Excerpted from “Lucinda Barnes retiring as Berkeley Art Museum curator”
News | Charles Desmarais | on May 25, 2016
Complements at Minnesota Street: The Minnesota Street Project is just getting started, but it is impressive to see the synergies that can happen there, whether by design, because ideas are in the air or as a consequence of sheer luck. It happens right now that three striking exhibitions— one each of photography, painting and video — work so well together that they could be combined to make a strong museum presentation somewhere.
Our imaginary show would essentially be a mashup of visual mashups: each picture combination of many, the exhibition itself a spliced-together recombinant.
I recommend viewing, in order, “New Material” at Casemore Kirkeby, which shares astonishingly fresh photographic approaches by eight young Japanese artists; “Slow Wave,” a large show on two floors of painting by Paul Wackers at Eleanor Harwood Gallery; and the brain- and eye-teaser “How Not to Be Seen: A F—ing Didactic Educational .MOV File,” a 2013 instant comic classic by Berlin artist Hito Steyerl.
Charles Desmarais
San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic.
