Open Studios: Part Two

Clark Buckner is one of the major lessors for the Mission 17 space, and is a very interesting character. I met him about three years ago off of Craigslist when he was looking for help in scanning Polaroids at high resolution so he could blow them up and have fabulous Gerhard Richter blurry, arty color photos. They're actually quite good, and I'm still waiting to see his 20-foot naked dude collage (Hockney-style) which is a masterpiece.



At the moment, when he's not a philosophy professor at Mills College and running the galleries, he's doing video, multimedia, whatever art. Today he was projecting a conceptual slide show of scans from the mercenary "Soldier of Fortune" magazine with their pictures of Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell and homoerotica combat, along with scans from from military fetish magazines with hardcore gay porn images.



Clark, by the way, from everything I've been able to gather, is completely heterosexual. He's even recently married a genuinely likeable woman.



As somebody said at the Lone Star Saloon later, "Well, that's progressive, I guess." As the tiny sign noted on the doorway of Clark's studio, this "was not for family viewing" and I hope you haven't been fired for looking at it on the job.



Clark was talking with his next-door studio mate, Vogt (pictured), who was explaining what his artwork was trying to do.



He was using wood to create sculptures that looked intentionally like 2D drawings of 3D figures.



Now he was also starting to play with 3D/2D with porticos.



The above was a favorite...



...but I liked them all.



Sharing the studio with Vogt was Sarah Smith (pictured above).



She had a scraggly, wonderful set of drawings on the wall.



But what was great was her monumental wood sculpture that looked designed to upstage her romantic friend's pieces. Actually, they were quite complementary, the difference between men's and women's shapes/forms never quite so well delineated.