avant garde | | atractivoquenobello

On April 16, San Francisco’s SOMArts will host a 2-hour panel discussion on ‘Art, Performance & Legitimacy’, followed by a performance from Womenhouse, a temporary drag queen feminist collective.

Following the recent opening of the Work More #6 group exhibition, which brings a taste of San Francisco’s avant-garde drag culture to the confines of a gallery space, the panel will explore the notion of authenticity and “outsider art”, featuring speakers such as Work More #6 curator Sarah Sass Biscarra-Dilley, Julie Phelps of Counterpulse, Bettie-Sue Hertz of YBCA, as well as Matt Sussman of Art Practical, and moderated by Cara Rose DeFabio.

The panel will also consider the return of performance art to the gallery world and the consequences of drag and other queer performances entering the conversation, from the ways in which it could legitimize the form to the dangers of commodification of queer culture.

After the 2-hour panel discussion, members of the group Womenhouse – inspired by the 1972 feminist art installation and performance space, Womanhouse – will enact performances throughout the evening. To find out more about more about the event, visit the official event website or get details directly on our aqnb event listing.**

: Work MORE! #6 group exhibition. Image courtesy SOMArts.

Whilst his roots are in the downtown New York experimental music scene, recently Christian Marclay has become more widely recognized for his ambitious film and video works. ‘Musical’ concerns have remained, however; Video Quartet (2002) is a four-screen installation in which musical scenes from a vast array of filmic source material is mixed and juxtaposed to effectively create a new work (predictable reference to Marclay’s early adoption of hip-hop methodology goes here). The Clock (2010), while less overtly musical is nevertheless greatly concerned with rhythm and time, being, as it is, a functioning 24-hour clock produced entirely from innumerable cut-ups of time-centric sequences from film and television.

Everyday, then, unites these two aspects of Marclay’s oeuvre, music and video, being a video work that functions as a score, of sorts, for a group of improvising musicians to respond to. In this case the improvisers in question are a bunch of familiar names from the British jazz/improv/chin-stroking scene, including Steve Beresford on piano and peculiar electronics and the ubiquitous John Butcher on various reed instruments, as well as Marclay himself on the wheels of steel. Continue reading Real Time