Posts archive: February 2007

Gloria Tanchelev writes:  Take a trip out to San Francisco State University to see the exhibition “Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art.” Several artists in the exhibition have ties to the Bay Area. Including the work of Dinh Q. Le, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Harrell Fletcher, Long Nguyen, Thai Bui and Joyce Kozloff among others, “Witness to War” presents the emotional, intellectual and creative experience of artists born in the United States and Vietnam. Their art — painting, braided photographs, film, video, sculpture and installation — probes and transforms painful memories from opposite sides of the war, memories which electrify their work.

On Saturday February 24, art historian Moira Roth and artist, feminist and pacifist Joyce Kozloff talked about Kozloff’s life as an artist/activist, especially her recent engagement with Artists Against the War (the “American War” in Iraq). 

Other lectures, events, an artist roundtable and concurrent film festival, WWII to IRAQ, are scheduled at SFSU. For information: www.ica.sfsu.edu.

“Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art” remains at the Fine Arts Gallery, Fine Arts Building, San Francisco State University through March 15.

- Meredith Tromble [Tuesday, February 27th, 2007]

Anna Nichole Smith has died. She didn’t do any wrong except be pretty. We all remember where we were when Marilyn Monroe died. I was three years old.

She died less than a year after her unusually handsome son died. We don’t know whether she died of suicide or a drug overdose.

In 2000, the second most beautiful woman in the world committed suicide. Ann Carter said something very strange to me. She said, “You remind me of Marilyn Monroe”. I thought that was strange because I was 200 lbs. and a 37-year-old man. I asked her why and she said because I was a “beautiful child”. That’s what Truman Capote said about Marilyn Monroe before he died of AIDS.

John Lennon was killed. John F. Kennedy was killed. Neither meant anything to me. I remember, when JFK was killed, my mother was furious because “her stories” (soap operas) would be off for a week.

Anna Nicole didn’t make any great movies like Marilyn. She was the first Paris Hilton. Famous because she was famous, as Marshall McLuhan would say. But she had a heart and it’s not beating anymore and I feel less.

I’m writing this as Anna is having her autopsy.

Andy Warhol said that beauty was a form of intelligence. I guess that made Anna a very smart girl. So she’s in heaven now with Jimmy Hoffa, Jim Henson and Charlie Sheen.

There was something special about her other than the fact that she had the biggest breasts of any mammal since Bambi’s mother.

I hope she’s happy where ever she is. I’ve never been so unhappy in all my life.

- Dale Hoyt [Wednesday, February 14th, 2007]

Klaus Biesenbach, the newish chief curator of media at the Museum of Modern Art, exemplifies the intersection of curating and celebrity, reports Nicholas Boston for the New York Observer.

- Meredith Tromble [Sunday, February 11th, 2007]

From the editors