8 years later, Pink Flamingos. In preperation for this interview, I watched Pink Flamingos for the first time having heard it countlessly referenced but never really knowing what it was about. I was shocked, truly shocked. I wondered how a filmmaker who had directed a 200+ cross dressing actor to bend down and eat dog feces had become so famous, and now, almost, just almost mainstream. What makes Pink Flamingos and all of John Waters' subsequent films so special is not the shock effect (one that comes naturally to Waters). One of the things that makes his work stand out is the compassion in them, the sensitivity, the sense of comraderie. and all of this is reflected very much in his character. The latest incarnation of John Waters is Hairspray. It was first made by him in 1988, it then turned into a huge Broadway hit and now he has executive produced the remake of the film. Needless to say, John Waters has surely developed since his earlier films that were made on the smallest of budgets and consisted of a cast of characters that were his friends. The thing is that, as much as he could, John Waters did things his way, and this, along with so many other talents, makes him one of the best filmmakers today. Recently John Waters has had a more recent incarnation, that of artist and art collector. His new show titled, Reckless Eyeballs, is a reflection of some of John Waters' social fascinations. The work in the show, most of which is photography but also includes a sculpture and two sound pieces, looks at the world of film, of art, and of politics. Waters holds no punches and the show is irreverent and hilarious and poignant. It is at the Rena Bransten gallery and I spoke with John Waters at the gallery. Steve Buscemi has been a fixture in the independent film circuit for nearly 20 years and has been acting for most of his life. He has over 100 acting credits to his name, he has written, produced, been part of soundtracks and directed. His most recent film, Interview, which he both directed and stars in, marks the first in yet another foray of Buscemi's, bringing the films of assassinated filmmaker Theo Van Gogh to the screen. You may remember the violent death of Theo Van Gogh at the hands of an Islamist fundamentalist in the streets of Amsterdam. Theo Van Gogh was shot and then nearly decapitated, a 5 page note was attached to his body with a knife. Theo Van Gogh was quite vocal about his anti Islamic sentiments yet the backlash that he received seemed to shock the world. Now, in his memory, Steve Buscemi has created the film company Triple Theo and will re-create three of Theo Van Gogh's films. Interview is the first. Steve Buscemi was born in Brooklyn NY, his father was a sanitation worker, his mom a hostess at the local Howard Johnson motel. Before he began his acting career, Buscemi was a NY city firefighter in Little Italy, NYC for four years. He joined the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group and his acting career grew. Steve Buscemi often plays neurotic characters, full of angst and frustration. He is a permanent fixture in films by the Coen brothers but the role that really put him in the spotlight was that of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs. Buscemi's character in Interview is not neurotic but quite persistent. The story is this: Pierre Peders, a war reporter for a Washington newspaper is asked to do a fluff piece on a well known b actress, the reason being that his "facts" in his political pieces have not been very reliable. Uninterested and frustrated with this assignment, he does nothing to learn about the actress who gets extraordinarily frustrated herself. What ensues is a seeming cat and mouse chase in the actress' loft where each party reveals more or maybe less than they would like to. The film is disquieting and uncomfortable and memorable. I spoke with Steve Buscemi while he was in San Francisco promoting his film, Interview. EDWARD BURTYNSKY and JENNIFER BAICHWAL In 2005, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky won the TED prize, a prestigious award given to three people a year. As part of the award, the recipient is given the the chance to speak at the TED conference and share three wishes he or she has for the world. In the case of Burtynsky, these issues revolved around sustainability and his intimate awareness of the fact that man's effect on earth is becoming increasingly destructive. In fact, Burtynsky's study on man's effect began when he first started university. It was a project his professor gave him, to document the evidence of man on earth, and, according to Burtynsky, he is still working on that initial project. Edward Burtynsky's photographs are beautiful, massive reflections on massive global influences. However, what is interesting about Burtynsky is that he is not photographing inherently beautiful landscapes. In fact, some of the images he captures are quite horrific when you think of the consequences of the subjects he deals with--factories, quarries, urban mines, oil. Now a film has been made about the work titled Manufactured Landscapes. The filmmaker, Jennifer Baichwal, loved Burtynsky's work and given the social implications it has, decided that a film would be a brilliant way to reveal the source of the images The film looks at the life behind the still images Burtynsky captures, it takes us into the moving reality of the the quarries and dams that Burtynsky travels around the world to photograph. In the film, we travel to China and Bangladesh. We see young men knee deep in oil, we see older men who have worked on the Three Gorges Dam for nearly ten years, we see cities leveled and piles of electronic waste, we see clouds turned black from the smoke of coal mines and we observe the way Baichwal meticulously turns still images into moving pictures. It's a brilliant film and one that forces you to look at all the things you find disposable and re-question their value and the place where they might ultimately end up.
Vivienne Westwood, the well known fashion designer who has changed the face of design over the last 40 years just arrived to San Francisco with an expected splash this past weekend. This week on Sight Unseen, part one of my interview with Dame Westwood. As you may know, Westwood's initial designs shocked the world with their punk aesthetic. She worked with Malcolm McClaren, manager of The Sex Pistols, opened a store on Kings Road called Let it Rock and that was when her design career began. Over the years she has both broken boundaries and remained committed to a history of design and fashion—Westwood has reinvented fashion objects, re-contextualizing them, changing their meaning and commenting on established British traditions (both of aesthetic and class). Along with that, she has been embraced by the British establishment even though she was so anti-establishment during the early part of her career. Now she has a show called Vivienne Westwood: 36 years in Fashion. The show started at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is traveling around the world. It's only stop in the US is here in San Francisco at the de Young Museum and right after the opening, the museum was filled with visitors. The show is quite extensive, spanning Westwood's entire career and the deYoung has offered an entire floor of the Museum for the show. In a way, when entering the exhibit, you feel like you're entering into the beautiful mind of the designer. Vivienne Westwood and I spoke about the reverence to the past (and the necessity of that reverence), the banality of contemporary art, the experience of collaboration and her advice to young designers, amongst other things. The largest collection of Matisse's outside of the Matisse Museum in Paris, Picasso's first sculptures ever made in concrete, Miros, Giacomettis, David Smith, Lichtenstein, Antony Gormley, James Turrell, these are just a selection of works that Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy have collected over the past 50 years. and now, these works can be viewed in a private museum called The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. I met Raymond Nasher there this weekend. He had just returned from a visit to the White House where he had chats with the First Lady about the arts in America. Raymond Nasher opened the sculpture center three years ago in Dallas. He wanted it to be designed by Renzo Piano, he wanted to create an open air museum, a building where it would be difficult to distinguish between outside and in, and most importantly, he wanted to share his collection with people, not keep it for his family or for himself. In fact, he believes that art is meant to be shared, it's the foundation for a community to grow, to learn, to have profound experiences. That said, Raymond Nasher has amassed a collection very few ever have the opportunity to do and he started from scratch, having grown as a collector and a real estate developer, all the while living in a nurturing relationship with his wife Patsy, who had the eye for the work. MONTAGE: A COLLECTION OF VOICES FROM THE PAST YEAR This week, I have selected a montage of bits and pieces of interviews I have done over that last couple of years. I have spoken with loads of artists from varying backgrounds, architects from London, installation artists from Switzerland, curators from NY, performance artists from Maine, designers from Canada and a furniture designer from Dorset. The snippets you will hear are both about their art and about their perceptions, on their life, experience and the work they have created. The voices you will hear are those of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tobias Wong, William Pope.L, Ralph Rugoff, Wim Wenders, Philip Wood, Dennis Crompton and Matthew Higgs. Throughout, the music of Miles Davis.
BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION | WOMAN'S HOUR For over 50 years Woman's Hour has featured the famous and infamous, men and women who have, quite literally, defined their times. Live broadcasting, with all its risks and rewards, has always been fundamental to Woman's Hour. Even in the early days, when a slip of the tongue could prompt a national outrage, the programme never shirked from tackling inflammatory items. Today Woman's Hour combines live and pre-recorded material and is the longest running and one of the most listened to programs on the BBC. For more information, visit the Woman's Hour website. Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River. Known during the Depression years as "Alabama Africa", it was the site of cotton plantations owned primarily by Joseph Gee. The poor rural hamlet has recently enjoyed huge success as an exhibition of quilts has toured the United States. The town’s women have developed a distinctive, bold style based on African American colours, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts. The New York Times called their quilts "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." Tania Ketenjian visited the exhibition, which has now reached de Young Museum in San Francisco, where she met curator Diane Mott and some of the quilt makers, namely Lucy Marie Mingo, Loretta Petway, Louisiana Petway Bendolph and Mary Lee Bendolph. BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION | THE WORLD SERVICE—CULTURE SHOCK The BBC World Service is the leading international broadcaster. Services are also available online and on video. Our network of correspondents provide impartial news, reports and analysis in 33 languages from locations around the world. We are celebrating our 75th anniversary. Culture Shock is an arts and culture program. I have helped produce a couple of pieces—Fixed Gear Bikes, Trends in San Francisco, Etreme Paper Art, a Robot for Your Kitchen. Click here to listen to Culture Shock. RTE-Ireland's national RADIO BROADCASTER | THE ELEVENTH HOUR The Eleventh Hour is RTÉ Radio 1's new late night arts and culture show, presented by Páraic Breathnach. As well as covering arts and cultural events and festivals, The Eleventh Hour will initiate debate, argument and creative participation among its late night audience. The programme will also be working with arts and cultural groups on projects and events that will allow listeners to get involved in the creative process. For more information, visit the The Eleventh Hour website. Vivienne Westwood, the one-time creator of the punk aesthetic with Malcolm McLaren, is now one of the leading figures in haute couture. Much of Westwood's work is inspired by painting and costume history. A major exhibition of her work took place in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last year, and the same exhibition is now on view in San Francisco. Tania Ketenjian is a radio presenter living in San Francisco who met Vivienne Westwood, and on tonight's show we hear her interview with the designer. ACCENT ELIMINATION by NINA KATCHADOURIAN Artist Nina Katchadourian lives in New York and every day she comes across posters advertising courses in "accent elimination". Both her parents have very strong and very distinct accents. Her father is Armenian, raised in Lebanon and French educated and her mother was born in Finland and speaks Swedish (she also happens to be quite the linguist and can pick up all kinds of languages). As a child, Nina would always try and imitate her parents' accents to no avail. For this project, she invited her parents towork with a speech coach to try and eliminate their accents as she conversely tried to adopt theirs. This project reflects "the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other."
CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION | DEFINITELY NOT THE OPERA Definitely Not the Opera is created by a dedicated and talented gang of audio mercenaries based in Winnipeg and Toronto. We survive on an unhealthy diet of celebrity gossip, TV show recaps and office dance-offs. For this program, DNTO interviewed me about a piece I had done almost two years ago about an exhibition at POND gallery called Shopdropping. They focused particularly on a project by Marc Horowitz called "Dinner with Marc". Listen to the INTERVIEW WITH DNTO
AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION | THE NIGHT AIR The Night Air is broadcast each Sunday from 8.30pm. Part one is repeated on Fridays at 9.35pm, Part Two is repeated on Saturdays at midnight. The Night Air is a new kind of venture for Radio National - an ever-changing, 90-minute radio composition of music, sounds, ideas and stories. The program is a seductive mix of forms ranging through short monologues, songs, dialogues, essays, poems, short stories, cut-ups, columns, speeches, recipes, sound art, rants, environmental recordings, weather reports and instrumental music. For more information, visit The Night Air website. The Collector’s Edition the works of some contributors to The Night Air including a potted history of LSD; a visit to some sound artists in a San Francisco gallery, and a backdrop of local found sound. Works by: Tania Ketenjian; Dean Champ; Fiona Negrin; and Annlise Friend.
PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL | STUDIO 360 Current issues, events and trends in art are a jumping off point for an exploration of ideas that aren't necessarily "news," yet are provocative and offer a lens on experience that only art can provide. Studio 360 presents richly textured and emotionally resonant stories that look at art's creative influence and transformative power in everyday life. Studio 360 is a weekly show that airs nationally through Public Radio International. For times on your local NPR station, visit Studio 360 for station listings. POP-UP TATTOO PARLOR AT ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007 Last year at Art Basel Miami Beach, I came across something I was truly surprised by, a tattoo parlor that was only up for three days where collectors could get pieces they would never be able to sell again, unless they took their skin off. Click here for the longer version I made for Dazed and Confused Magazine. For three months, my great friend Michael and I traveled across the United States and I asked people what they thought Happiness is and what are five things that make them happy. These were their answers. For this program, i interviewed members of the San Francisco based collective Quorum about thieir project at Art Basel Miami 2006 called Blood for Art. The largest collection of Matisse's outside of the Matisse Museum in Paris, Picasso's first sculptures ever made in concrete, Miros, Giacomettis, David Smith, Lichtenstein, Antony Gormley, James Turrell, these are just a selection of works that Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy have collected over the past 50 years. Raymond Nasher passed away on March 16, 2007. This is a small tribute to his life. Above is a longer interview. Click here to listen to the piece. PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL | THE WORLD During the 1930's and 40's the Nazis stole countless works of art throughout Europe. A new documentary called "The Rape of Europa" tells the story of the massive plunder of Europe's finest treasures...and the art experts who were sent to Europe to help recover them. AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA | WEEKEND AMERICA Weekend America is a two-hour program service designed to fit the weekend state of mind. Barbara Bogaev and Bill Radke host the program each week from Los Angeles, inviting listeners to a lively conversation about the issues of the week, the arts, and public affairs. We have some time, on weekends, to see the world through each other's eyes. To walk in someone else's shoes a bit, and go to places we wouldn't otherwise go. Stop by for a weekly visit with 300 million neighbors. For times on your local NPR station, visit Weekend America for station listings. How do you turn a Crate & Barrel catalog into a giant social experiment? Artist Marc Horowitz found a way and it was as simple as writing his cell phone number on a piece of paper. How do you manage your life knowing you're only on the earth for a short time? Filmmakers David and Hi-Jin Hodge have created a video exhibit called: Impermanence: the Time of Man. Their work is part of an international program called The Missing Peace Project. The program's purpose is to renew and revitalize global dialogue about peace. Weekend America sat down with the filmmakers to talk about how their thoughts on impermanence changed during the making of their work. As a child, Brian Copeland was noticed quickly in his San Leandro neighborhood. He was Black. His neighbors were nearly all white and many of them were heavily racist. He shares his experiences from that time in his one-man show called "Not A Genuine Black Man." Producer Tania Ketenjian joined him recently for a walk through his old neighborhood.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO | DAY TO DAY French video artist Sylvie Blocher makes sight specific pieces. She calls these works Universal Local Art or ULA’s. Blocher goes to a place and creates a work of art based on a universal issue that manifests itself locally so when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called upon her to make a ULA in San Francisco, she decided to do a piece on money, an issue she believes has a strong presence here. WPS1 ART RADIO WPS1 is the world's first internet art radio station.The station's programs combine talk and music shows hosted by contemporary writers, artists and musicians with rare historic material that includes the entire audio archive of the Museum of Modern Art. WPS1 has become a live audio museum in cyberspace, extending the visual art, book, music, film, video and performance programs that P.S.1 and MoMA are known for in ways previously unforeseen. Here, at www.wps1.org, is the first all-art, all-the-time radio station, where expression of all kinds remains truly free. Shows air for one week, twice a day. San Francisco: Our Correspondent airs approximately every 2-4 weeks. 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. CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS | PODCAST Over the next few months, I will be producing a podcast for the California College of the Arts titled The Future of Culture. To hear the podcast, please click here. KALW is a pioneering educational radio station licensed to the San Francisco Unified School District and broadcast at 91.7 FM. KAWL was the first FM station in San Francisco, as well as the first educational FM station in the United States, and the first station in San Francisco to broadcast NPR. Programming includes National Public Radio, Canadian and British broadcasting, as well as local productions. A Few Things Considered airs weekly on Sundays 3:30-4:00 p.m. PST on KALW. ART AND SPACE Real estate prices in San Francisco are forcing
artists to move out. Not only is housing ourtrageous but finding a place
to work has become more and more of a challenge. What creative solutions
are artists coming up with, where are they now finding themselves and
what is the future of an art community in the city. SORORITIES (THE BBC | WOMAN'S HOUR) TINGS DEY HAPPEN (THE BBC WORLD SERVICE) TAKING OVER, AN PACKAGED PIECE WITH DANNY HOCH (THE BBC WORLD SERVICE) FOG AS ARCHITECTURE (STUDIO 360 | PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL) LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (STUDIO 360)
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