arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL In a characteristically poetic passage within 1980's Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes early cameras, given their cabinet-like appearance and precise mechanical innards, as "clocks for seeing." I couldn't shake the phrase while taking in Will Rogan's "Stay Home," an ambiguous smile of a solo show composed of photographs and three-dimensional photographic collages at Altman Siegel.Read more »

arts@sfbg.comRead more »

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL The secret lives of teenagers aren't so secret. They're just password protected and might only be on view to a close circle of Facebook friends. Alternately, they might be lived via text message or on YouTube. Typically only the most sensational and tragic episodes involving wired teens seem to make the news — pregnancy pacts, cyber bullying, suicides — even if teenagers were having unprotected sex, harassing others and being harassed, or choosing to end their lives long before MySpace or smart phones. Read more »

arts@sfbg.com Read more »

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL "The black queen is not interested in sympathy," intones the artist Tim Roseborough dryly in Portrait of Jason II: Rebirth of the B*tch , his "sequel" to Shirley Clarke's 1967 film Portrait of Jason. It's one of many verbal snaps issued by Roseborough's piece, a séance with and tribute to its titular subject currently on view at the tiny Scenius Gallery.Read more »

arts@sfbg.comRead more »

From Kurt Schwitters' dwelling-consuming accretion The Merzbau to Tim Noble and Sue Webster's silhouette-casting garbage heaps, making art from the discard pile is by no means a new gesture. It can still be a potent one, though, as evinced by "Art at the Dump," a 20-year survey of the fruits of Recology's artist in residence program at Intersection for the Art's new gallery space in the historic San Francisco Chronicle building.Read more »

arts@sfbg.comRead more »

arts@sfbg.com

PHOTO ISSUE It wasn't until Julian ArtPorn (www.ArtPorn.com) was taping the back hem of my red and white polka dot dress up over the seat of my Nishiki road bike that I realized the Coppertone dog-girl duo of yore is, in fact, one of our most visible illustrative renditions of boudoir photography. Then, my derriere suitably exposed to his basement studio — the most revealing shot of our session — and he had arranged my hips just so, and coached me on the appropriate pin up "surprised" face, ArtPorn resumed with the flash bulbs.Read more »

It is an understatement to say that the work of Matthew Barney elicits strong reactions. Critics have alternately hailed him as "the most important American artist of his generation" (that's the New York Times' Michael Kimmelman) and complained of his art's Wagnerian grandiosity, needless inscrutability, pretentiousness, and icy perfection ("loveless" was one of the words the San Francisco Chronicle's Kenneth Baker used to describe "Drawing Restraint 9," Barney's 2006 show at SFMOMA).Read more »