August 18-September 12 at BAM

August 18-September 12 at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA)

For information see:
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/calendar/month/08012010
or call: 510.642.0808

2626 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720

Open Wednesday-Sunday, 11AM-5PM

Gallery Admission:
Free for BAM/PFA members; UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff; children (12 & under)
$10 for adults (18-64)
$7 for non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17)

Current Ongoing Exhibitions

Nature into Action: Hans Hofmann
Through August 29
Drawn from BAM/PFA’s extensive Hans Hofmann collection, this installation reveals the relationship between nature as source and action as method in the great abstract painter’s work.

Marisa Olson: Double Bind
Through August 31
With a pair of provocative YouTube videos, Olson unravels the promise and pitfalls of online participatory culture. Online only: netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain
MATRIX 232
Through September 12
Brent Green is a maker of moving things—animated films, kinetic objects, and other eccentric inventions. His MATRIX exhibition coincides with the release of his first feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, a fable of love, loss, and compulsive construction.

Thom Faulders: BAMscape
Through fall 2011
How often do you get a chance to sit, lounge, or study on a work of art? BAMscape invites you to interact with art—and with the museum—in unexpected ways.


MATRIX 233
David Wilson
Gatherings
Until August 22
Gatherings is the first-ever crossover project between the museum’s MATRIX and L@TE programs. Follow the Oakland based artist David Wilson’s progress on site-specific installations in Gallery B while becoming immersed in a series of four Friday-night performances programmed in conjunction with his work.

Continuing Exhibition
Himalayan Pilgrimage
Ongoing

Reaching across several centuries and over the highest mountains in the world, Buddhism spread from India through the narrow corridors of Central Asia into Tibet, where it has remained the primary ethical and moral compass of the Tibetan people. Explore this journey in Himalayan Pilgrimage through exceptionally beautiful objects of sculpture and painting dating from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries and drawn from a private collection on long-term loan to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The central image, a five-foot-tall seated Buddha, provides the axis and symbolic core of the exhibition. This sculpture of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni is seen in a gesture of “touching the earth,” or bhumisparsa mudra, in which he calls on the earth to witness his enlightenment. From this, the central figure and the basic principle of Buddhist thought, the exhibition goes on to explore the cosmic realms of Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

Julia M. White
Senior Curator for Asian Art


New and Upcoming Events and Exhibitions

New Exhibition
Hauntology 
July 14-December 5

Hauntology, essentially the logic of the ghost, is a concept as ephemeral and abstract as the term implies. Since it was first used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a 1993 lecture delivered at UC Riverside concerning the state of Marxist thought in the post-Communist era, the term hauntology has been widely discussed in philosophical and political circles, as well as becoming a major influence in the development of various sub-genres of electronic music.

This exhibition focuses primarily on the museum’s recent contemporary acquisitions, mixing these with a number of other works representing a wide range of periods and styles. Although the artists included in Hauntology do not necessarily see themselves as part of a larger movement, when viewed collectively a number of resonances appear, not unrelated to the musical interpretations of the theme. Works in Hauntology frequently incorporate archaic imagery, styles, or techniques and evoke uncertainty, mystery, inexpressible fears, and unsatisfied longing.

For Derrida himself, hauntology is a philosophy of history that upsets the easy progression of time by proposing that the present is simultaneously haunted by the past and the future. Specifically, Derrida suggests that the specter of Marxist utopianism haunts the present, capitalist society, in what he describes as “the persistence of a present past.” The notion of hauntology also can be seen as describing the fluidity of identity among individuals, marking the dynamic and inevitable shades of influence that link one person’s experience to another’s, both in the present and over time.

In the fifteen years since Derrida first used this term, hauntology, and the related term, hauntological, have been adopted by the British music critic Simon Reynolds to describe a recurring influence in electronic music created primarily by artists in the United Kingdom who use and manipulate samples culled from the past (mostly old wax-cylinder recordings, classical records, library music, or postwar popular music) to invoke either a euphoric or unsettling view of an imagined future. The music has an anachronistic quality hinting at an unrecognizable familiarity that is often dreamlike, blurry, and melancholic—what Reynolds describes as “an uneasy mixture of the ancient and the modern.”

This exhibition marks the first time that a museum has presented works of visual art within the framework of hauntology. Works by Luc Tuymans, Paul Sietsema, Carrie Mae Weems, Bruce Conner, Robert Gutierrez, Diane Arbus, Travis Collinson, Paul Schiek, Arnold Kemp, and others form loose groups in which one can discern various thematic concentrations: the enigma of place and placelessness, memorial and longing, transitional beings, displacement and disappearance, demonic manifestations, auras, elegies of nature, and the translucency of the psyche.

Scott Hewicker, artist and musician
Lawrence Rinder, director, BAM/PFA
Curators


Wednesday, August 25
New Exhibition Opens

Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture
August 25-December 12

A dazzling array of Japan’s greatest artistic traditions from ancient to modern will be presented in BAM/PFA’s major fall exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture. The Clark Center of Hanford, California, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will collaborate in bringing one of the most significant collections of Japanese art in America to the Bay Area with a presentation of more than 100 works of art. The exhibition will cover the broad collecting interests of the center’s founder, fourth-generation San Joaquin Valley resident Willard Clark, whose passion for Japan’s art and culture has resulted in a collection representing all major areas of artistic endeavor, with dates ranging from the late Heian period to the twenty-first century. Selections from the collection will be organized thematically, addressing topics of Buddhist art, literati painting, the natural environment, everyday life, bamboo sculpture, and contemporary ceramics, as well as works that celebrate a uniquely Japanese sense of humor. 



Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture is organized jointly by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture and is co-curated by Andreas Marks, Clark Center director, and Julia M. White, senior curator of Asian Art at BAM/PFA.


Public Program
Thursday, August 26, 7 p.m.
Lecture
Timon Screech
Collecting and Viewing in the Edo Period: Some Thoughts on the Ownership and Display of Paintings
Museum Theater

Edo painting is greatly admired today and is studied in detail, but little attention has been given to how painting was considered during the period itself. This talk focuses on objects in the Clark Collection that let us consider how and why, at the time, people bought these works of art and where they displayed them, as well as how they might have been shocked to find the objects—in the hands of the “wrong” people—placed, out of admiration, in inappropriate places.

Timon Screech is the author of ten books on the visual culture of the Edo period, including works on the effect of the “scientific gaze” on popular imagery, erotic images, and the writings of eighteenth-century travelers to Japan. He has taught the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, since 1991, and in 2006 he was elected to a chair in the history of art. After receiving his B.A. at Oxford, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1991. His current research project relates to the deification of the first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu and the cult established for him at Nikko.

Guided Tours of Flowers of the Four Seasons
Guided tours of Flowers of the Four Seasons are presented by UC Berkeley graduate students in the Department of Art History on Thursdays at 12 noon and Sundays at 2 p.m. Student guides, all of whom specialize in East Asian art, are Kristopher Kersey, Carl Gellert, and Michelle Wang.

Schedule:
Thursdays at 12:15 p.m.: September 2, 9
Sundays at 2:00 p.m.: September 12
Tours to continue through October.

Wednesday, September 1
Unlogo: Jeff Crouse
Online only
Exhibition Opens
September 1-November 30

With an iPhone app and a website, this online exhibition enables individuals to use a phone to identify logos occurring in cellular photographs and to replace them with images drawn from an online databank. Anyone can view and contribute to the databank, suggesting and uploading images that may be substituted for a particular logo, hence undoing the original logo—Unlogo. Online only: netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Thursday, September 2
Free First Thursday
Gallery Admission Free All Day

Friday, September 3 @ 8:00 p.m.
L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Terry Riley Celebrates 75 
(Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)
Programmed by Sarah Cahill

BAM/PFA welcomes back a true American original, master composer-pianist Terry Riley, in a concert to celebrate his 75th birthday. After his acclaimed performance last year, Riley returns with Gyan Riley to open the L@TE fall season, once again transforming the architecture of the museum into his own warm and welcoming living room.

Friday night programs typically begin at 7:30 p.m. in Gallery B; doors open at 5 p.m. with DJs in the lobby or Gallery B at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $7; free for BAM/PFA members and Cal students. For more information on L@TE programs and our guest programmers, please visit bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/late. Galleries open until 11 p.m.

Friday, September 10 @ 7:30 p.m.
L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Beginning of Edo Period 
(Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)
Programmed by Tomo Yasuda

The sound of the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, provides the “soundtrack” for a live painting—a work of visual art completed as a public performance—by the duo the Bahama Kangaroos (artists Naoki Onodera and Yukako Ezoe Onodera). Shoko Hikage and Kanoko Nishi perform traditional works for koto ranging from the beginning of the Edo period to contemporary compositions. Beginning of the Edo Period is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons.
See http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/clarkcenter for more information on the exhibition.
Galleries Open Until 9 p.m.

12Sunday
Brent Green/MATRIX 232
Exhibition Closes