“In being related, it is given meaning, partly because everything in it is related, one thing to another – it becomes coherent, it is given form.”

Multiple ways of telling the same story, or, multiple stories told by use of the same symbols. Divergent narratives and parallel readings. All this is danced around here with the aim of inviting correspondences, sharing in some always-emergent sense of the uncanny. Featuring the voices and work of: John Berger and Susan Sontag, Audra Wolowiec, John Balance, Music Research Strategies (Marshall Trammell), A-Y/dancers, Arundhati Roy, James Baldwin, and KMRU. Episode title is taken from John Berger’s conversation with Susan Sontag which is sampled at length.

–Mark Trecka

Correspondences as Shelter, Ep.1

“In the middle of this vision of imprisonmentand liberation I could not stop wondering whether it was a ruin or a buildingin the process of construction that I had entered. Both ideas were right in away at the time … “ 

 My friend Andrew Furse and I saw PeterSempel’s film about Kazuo Ohno at the Goethe Institute in Chicago in 2015. Inthat film, Ohno dances on the roof of a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan,gesturing at the World Trade Center as though in abject horror. What is heremembering? Here, the similarities between ruin and construction, Ohno’srejection of technique, and the ghosts of all this are considered, with the aimof arousing or highlighting correspondences. Featuring the voices and work ofKazuo Ohno, Pillars and Tongues, Tony Conrad (performing an improvised scorefor Piero Heliczar’s Joan of Arc),Wadada Leo Smith / Douglas R. Ewert / Mike Reed, Genesis P-Orridge, ArundhatiRoy, and Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln. Episode title is taken from W.G. Sebald’sAusterlitz. 

–Mark Trecka

Correspondences as Shelter, Ep.2

“We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.” 

Dreaming – and related concerns – engaged here with the aim of arousing or highlighting correspondences, forever courting the uncanny. Featuring the voices and work of: Jackie Wang and Assata Shakur, John Berger and Susan Sontag, John Cage and Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Hildegard Westerkamp, Susan Alcorn / Joe McPhee / Ken Vandermark, Midori Takada and Masahiko Satoh, and Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird. Further exploration: the dream lives of incarcerated people, as per my ongoing conversation with La Meik at Eastern Correctional Facility. Episode titls is taken from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

–Mark Trecka

Correspondences as Shelter, Ep.3

Broken Boxes- On Collecting Records, Interview with DJ Inti (2014 Rebroadcast) 

Rebroadcast of a 2014 interview with Oakland based record collector DJ Inti. This was the first Interview I ever produced through the platform Broken Boxes and speaks to my relationship to place regarding living in Santa Barbara and the Bay Area after leaving Hawai’i. 

“In this episode, I talk with DJ INTI. Inti is currently living and Dj’ing in Oakland, CA. He has been working in music stores and collecting records for over 25 years. His connection with music is consuming, in the way all artists must obsessively process life through their chosen art discipline. Inti’s medium is music, specifically, but not limited to vinyl. We begin the conversation by talking about the beginning, Inti’s connection points to music throughout his life, the places and people that inspired him to love music. This is not just an interview, but a collection of stories, insights, and inspirations as seen through the eyes of a DJ, record collector and one of my dearest friends.”

Broken Boxes, Ep.10

Movable, Long Commutes Between Loved Ones, Music For Motors and Resonant Strings 

Movable is scored for pianoforte in a unique just intonation/equal temperament hybrid tuning and employs a new mechanical extension we like to call the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings.

–Zachary James Watkins

A Watkins Retrospective, Ep.7

Faith Wilding, Waiting With (2007)

Music for Maraming by Loren Kiyoshi Dempster

Created by Angela Hennessy, this audio guide gives visitors to SFMOMA an alternative means of navigating the institution. Intervening into the traditional museum space, it directs visitors to works of Black Abstraction, landscape, and portraiture in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, offering insights and new perspectives.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and co-founder of See Black Womxn. Hennessy’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, The New Yorker, and Surface Design Journal. She has had recent exhibitions at SOMARTs, MoAD, Pt. 2 Gallery, and SoEx.

This is the ninth program in our year-long season dedicated to thinking about our contemporary moment through the lens of Lorraine O’Grady's work. Special thanks to Wattis curatorial fellow Meghan Smith for her work on this project.

Image credit: Zanele Muholi, "Phaphama, at Cassilhaus, North Carolina," from the series "Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness)," 2016; collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; ©Zanele Muholi; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

...An Audio Guide to Black Abstraction, Landscape, and Portraiture at SFMOMA by Angela Hennessy

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part 1 surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part 1 Audio Tour

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part II surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part II Audio Tour

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part III surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part III Audio Tour

Francesco Pedraglio (1981) uses storytelling as a tool for decoding intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. He explores how the
acts of narrating and staging shape the relationship between teller and listener,
revealing the fantasies and fictions that make up our reality. As part of his ongoing
Autobiography of a Museum series, Pedraglio composes a narrative from the perspective of the Wattis. Told through a set of staff keys—from office and storage keys
to the curator’s house key—Pedraglio scratches their silhouettes into the museum’s
walls, exposing layers of sheetrock and paint from previous exhibitions. A graffiti of
sorts, this quiet intervention leaves a speculative trace of those who move through the
institution: staff, artists, and the public. Here, buried memories, invisible routines,
and idle fictions accumulate in the museum’s unconscious.

Francesco Pedraglio: "Autobiography of a Museum" Performance

The writer and theorist Fred Moten's lecture on Ralp Ellison's "Invisible Man" (1952) and the concept of invisibility in David Hammons' work.
This was the ninth event in our year-long season about and around the work of David Hammons, that took place at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts on March 10th, 2017.

Fred Moten on "Invisible Man" - David Hammons Research Institute

"I’m against it." (The Ramones, Road to Ruin, 1978)

Punk is dead, long live punk. In his book The No Texts, the painter Steven Parrino wrote about the ruthless pursuit of freedom via destruction. He tried to save painting by blacking it out, by canceling its image. He saw the job of the artist as that of being an exposed nerve—a mirror to a world that has become the site of endless distortions. FTW.

The philosopher Andrew Culp extends that anarchism into politics: the lesson to be drawn is that negation is finding a way to say “no” to those who tell us to take the world as it is. Today, he tells us, that world is dominated by communication, connection, transmission, and translation. And those who determine how that works and who that benefits are committing acts of violence and information warfare. The only way to fight them is not to contradict or even to accelerate, but to contaminate and interrupt. Creation and destruction go hand in hand—it all depends on what side you’re on.

In this lecture, Culp uses Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger’s 1969 Dziga Vertov Group agitprop film British Sounds (aka See You at Mao) as a way to think about what agitprop might look like today. Would it be enough to replace the film’s famous 10-minute tracking shot of an automobile assembly line with a similar shot at an Amazon Fulfillment Center? Or maybe the whole repertoire of jump cuts, didactic monologue, and striking color are no longer techniques of agitation in our world of pervasive advertising, informatized production, sprawling commodity chains, increasingly-synthetic life, and digital communication networks. If so, how far must we go to maintain an avant-garde orientation toward the present?

Andrew Culp teaches Media History and Theory at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. His most recent book is Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Andrew Culp on Aesthetics of Refusal

Some of you, especially those of you who don't live in San Francisco, might not be familiar with the work of Dodie Bellamy.

She's a novelist, poet, and essayist who has been living and working here since the late 1970s, and has become a central member of the Bay Area’s avant-garde literary scene. She's interested in sex, death, and literature. Her material is language and narrative, which she twists and bends around different truths and untruths.

In her mind, a good essay always embarrasses its author, a bit.

Andrew Durbin, himself a poet and novelist, is an avid reader of Bellamy's work, along with the work of other writers from the New Narrative movement of the 1970s and 80s. Like them, he sees autobiography as something to use, but also to subvert, pervert, and perform. 

Durbin launches our 5th year-long research season with a new lecture on the writer Dodie Bellamy, giving an overview and sharing his perspective on her work and her words.

Andrew Durbin is an American poet and novelist, and currently serves as Senior Editor for the Americas at Frieze Magazine. With Ben Fama and Trisha Low, he co-founded Wonder and published books, pamphlets, and limited edition art prints from writers and artists such as Juliana Huxtable, Ariana Reines, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Nighboat Books published Mature Themes (2014), his collection of poems, and MacArthur Park (2017), his first full-length novel. 


This is the first event in our year-long season dedicated to the questions posed by the work of Dodie Bellamy and how they address art, culture, and society today.

Andrew Durbin on Dodie Bellamy

Lydia Ourahmane in conversation with Anthony Huberman

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art. It was founded in 1998, at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

The Wattis Institute is a place for showing art and for thinking about art. We spend time with artists and pay close attention to their ideas.

We like to work with one artist at a time—one artist presents an exhibition in the gallery, one artist stays in the apartment on a residency, and one artist is the subject of a year-long research initiative. 

The Wattis Institute is a headquarters for contemporary art for everyone in the Bay Area, and runs an active event space (featuring an artist-designed bar) for discussions, performances, screenings, artworks, and drinks.

Popular tracks by CCA Wattis Institute