Clark Buckner

Background

About Clark Buckner

Clark Buckner is an avant-garde cultural producer with more than twenty-years of professional experience: curating exhibitions and screenings; producing film, video, and VR projects; publishing books and articles; advising collectors; and teaching courses on art, philosophy, film, video, and cultural criticism in higher ed. He currently serves as Director of Telematic Media Arts in San Francisco's SoMa District, where he focuses specifically on time-based arts, screen culture, and art’s intersection with technology. His recent curatorial and production projects include: When Dreams Are Realty, A quadraphonic sound-art installation by leading Indigenous-American artist, Cristobal Martinez; The Friend, a nine-channel video installation by second-generation video artist John Sanborn, featuring actor John Cameron Mitchell; and The Archive to Come, a large group show of time-based works by more than 50 international artists, co-curated w/ new media powerhouse Carla Gannis in response to Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, and the crisis of the republic. Over the last year or so, he has contributed in diverse capacities to exhibitions, screenings, and events at ONX Studio (Onassis Foundation and New Inc, New York), Perez Art Museum (Miami), Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation (SF), Videoformes (Clermont-Ferrand), and ZKM (Karlsruhe). Along with perennial catalog essays - on Carla Gannis, Peter Burr, Orphan Drift, and Contemporary Chinese Video Art, among others - his publications on art, philosophy, film, video, and curatorial practice include Apropos of Nothing: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Coen Brothers (SUNY U.P.), and the co-authored collection Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy After the Death of God (Fordham, U.P.), as well as articles in Afterimage; Art Journal; Culture, Theory, Critique; Art Review; Bomb Magazine; NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; and SFMoMA’s Open Space. For many years, he taught art history, philosophy, and cultural criticism in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Before that, he taught in the Philosophy Departments at Mills College and UC Santa Cruz. He co-founded The Blue Studio, an arts community and workspace; and he served as Director/Curator of the project space, Mission 17. He composes sound scores for the dance company, Jennifer Perfilio / Movement Works, and has a PhD in Continental Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Critical Theory from Vanderbilt University.