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Visual Art

Group think

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arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL “Calder to Warhol,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s giant introductory survey of the Fisher collection, isn’t the only big summer show happening right now. With its wanted poster-style flyer design and a menacing title that could have come from a hardboiled paperback, “They Knew What They Wanted” is an exquisite corpse of a group show, pieced together and then strewn across town by four artists at four different galleries: Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel, Robert Bechtle at John Berggruen, Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery, and Jordan Kantor at Ratio 3.

Allusions to criminality aside, the artists/curators of “They Knew What They Wanted” would more likely be found on the forensics team than the wrong side of the law. All are steely observers whose art could broadly be said to share a focus on the dynamics of surveillance at work within postwar portrait and landscape photography, particularly photography that looked at what was booming outside of America’s urban centers. Although Grannan is the sole photographer in the group, Ebner’s temporary installations of handmade signage placed in public settings — which she then photographs in black and white — and Bechtle and Kantor’s photo-based oil paintings also fall under the sign of the photography.

It’s not surprising then that multiple pieces by each of the curators can be found across all four galleries, as well as certain names (Lee Friedlander, Miriam Böhm, Trevor Paglen, and Ed Ruscha in particular) whose work shares an aesthetic affinity with that of the curators. This form of cross-gallery display gives “They Knew What They Wanted” a cohesion that is often rare in group shows, while still not being so insular as to make it hard to differentiate each artist-curator’s own aesthetic sense.

Bechtle’s selections offer the least surprises, summoning the same post-1960s Western suburban milieu evoked by his photorealistic paintings of driveway-bound vintage cars. After a few rounds of viewing, though, Robert Adams’ vintage snaps of Colorado ‘burbs, Friedlander’s skewed takes on small town architecture, Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ aquatint etchings of backyard swimmers, and Tom McKinley’s oils of cool modernist interiors start to add up to the visual equivalent of tract housing.

Ebner and Kantor’s picks are more interior-minded than the mainly street-level and exterior scenes crowding John Berggruen. They also veer the furthest from each artist’s own work. For example, Sol LeWitt’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it painted electrical wall plate at Altman Siegel is just a few Home Depot aisles away from Rachel Whiteread’s stainless steel castings of light switches over at Ratio 3. Back at Altman Siegel, Fletcher Benton’s 1983 bronze tennis racket, “Adjustable Racket for Short Heavy Hitters,” leans dejectedly in a corner, in wait for a yard sale that will never come. Grannan’s grab bag at Fraenkel is the most photo-heavy, and her selection ventures furthest — with mixed success — from the thematic territory staked out by Bechtle, Ebner, and Kantor.

In a way, Ebner, Bechtle, Grannan, and Kantor have beat SFMOMA to the punch. The museum is set to restage the landmark 1975 photography exhibit “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” — which presented dispassionate documentation of parking lots, construction sites, and other forms of ex-urban development — at the end of the month. But for a sustained exploration of the meteor-like impact of “New Topographics” on the photography and painting that followed in its wake, one couldn’t ask for a better art historical crash-course than “They Knew What They Wanted.” *

 

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED

Through July 31, free

John Berggruen Gallery

228 Grant, SF

(415) 781-4629

www.berggruen.com

Through Aug. 7, free

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

Through Aug. 13, free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

Through Aug. 21, free

Fraenkel Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 981-2661

www.fraenkelgallery.com

Dizzy dazzle

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arts@sfbg.com

ART Let’s start with the obvious: the massive art collection of Gap Inc. founders Doris and the late Don Fisher is by far one of the largest and most significant windfalls SFMOMA has received in its 75-year history. More important, the collection — which had primarily been viewable throughout the Gap’s SF headquarters only by company employees and visiting tour groups — is finally being made accessible to the general public.

Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, has selected 160 works — a mere fraction of the 1,100 total — for “Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection,” a Fishers’ Greatest Hits that aims to provide an overview of the breadth of their holdings as well as highlight their in-depth focus on certain artists. During the exhibits media preview, Garrels mentioned that the Fishers acquired pieces without the help of advisers, jointly choosing works that “spoke to them.” Clearly, they had a taste for big game.

Primarily comprising paintings and sculpture, “Calder to Warhol” is, as its title indicates, a veritable who’s who of mid-to-late 20th century modern art that takes over the museum’s top two floors and spills out into the rooftop sculpture garden. I’m not being facetious when I say there’s something for everyone. Aside from extensive collections of Calder and Warhol, the show is chockablock with iconic pieces by Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close … and the list goes on.

The range of artists and quality of the pieces assembled is dizzying. Take the fourth floor, for instance. The shock of several hideous, large-scale mixed media on aluminum DayGlo monstrosities by Frank Stella from the late 1970s and ’80s is largely soothed by the blushing, meaty pinks and reds of The Street, a remarkable 1956 Philip Guston abstract canvas in an adjoining gallery (Guston gets an additional gallery all to himself), which then leads to the downy embrace of Lee Krasner’s equally stunning 1961 oil Polar Stampede — a palimpsest of brown and gold hatch-marked feathers — and from there a gallery of four decades of Twombly’s looped scribbles.

Then there’s the small collection of Agnes Martin paintings, which by itself would be worth the price of admission. Martin is an artist who particularly suffers in reproduction: the delicate lines and gentle washes of color in her paintings get lost, and all one sees are their grid-like skeletons. Being able to study up close the subtle pop effect of the squares in Night Sea (1963) — the way in which the gold leaf underneath the oil causes the canvas’ tiny bluish squares to flash teal — is a revelation.

Or, starting from the floor’s north end, one encounters a crash course in Pop Art and its kin. The Lichtensteins and the Claes Oldenburg apple core are all well and good, but the Warhols are where it’s at: standouts are early 1960s silkscreens such as Tunafish Disaster and two of the handsome criminals in the “Most Wanted Men” series, and lesser-famous portraits of Joseph Beuys and Robert Mapplethorpe alongside Dolly and Jackie’s familiar visages. These aren’t the usual Factory hits.

Around another corner, past a room crowded with Close portraits, is another must-see: two enormous Sigmar Polke canvases from his alchemical 1988 series, “The Spirits That Lend Strength to the Invisible,” on which the German artist applied unconventional materials such as tellurium, chemical resin, and ground-up meteors. Their wild, particulate sprays evoke both the Hubble Telescope’s images of space, as well as the crude plumes currently floating off the Gulf Coast.

And I haven’t even started in on the fifth floor, with its showcases of Important Works by Calder, Kelly, Serra, Kiefer, Richter, and some particularly wonderful Lewitt wall drawings.

Yes, “Calder to Warhol” is dizzying. It is also frequently dazzling. But I can’t help but feel a little squeamish in the face of such a grand and copious cache; one that until recently had been displayed as an act of corporate largesse to those in the service of the empire that funded its acquisition.

Art collecting is a form of investment, capital put down toward ensuring the collector’s future legacy as much as it is a reflection of aesthetic tastes. The Fishers rarely sold pieces, and the equal attention they paid to collecting both figurative and abstract works — as well as an earlier failed bid to construct a private museum in the Presidio — suggests that the collection was developed increasingly with an eye toward creating the very sort of jaw-dropping endowment of which SFMOMA now finds itself the very fortunate recipient.

Certainly for SFMOMA, the benefits of this gift are clear. The museum’s profile has undoubtedly risen, and will continue to rise once the planned expansion set to house the remaining 90 percent of the collection’s holdings is complete. What remains less apparent throughout “Calder to Warhol” is a sense of the Fishers’ personal investment in the pieces they so assiduously acquired. To simply say that the art — so much amazing work, now finally on view — speaks for itself is only half true. As with any major private collection, it also speaks to a long campaign waged over the peaks and valleys of the art market.

Still, the Fishers aren’t merely the sum of their deep pockets. I wish the wall panels revealed when each piece had been bought, and whether Don or Doris had singled it out first (Imagine their dinner conversations: “Honey, would you like to buy a Dan Flavin?”). That information would put a different, perhaps more humanizing, spin on the story “Calder to Warhol” currently tells: a testament to the Fishers’ wide-reaching, frequently well-informed, and relatively safe taste for blue chip names.

CALDER TO WARHOL: INTRODUCING THE FISHER COLLECTION

Through Sept. 19, $9–$15

(children under 12 free; first Tuesday of every month free)

SFMOMA

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Free art school

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Yes, it is summer. And yes, you look great in your tankini chewing ice cream and leathering your face. I am aware that school is out of session and out of fashion. And I know the institutional dinosaurs in tweed make you sneeze. But school is cool again — or at least it’s not as stale and stubborn as it once was.

I’m referring to experimental art schools, or “artist-initiated schools.” Their history lies in previous alternative art education models like the Bauhaus school or Black Mountain College, which served to explore other, more inventive ways of teaching and creating. Current models are everywhere. Coupled with the reach of today’s technologies they’ve grown into nebulous networks that spread like rhizomes in response to (or refusal of) what’s been called “a crisis in contemporary art education.”

Two recently published books address the height of this concern and the new shifts occurring within art education: Rethinking the Contemporary Art School (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 234 pages, $25) and Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (MIT Press, 268 pages, $30). To get a grasp of how this has affected the Bay Area, I met with independent curator Joseph del Pesco to discuss some of the history and impetuses of these schools locally, including one of his own.

Pointing to Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius as a precursor, and his edict-turned-trope “art cannot be taught,” del Pesco says artist-initiated schools begin with “the idea that artists need an informal education,” which includes “informal spaces” away from art world market pressures and “collectors who cop the studios of the best MFA programs.”

These informal spaces might take shape in a proper building or institution, but they’re also known to saunter in the streets, rub elbows in Chinatown bars, and wander nomadically from site to site. The loose, open structure of these spaces is meant to compliment and encourage the artist as autodidactic, self-orienting, and adaptive. This as opposed to the more conventional learning institutions that structure education through rigid class times, grades, diplomas, and linear teacher-to-student pedagogy.

Regarding local experimental school models, del Pesco cites the Independent School of Art as “the most important example in the Bay Area.” “ISA was run on a barter-based tuition system and you basically got a free education from Jon Rubin [ISA’s initiator], who was teaching at CCA and SFAI at the time.” Although the school only ran for two years (2004–06, at which point Rubin took a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University), del Pesco emphasizes ISA’s ability to function completely untethered as a nomadic network of artists who successfully organized projects and events. ISA’s endeavors included black market auctions where students made and sold forgeries of famous art works, then used the money to fund more ISA projects.

Del Pesco’s own “experimental school-without-walls,” Pickpocket Almanack, is slightly less ambitious in its approach. Instead, this “school” (del Pesco is highly reluctant to use this term and insists on its metaphorical value to dismiss any anxieties it might harbor) functions more as an “algorithmic calendar.”

“I think some of the most interesting things we have here in the Bay Area are the public programs. The lectures, the panel discussions, the screenings — those are our creative strengths,” del Pesco says. “And part of Pickpocket Almanack — part of its impetus — was to take advantage of that.”

Just as the name implies — “stolen calendar” (the “k” added as a nod to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack) — Pickpocket Almanack “steals” from the slew of free public programs offered by the Bay Area’s art institutions and organizes the best into individual courses via the prowess of an appointed team of “experts” or faculty. The faculty involved in Pickpocket’s spring 2010 season ran a wide gamut: Claudia Altman-Siegel, owner and director of Altman Siegel Gallery; Jim Fairchild, Modest Mouse guitarist; Amy Franceschini, artist and member of the Futurefarmers collective who organized Playshop, another Bay Area artist-initiated school; Renny Pritikin, curator and codirector during one of the best eras of the now defunct alternative space New Langton Arts; and Jerome Waag, artist and chef involved in the experimental restaurant collaborative OPENrestaraunt.

Partnered with SFMOMA, one might suspect Pickpocket Almanack’s “experimental” claim to be somewhat compromised. Although this relationship might carry with it a few bureaucratic implications, del Pesco assured me that Pickpocket’s faculty isn’t expected to include any of the museum’s events into its courses. If anything the pairing provides a consolation prize for Pickpocket’s participants (“students” is another term del Pesco avoids): an SFMOMA ID card that allows free access to any public program.

“It’s kind of like a gesture that makes the material real in some way,” del Pesco says. Since Pickpocket’s participants sign up through the website and discuss events primarily through e-mail, an initial launch event and final wrap-up meeting have also been incorporated to give some semblance of actual participation. But there’s no set structure. Some faculty have organized events outside of the course calendar, among them Fairchild, who facilitated a conversation with musician John Vanderslice.

While participating, as in any community setting, there’s always a fear of lame ducks. The misanthropic can technically remain anonymous throughout the course. “But there’s some incentive to actually meet each other to make it not a community but a kind of informal network of relationships,” del Pesco says. He likes to think of Pickpocket as “a special encounter with knowledge, where you don’t have the weight of school and education and a degree and grades and all that other shit. It’s self-guided; it’s social; it’s about the relationship between you, the people in the course, and the faculty — the informal production of knowledge and making visible certain events going on in the Bay Area.”

Pickpocket’s next season begins in September. So you have plenty of time to get dumb in the sun. 

www.pickpocketalmanack.org

The people’s court

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arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL Amanda Curreri wants you. Like the open-ended phrasing of its title, "Occupy the Empty," Curreri’s second solo show at Ping Pong Gallery is both a basic statement of what an artist does within an exhibition space and a call to action soliciting the viewer to step in, step up, and take a stand. Or perhaps the phrase should be "take the stand," since, as the artist explained to me during a recent gallery visit, the arrangement of the installation’s components roughly mirrors the layout of a courtroom.

A heavy wooden bench sits to the right of the gallery entrance, evoking where the witnesses, lawyers, and spectators sit; leaning against the wall to the right is the "jury box," two long panels silk-screened with six life-size images of chairs apiece; a sculpture in the gallery’s center, which looks like a segment of the kind of pearl necklace both Jackie O and a porn actress would wear, becomes the balustrade that typically separates the actors from the observers in legal proceedings.

On the wall opposite the bench hangs a canvas covered in carefully painted grayscale rectangles — an abstract approximation of TV static — that’s next to a TV set elevated on a stool off of which hangs a compilation of last words of various famous figures (it’s hard to top Karl Marx’s final trump card: "Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough"). This is what Curreri refers to as the "power spot" in the room, "either where the judge would go or where the witness stand would be."

Our conversation is occurring after I’ve just "stepped down" from being videotaped by Curreri, and her telling collapse of the judge’s bench and the jury box sums up my experience: I wasn’t really under oath, but I wanted to be true to myself, since my act of testifying and its record are now part of "Occupy the Empty." She’s been asking people who come by the show to sign up and share their thoughts on the subject of last words. On July 9th, just before the exhibit closes, these conversations will be played back on the TV set, which until then has remained off.

Curreri started formulating "Occupy the Empty" last year after participating in a court hearing in Massachusetts concerning her late father. It turns out this was the same courthouse in which Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in the early 20th century. Curreri, also of Italian-American descent, started thinking about the judicial system as a kind of democratic theater in which one’s mandatory performance carries incredibly high stakes — including, as with Sacco and Vanzetti and thousands of other tragic cases, death.

"I wanted to bring some gravity into what we do as artists," Curreri explains, reflecting on the stakes of participation in her art. "I really value the way people put their lives together and present themselves. So I wanted a work that would necessitate some commitment on the viewers’ part."

When Curreri starts remembering the conversation she had with her father on his deathbed, I think of the collage hanging on the wall opposite the silk-screened jury box, in which Curreri has surrounded a copy of the moving letter Sacco wrote to his son on the eve of his execution with childhood photos of her and her dad. This fusion of the personal with the historic is simultaneously touching and troubling (Sacco’s words are not those of Curreri’s father, even though the two men are aligned graphically), but it is rooted in the common impulse to ground our present by finding solace in the past. Last words are comforting in this regard. They are epigrammatic reminders that we will have our say.

At its core, "Occupy the Empty" is about just that: having a say. Or as Curreri phrases it: "I’m asking people to stand in a moment of silence and occupy it and project."

MORE FAMILY MATTERS


"3+3," a group show of local marquee names at Haines Gallery, contains a lot of eye candy. Shaun O’Dell’s delicate ink-on-paper exercises in moiré pattern interference and Leslie Shows’ graphic reconfiguration of a brush-painted Chinese landscape scroll via cut-out comics and Benday dot sprays are particularly lovely stations in this curatorial relay: Haines selected O’Dell along with Kota Ezawa and Darren WatersTon, who in turn chose Emily Prince, Taha Belal, and Shows, respectively.

Prince’s contribution stands out because the beauty of its craft comments on the nature and history of its craft. In two identical wooden square frames hang what appear to be identical lace doilies, although the one of the right seems more brittle and aged. Closer inspection reveals that the second doily is in fact a to-scale, scanned, and intricately cut-out paper replica of the one on the left, which the wall card indicates was crocheted by the artist’s grandmother. Prince’s handiwork is no less delicate — or "auratic" for that matter — than that of her grandmother’s, and this tribute to "women’s work" is no less genuine for containing a facsimile.

If you want to have a conversation about the place of craft within fine art, you’re first going to have to navigate through these two skeins.

OCCUPY THE EMPTY

Through July 10, free

"Last Words" viewing party July 9 , 7–9 p.m.

Ping Pong Gallery

1240 22nd St, SF

(415) 550-7483

www.pingponggallery.com

3+3

Through July 10, free

Haines Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 397-8114

Dear John

1

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL What does it mean to call John Waters’ art “bad”? The question is hard to shake while surveying “Rush,” the filmmaker and part-time San Francisco resident’s fourth show at Rena Bransten Gallery. It’s tricky with Waters, whose creative practice has always exulted in its bad taste. He would probably respond to my query with a knowing smile.

Time has certainly been on his side. What was once reviled someday becomes celebrated, and so even Waters’ most extreme examples of cinematic filth are now part of the cultural canon. In his post-Hairspray crossover years, Waters has settled into the role of practiced raconteur, having whittled his biographical anecdotes and wry observations into a recombinant set of talking points.

This stand-up-like approach has informed his visual art as well. Waters’ early stabs at photography — horizontally grouped freeze-frames from Hollywood classics, obscure gems, and gay porn, all shot from the television screen — riffed on the innate humor of their subjects, further underscoring the awkwardness of each pause through canny juxtaposition.

The photo-collages in “Rush” are more aggressively puerile. Less documents of the chance encounter between a TV set and a camera, they offer up a series of crudely Photoshopped one-liners: a bevy of Hollywood royalty are given hairlips; Charlton Heston as Moses holds a can of soda; Audrey Hepburn’s swan-like neck is covered in monstrous hickeys.

The sharper collages — like the series of characters lying in state — elicit a chuckle. The dumber ones recall in their approach Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Gottfried Helnwein’s frequently copied, cheesy Hollywood riff on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Again, I sense Waters would be just as proud having his work compared to Helnwein’s as he would to his more obvious precedents in business and in art: Koons and Warhol.

Instead of cardboard Brillo boxes, Waters — or, one presumes, a workshop — has fabricated bigger-than-life versions of an ant trap, a spilled bottle of Rush-brand “liquid incense” (from which the show takes its name), and a tub of the exorbitantly priced facial cream La Mer. There’s also an Ike Turner doll, posed on bended knee, holding a smaller marionette of Tina Turner, called “Control.”.

The sculptures are by far the smartest works in the show — gaudy, oversized lawn ornaments to hucksterism, the fleeting nature of pleasure, and the futile postponement of time’s onward creep through conspicuous consumption. In short, they are monuments to the follies and vanities of the art world itself, which, judging by the show’s price list, is willing to pay top dollar for a spanking from John Waters.

For those of us who are simply content with our dog-eared copies of Shock Value and our Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living DVDs, “Rush” is too often like that overturned bottle of poppers: all flash but no high.

 

TRASH HUMPING

While in 77 Geary, head over to Marx & Zavattero for a different but no less trashy example of queer sensibility. James Gobel’s yarn, felt, and acrylic paintings construct a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp for bears in which hirsute and chubby fanboys do their best Jem impressions in truly outrageous color combinations. More interesting are Gobel’s “couture beanbags,” whose doughy amorphousness and “designer” plaid covers evoke the physicality and dress of his painted subjects in a far more tactile manner that’s as inviting as it is unsettling. Gobel understands that with subcultures, as with lovers, snuggling can sometimes turn to smothering.

RUSH

Through July 10, free

Rena Bransten

77 Geary, SF

(415) 982-3292

www.renabranstengallery.com

I GET WHAT I WANT, & ALWAYS GET IT AGAIN!

Through July 17, free

Marx & Zavattero

77 Geary, SF

(415) 627-9111

www.marxzav.com

Whirl trade center

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arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART In 2005, then-struggling Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou presented “Arts, Beats and Lyrics” at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The oversize paintings were blinged-out-mack-daddy-baller self-portraits showing the artist on the covers of well-known and respected magazines. Within two years, his work had been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including Art In America, Harper’s, NY Arts, Mass Appeal, and The Fader. The sheer voodoo of this act makes Pecou a formidable creative force, and coupled with his knack for spectacle, his opening at Shooting Gallery this month is rumored to be the most vainglorious of the season. I caught up with him recently on the phone.

SFBG I’m amazed by your earlier work because it seems to me that you used sympathetic magic to approach fame. You placed yourself within the context of celebrity and became a celebrity. Was that your original intention?

Fahamu Pecou It’s funny. It was kind of like the law of attraction. You can write your own narrative by believing in the messages you put out. I started doing this marketing campaign because I was frustrated with the way my career was going at the time. I really just wanted to get my name out there. Just my name. I wanted to make sure that when my name came across the desk of curator or gallery owner, they’d say, “I’ve seen this name before, maybe I should learn more about this person.” It was really sort of a joke. As it started to grow and people began to talk about it, it took on a life of its own.

SFBG Did you anticipate that it would go beyond Atlanta and become international?

FP No. It was just a clever, catchy inside joke among me and my friends. The minute I started putting out stickers and posters that said “Fahamu Pecou Is The Shit,” it was a hit. People were jumping on it. It was good that it happened that way because it allowed me to grow with it. Whether I can directly relate it to a specific style, I’ll leave that for people to write about.

SFBG Why did you call your latest show “Whirl Trade”?

FP The theme came from the idea of cultural exchanges between Africans on the continent of Africa and the rest of the African diaspora around the world, and how a lot can be lost and misconstrued when taken out of the original cultural context. We look back and forth at each other, and we do what we think is our best impression of “the other.” It comes out a twisted up and strange simulation.

I was in South Africa for residency on the Eastern Cape and spent some time in Capetown. I had a friend from Detroit with me, and a few friends from Capetown. We were coming out a restaurant and this homeless guy heard me and my homeboy talking. He said, “You guys are from America? You guys are the real niggas.”

We were both like, “Naw man, we aren’t niggers, we’re brothers.” And he said, “No. No, you guys are niggas, and I want to be a nigga too.” He was going on and on about how being a nigga was a good thing, not like these guys who come in from Nigeria and other places thinking they’re real niggas. We were the real deal. And here we are, trying to explain to him how being a nigga is not a good thing. Nobody wants to be a nigga. My Capetown friends were telling me that being a nigga is not a bad thing anymore. I started wondering, where did this come from? That’s what “Whirl Trade” is about: the cultural export of hip-hop culture and the impact it has on the rest of the world. We have this great stage, this platform, where we have the ear of the world. What are we saying? A lot of what’s being said and heard is a lot of nothing, especially when taken out of cultural context.

The response has been great and has sparked a lot of conversation around how we view ourselves and each other. What kind of impression we are making of ourselves to other cultures and, deeper still, what kind of impression do I have about African culture through this same context and my own experience? I couldn’t ask one question without asking the other. I try to be cautious about this in my work. I’m not trying to accuse or ridicule any group so much as begin to ask questions and start a dialogue between groups who think they know each other but don’t.

SFBG You do performances at your gallery shows. Costumes and everything. How does fashion play into your work?

FP In the beginning, it was more about capturing fashion that reflected a whole lifestyle. I patterned it after 50 Cent, who was the catalyst for my whole campaign. I was watching how he was packaged and wondering why a visual artist was never marketed that way. My whole fashion was based on that and Puff Daddy. Then I added my own touches with ascots and blazers and stuff like that.

With “Whirl Trade,” I’m looking at contemporary African fashion. Right now, African street fashion is a mashup of textiles and patterns, colors that almost seem disparate but come together beautifully. That and photographs of Malik Sadibe inspired me to bring in many different patterns and contrasts. It wasn’t that I was trying to copy a style as much as capture the cultural exchange between what Africans think African Americans dress like, and what African Americans think Africans dress like.

SFBG Though you reference hip-hop, I don’t really see you as a hip-hop artist. I sense a cynicism in your approach. Are you disillusioned with hip-hop?

FP I just found myself not so connected to what was being presented in early 2000s. A lot of media-made hip-hop stars came out. It stopped being so much about talent as it was marketing. It became about who was willing to come out and say they sold these drugs or did this killing. At one point that was legitimate, rappers came from the street, but then came these media guys who just said that shit to be famous, just for credibility and that’s what started hurting the integrity of the form.

It stopped being how fresh, how clever or how innovative an artist could be. It became how violent, how misogynistic, how violent a person could be. Extremes of everything — people ended being blaxploitation characters.

I’m talking about that in my next work, called “Hard To Death” — about the evolution of black manhood, and how there’s a lack of visual representation of that evolution beyond a certain point. Most of the images we see are reflections of hip-hop culture, which captures the black male between the ages of 18-25, just when many young men are working things out. It has become one of the only representations of black masculinity, which is very frustrating. My next piece is devoted to accurately portraying the evolution of black men. I’m seeing more established artists like Common and Jay-Z who have grown beyond that dangerous time.

Since my son was born, I’ve been really driven to addressing these issues around black masculinity and black manhood. I feel a sense of responsibility there because my work crosses the lines between popular culture and hip-hop culture, and I see that there’s a lack of responsible voices. My voice can work as a catalyst to start a conversation. I started a blog (passageofright.wordpress.com) to begin talking about creating systems for some kinds of rites of passage for young black boys. I didn’t grow up with a father or a whole lot of role models, so most of what I’ve learned about being a man is from the school of hard knocks. I want to prevent the continuation of that kind of awakening.

WHIRL TRADE: NEW WORKS BY FAHAMU PECOU

Reception Sat/12, 7–11 p.m.;

Through July 3

Shooting Gallery

839 Larkin, SF

(415) 931-1500

www.shootinggallerysf.com

www.fahamupecouart.com

100 photos in search of an exhibit

0

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL "Furthermore" implies that one is not quite finished. There is more elaboration to come, or another point entirely will be addressed. It signals that what the speaker may have fully thought through has not yet been fully stated.

"Furthermore" is also the title of Fraenkel Gallery’s 30th anniversary show, a wonderful assortment of odd ducks and singular sensations, canonized masters and anonymous geniuses. Or as gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel puts it in the intro to the exhibit’s catalog, these are, "scrappy, tenacious, unrelated photographs that want to become an exhibition."

Fraenkel’s anthropomorphic phrasing (they "want to become an exhibition") is appropriate since these pictures have new stories to tell. Many names and images are familiar (Arbus, Lange, Warhol, Levitt), while others, like the heartbreaking anonymous photograph of 1930s starlet Starr Faithful’s suicide note, aren’t. But none of these photographs are quite finished with what they have to tell us, especially when in proximity to each other.

The pictures are hung in clusters that bring out their thematic or formal affinities while simultaneously enhancing the singular qualities of each individual piece. In one of the first groupings, the scatological mechanics of Morton Schamberg’s 1917 Dada readymade God (this study is reputedly the only known photographic print of the piece in existence) are echoed in the tubular forms of Christian Marclay’s collage Double Tuba and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson’s 1867 albumen print of a pneumatic motor.

Nearby hangs a constellation of feminine self-presentation as masquerade, with Katy Grannan’s anonymous, windswept crone (2009); Ethyl Eichelberger in Peter Hujar’s elegiac 1983 portrait of the performer in Southern belle drag; and the Deco seductress in Andre Kertesz’s Satiric Dancer (1926) emerging as Norn-like sisters from across time and space.

The more abstract groupings are no less evocative, linking up formal experimentations (Mel Bochner’s cartographic Surface Dis/tension) to the serendipitous beauty of scientific documentation (the anonymous 1930 cyanotype of a radio transmission sent from the Eiffel Tower). Wonderful stuff.

FURTHERMORE …


Candy-coating sexual innuendo is an old trick in pop music (see 50 Cent, Madonna, etc.), but the sweets served up by John DeFazio and Leigha Mason at Meridian Gallery seduce precisely because they don’t want your loving. DeFazio’s baroque reliquaries for cultural figures and Mason’s fingernail and hair-laden resin candies are memento mori for youthful fantasies and heroes; roadside tchotchkes picked up from America’s death drive.

Keira Kotler’s monochromatic paintings, with their soothing shifts in luminosity and tone, are the visual equivalent of a drone: seemingly static planes that slowly reveal their depth and subtlety through prolonged exposure. The color fields in "Stillness," her new show at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, skew more Richter (specifically his 1991 painting Blood Red Mirror, currently hanging at SFMOMA) than Rothko, but their slickness diminishes none of their auratic pull.

Well tickle me proud: it’s June. Electric Works is showing its pride with "More Glitter — Less Bitter," a career retrospective of local legend Daniel Nicoletta. If queer life in this city is a cabaret, then Nicoletta has been its unofficial in-house photographer, snapping SF’s finest LGBT freaks since he was a 19-year-old employee at Harvey Milk’s Castro Street camera store. Sparkle, Danny, sparkle! *

FURTHERMORE

Through June 25, free

Fraenkel Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 981-2661

www.fraenkelgallery.com

THE CANDY STORE

June 3– July 24, free

Meridian Gallery

535 Powell, SF

(415) 398-6176

www.meridiangallery.org

KEIRA KOTLER: STILLNESS

June 4–July 24, free

Chandra Cerrito Contemporary

480 23rd St, Oakl.

(510) 260-7494

www.chandracerrito.com/ccc

DANIEL NICOLETTA: MORE GLITTER — LESS BITTER

June 4–July 10, free

Electric Works

130 Eighth St, SF

(415) 626-5496

www.sfelectricworks.com

Something is missing

1

Mama’s goin’ strong. Mama’s movin’ on. Mama’s all alone. Mama doesn’t care. Mama? Ma-ma-ma-mama? Mama’s very alone (not to mention a bloody mess) in Louise Bourgeois’ “Mother and Child,” the nonagenarian artist’s fifth exhibit at Gallery Paule Anglim.

Motherhood, in all its generative and suffocating capacities, has been something of an idée fixe for Bourgeois across her 60-year career — most famously in her Spider sculptures, whose spindly arachnids, the artist has said in interviews, are stand-ins for her mother. Their fractured, complicated relationship surfaces in other works as well, as has Bourgeois’ own experiences as a mother.

Biographical context is secondary, though, to experiencing this recent group of maternally minded paintings and sculpture. “Mother and Child” packs a visceral punch that will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Brood (1979) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Although certainly no horror film, the exhibition viscerally explores the flipside of the “miracle of birth”: feelings of ambivalence, repulsion, and grief.

IS SOMETHING MISSING?

YES, SOMETHING IS MISSING AND ALWAYS WILL BE MISSING

THE EXPERIENCE OF EMPTINESS

So proclaims part of the text in I Am Afraid (2009). Printed onto a large, woven cotton canvas, the words hang over the rest of the exhibit like a curse. They speak to the sense of loss that frequently figures as part of postpartum depression. In giving birth, the mother has lost part of herself; but she has also been cut off from the experience of that loss. This, Bourgeois seems to declare, is not just the cost of human procreation, but an inescapable component of artistic endeavor as well.

Surrounding I Am Afraid are a series of drawings in blood-red gouache, originally done on wet paper to allow the sanguine watercolor medium to dry in saturated blotches, depicts the cycle by which a woman is born, matures, and then gives birth, becoming a mother herself. The figures are crudely sketched, at once child-like and grotesque, but their affective power comes from the suggestiveness of their basic shapes.

The sagging ovals of the drawings’ many fetal unborn, swollen bellies and rounded thighs are picked up in two tuberous bronze sculptures, Echo 1 and Echo IV (both from 2007). The sculptures’ biomorphic forms evoke bodily interiors — internal organs, fatty tissue — even though they are hollow shells of something that was once exterior: castings of old sweaters that had been stuffed and soaked with liquid. Something is always missing.

If you need an upper, Jay Howell’s got your fix. The 111 Minna curator’s latest solo show, “Alligator Fuck House,” crams enough DayGlo exuberance into the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it A440 Gallery (certainly the smallest space in the cavernous 49 Geary) to set you smiling all afternoon. If you aren’t blindsided by Mona Lisa, a mixed media avalanche that covers an entire wall, inspiration board-style, with Howell’s neat pen and ink doodles (“This boner is sincere,” reads one), vintage nudie mag clippings, and personal ephemera, then get in close to take in the framed drawings, each a rainbow unto itself.

Really Long Legs and Long Armed Fun smush together dozens of brightly hued Seussian figures that stretch their Mr. Fantastic-like appendages into long smears of color (and in Long Armed Fun, spell out the name of the game). Under the Leaves depicts a florid tree showering the ground with Fruity Pebbles foliage.

Matt Furie, Howell’s co-conspirator in anarchic, Technicolor figure drawing (the two let it rip two years ago at their “Return to Innocence” show at Receiver Gallery), is also currently showing a modest yet freaky assortment of paintings and drawings at Mission District sartorial one-stop Painted Bird. Come for the vintage duds, stay for the scenes from Swamp Thing’s kama sutra. *

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: MOTHER AND CHILD

Through June 12, free

Gallery Paule Anglim

(415) 433-2710

www.gallerypauleanglim.com

JAY HOWELL: ALLIGATOR FUCK HOUSE

Through June, free

A440

49 Geary, SF

(510) 593-0990

burningbook.com/index

MATT FURIE: FROM BEYOND

Ongoing, free

Painted Bird

1360 Valencia, SF

(415) 401-7027

www.paintedbird.org

 

Eyes of the city

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arts@sfbg.com

STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO Two packs of beer, five cameras, and a ridiculous amount of camera equipment are hauled up the narrow staircase and onto the Guardian’s sunny rooftop on Potrero Hill. The four members of Caliber, a talented group of Bay Area photographers, immediately strap on their cameras and secure their lenses.

Running to the edge of the roof, spinning in circles, pointing up, down, and side to side, they take snapshots. The sunset, the traffic, the sidewalk below — Caliber shows that it’s possible to find a beautiful angle in every direction.

“It’s like we’ve never taken a picture before,” says Caliber member Julie Michelle, smirking after a series of shots. A couple of minutes of later, beer lures the rest of the pack — Stuart Dixon, Travis Jensen, Troy Holden, and his visiting brother, Dylan — around the picnic table to talk about their love for street photography.

Photo by Julie Michelle

The group met through Flickr in October 2009, after admiring each other’s varied styles. They decided to collaborate in an independent fashion, putting up a Web site filled with genuine San Francisco moments only residents can experience. When they aren’t lurking with a camera in alleyways or roaming along sidewalks and through parking lots, Caliber’s male members work 9-to-5’s, while Michelle races around the city photographing for her own Web site. Caliber’s images are a sheer labor of love.

Dixon is all about using “weird gear” and putting a new spin on classic shots of the bridge, Bay landmarks, and traffic. The group describes Jensen as a legit street photographer who captures kick-flips, drug trades, and intimate portraits of wizened or withered people. Holden “defaults to high buildings,” abandoned warehouses, and construction zones. Michelle loves architectural details and stumbling upon “lonely” timeless moments.

Photo by Travis Jensen

“As a group, we’re not taking Hallmark postcard pictures. This is the San Francisco we live in. It’s not a sunset at Crissy Field or the Painted Ladies,” Michelle says.

“It’s the nitty-gritty city stuff,” Jensen clarifies.

Every day, the Caliber Web site features a minimum of four new photos, a click from each member caught in their digital nets while walking to work, riding the bus, or on a Sunday morning stroll. From intimate portraits to the beautiful cityscapes, Caliber’s photos capture the real San Francisco from the dirty ground up.

Photo by Troy Holden

“Getting the perfect shot is very mathematical. And this is me being nerdy, but it’s recognizing when every element is in its right place,” says Troy, noting that sometimes it takes a hundred snaps of a single scene to get it right.

“It’s like panning for gold, finding the nugget,” adds Michelle. “And all you need is one.”

www.calibersf.com

Vandalism Manifesto

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Editor’s note: An earlier edition of this manifesto was scrawled onto the walls of an abandoned underground Muni tunnel somewhere in the Sunset District.

STREETS ISSUE The magic of the word — VANDALISM — is terribly offensive. Vandalism offends all the right people and launches an offensive against all the wrong people. Wait, vandalism converts our doublemoralspeak to honesty. Vandalism affirms a number of precarious values: freedom, justice, the art of unmediated living, etc.

Vandalism is not just a word. It’s a gaseous engine powering subversion, all saturated in viscous honey. A lifestyle set on boundless hope. A toy monkey you can buy on Haight Street. A self-imagined adventure ride in your Disneyland theme city of choice. A movement determined to strategically undermine deceptive imagery in favor of immediate experience — the sort of primitive amoebic goo that inspires the gorgeous muck of truthfulness. Vandalism lives in dirt and filth — the only organic material left unadulterated.

Vandalism has a healthy diet: iIt devours the monopoly on spectacle and excretes into the vast wastelands of intergalactic oil spills. Vandalism likes thrills: It’s a hyperdérive on the brink of the familiar, gathering as much intensity as possible before fluxing the rules of the game into a vortex of momentous vision. Vandalism wants to hold your hand. Vandalism is so charged that you might already feel an electric rage surging forth while reading this. If you don’t, you will. Does it burn and singe and bend and twist into the antennae of your fingertips? Channel that rage into acts of vandalism.

Vandalism is an awfully new phenomenon. It takes up arms all over the world: in big cities like New York and London, and in not-so-famous towns like Bakersfield and Danville. Well, maybe not Danville. Just wait, Danville.

Vandalism is an awfully old phenomenon. You can see nature desecrated, I mean subliminally mysticized, in the caves of Lascaux. Since we no longer live in pure nature but in concrete labyrinths built on top of iron cage islands, we must bring the caves of Lascaux and beaches of Eden and tornados of Jupiter to bear on today’s jungle city. We must subliminally mysticize the streets. Cue air horn.

Vandalism is so important that there are white wall guardians who repress it with nervous glances and waving arms. Byzantine policies regulate it. Laws have been established to punish transgressors. Yet vandalism doesn’t go away. Too many dreams fuel it. Too many imaginations keep it vital. Word on the street is that Werner Herzog is making a movie about it.

Vandalism doesn’t insist on art. It doesn’t get involved in arguments about whether something is or isn’t art. That conversation is terribly boring. Have you been to a modern museum lately? Didn’t you get the joke? OK, I admit, that conversation is irresistible. Here’s a clarification: Vandalism is an art form even if the graffiti itself is not artistic — a shrouded word meaning ultimately, technically savvy, or educated and properly executed. To this, I summon the ghost of a severe-faced vandal, Norman Mailer: Art is not peace but war! And war ain’t always pretty, or concerned with legality, soljah.

Vandalism would prefer to mark its ephemeral existence on the city skin, gushing down the fermented joys of unsanctioned life, mummifying itself in the cold caverns of a culture mausoleum. It would prefer to make you smile and laugh and wonder mercilessly to what happens in galleries: first confusion, then self-consciousness, and finally, the lingering pain of feeling slightly cheated. (Confession: I kinda stole that from Banksy. VANDALIZED!) No, vandalism doesn’t demand legitimacy in order to die in a sea of sterilized artifacts — all rotten fish skins and busted gall bladders in excessive frames. Museums sanctify the past. Vandalism prophesies the present.

History lesson: Street kids baptized vandalism in the slums, reconfiguring our country’s criminal policies of benign neglect into an acrobatic dance. They spun windmills into the future and set their gaze on the heavens. Among buildings reduced to rubble — a bombed out third world — they flipped the script and defined vandalism as bombing. The kids crucified monotony and sacrificed the crushing industrial rhythm of authority. They called themselves writers and painted their neon-tinted altar egos onto the shining armor of the behemoth subway trains and all over the walls. The names projected a faith in identity among the noise of polluted prayers.

Writers became pseudonymous in an abysmal well of city hustlers trying to make a legacy for themselves — billboard important and newsworthy. Writers preferred this life, fleeting and necessary and beautiful in the quixotic eternity of the now. The indifferent had no choice but to reckon with the writers.

Over 40 years strong, the writers still scour the marrow of their bones to re-enchant the lifeblood of the city. They craft enigmas out of the geometric lines and curves of the alphabet, making ferocious animals out of huge letters, feral and gunning in the jungle. The animals promulgate like bacteria, spawning writers-turned-shamans who cast spells of cryptic iconography wherever they go. Mummies, giraffes, and spaceships populate the jungle. An aura of prophecy emerges in the streets.

Writers wage war against the ubiquitous icons of worship mounted across the empire: those branded images manufacturing a spectacle of insurmountable desire and Sisyphean frustration. The marketers might have the money to buy permission to assault your eyes and make you feel bad about yourself; writers have the courage to forgo bureaucratic approval, stake claim on what rightfully belongs to all of us and conjure up a moveable feast. We believe in innocent pleasures, impulsive and vibrant, in order to dismantle the tyranny of monotony! More air horn, please.

Vandalism is degenerate. It’s not here to promote cleanliness and genteel manners of etiquette. Vandalism will replace honorifics with its own stamp of affirmation: Vandal Basquiat, Vandal Futura 2000, Vandal Taki 183, Vandal Debord, Haring, Burrows and Proudhon. But more than any of that, all the lower-case vandals on Muni set to burn their names on your retina.

Vandalism doesn’t care about rights to property. Vandalism stands by this ancient principle: property is theft. Vandalism doesn’t care about copyright. Copyright smacks of self-indulgence and greed. Quote me on that. Vandalism is universal and limitless, unwieldy and unbalanced, completely unhinged and frighteningly beautiful. It’s dangerous but welcoming. Come on. Give vandalism a try. Vandalism is the new gentrification; everyone’s doing it. It’s pushing emptiness and dullness out of the city and raising the quality of life to unpredictable heights of magnanimity. Your neutral walls do violence to our integrity. Whatcha got against color?

How does one live well and good? By doing vandalism. How does one become anonymously famous? By doing vandalism. With a flick of the wrists and a swagger of the step. Til’ one can’t stop and certainly won’t stop. It’s a terrible habit, an awfully time-consuming obsession. How can one get rid of everything grotesque and in bad taste? Vandalism. How do we reassert ourselves in the midst of corporate homogeny and increasing pressure to normalize? Vandalism. By what means do we establish our will to communicate freely and openly in the public sphere? Vandalism.

Vandalism cannot be bought or sold in your local Walgreens (maybe in Giant Robot, though). No no, vandalism is a nebulous thing, an utterly cosmic thing, dirty and scurrilous and always operating in the shadows, always slipping away from sterilization and appropriation like a rat with rabies on the run. What a charming nuisance. What a credible way to live! Street credible. The streets is a mother, and good ol’ vanguard vandalism — the first lesson.

Vandalism once brought down the Roman empire. We have yet to rebuild the world in its depths. (Wooley Van Dahl)

360-degrees “Muralismo”

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caitlin@sfbg.com

STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO In the late 1960s, when the muralismo movement began gaining strength among artists and community organizers in the Mission District, or in the 1970s when pioneer female street artists Mujeres Muralistas first picked up their brushes to trick out Balmy Alley, they probably weren’t thinking about the de Young Museum and slick coffee table books.

But, to appropriate Jay-Z, street art’s got a new bitch — the fine art world. With the 2009 release of Precita Eyes’ eye-popping Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (www.missionmuralismo.com) and the corresponding year-long event series the picture book of the storied mural hood has spawned at the de Young museum, neighborhood tags and tableaus are gaining a stronger foothold in the world of high art. That is to say, the world of art that people pay big money for.

Banksy’s recent film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and the attendant media frenzy about several tie-in works appearing around town, is the hyped-out crest of spray-can crazy that’s got San Francisco in its grip. Galleries like Project One, White Walls, and 1AM are selling works for hundreds and thousands of dollars that you once saw on the wall of your neighborhood elementary school or liquor store. High class Union Square Hotel Des Arts offers visitors the chance to sleep in well-appointed rooms designed by “street” artists Apex, Shepard Fairey, and Chor Boogie. It’s hip to be street, stay up to get down, yadda yadda.

So what’s new? After all, Jean-Michel Basquiat zoomed from asphalt to canvas, sparking a meteoric career that collectors loved to cop a piece of in the 1980s. In graffiti’s early days, New York taggers struggled to retain control of their art in the face of soaring price tags, grasping middlemen, and ad execs who recognized the power of the bubble letter to sell. Past generations of SF artists like Twist and Mars One have graduated from the streets entirely. “You need money to do bigger and better things,” White Walls curator Justin Giarla told me. “Galleries are another possible venue to find yourself in history books, museums.”

Mission Muralismo offers a seductively jumbled history. Its pages, a nonlinear whirl of street art celebrated in situ, are perfect for a disparate neighborhood art movement that includes Latin American freedom songs, urban rustic neo-folk, and unapologetic civil disobedience. Editor Annice Jacoby says it took years of “digging through people’s closets” to create.

“You have to find a container that reflects the contradictions and surprises of the street,” Jacoby told me. “This whole place [the Mission] is like a gallery, proliferating and procreating.” To encapsulate the movement’s feel, she took images of temporal art — murals tend to last no more than 12 years before they start to deteriorate — and laid them alongside thoughtful essays by artists and other key Mission figures.

It would be easy to mistake the whirl surrounding Muralismo as another round of outsider art profiteering. Easy, that is, if you didn’t know Precita Eyes’ history of sponsoring social justice-based community murals. Easy, if you forget that the de Young events don’t directly commodify in the murals depicted in the book by swallowing them whole — those murals are pretty well stuck to their walls. Easy, if you’ve never seen the diverse crowds the events draw and the enthusiasm and respect shown by all sides.

“You mention Basquiat, and what happened there is that collectors started recognizing his work and showing it. This is different — we’re not bringing in the art,” de Young director of public programs Renee Baldocchi. Her museum’s First Fridays Mission Muralismo events, part of its Friday night “Cultural Encounters” series, are more than opportunistic book tie-ins. They aim to focus on the culture of the artists themselves. Key figures in the mural movement featured in the book like Juana Alicia, the Billboard Liberation Front, and Jet Martinez (muralist and artistic director of the Clarion Alley Mural Project), come in to lecture — street artists, lecturing? — to packed crowds on what they do, why it’s important, and how you can do it too. “We’re hoping that by inviting them in to talk about their art, it makes more people aware of them in the world,” Baldocchi says.

“The [de Young] events, I see them attracting a lot of young people,” says Jaime Cortez, an artist who coordinated the Galeria de la Raza digital billboard campaign in the 1990s and AIDS awareness mural projects. “I think that’s because of the big name graffiti artists the events draw.” Perhaps these functions are less about changing the meaning of the murals they celebrate than the high art venue they’re being celebrated in.

“It’s not like they’re having a show of muralists [at the de Young],” says Martinez, who has feet in both the street and gallery art worlds. Jet spoke at the Mission Muralismo event highlighting Clarion Alley. “They’re providing a forum where we can speak about this art,” he said.

Hopefully there are some lifted conversations going on, because the color and uniqueness of the Mission’s public art is pretty dope. “You’re dealing with a monumental subject,” Jacoby acknowledges. “You have to find a container that reflects the contradictions and surprises of the street.”

Debates don’t get much weirder than ones about where art “belongs.” But what’s certain is that with all the attention — the de Young events, the Banksy histrionics — more people are seeing the writing on the wall. “Oftentimes we’re in a hurry; we don’t stop to look at the murals,” Baldocchi says. “This is providing a forum so that when we do go down into the Mission, we can look at them and think about what’s being said — especially the social justice side.” *

MISSION MURALISMO

First Fridays, 5 p.m., free

de Young Museum

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., SF.

(415) 750-3600

www.famsf.org/deyoung

 

All the young Turks

1

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL Welcome to Hairy Eyeball, a bimonthly rundown of visual art. We don’t aim to be comprehensive, just opinionated. First Thursday is tomorrow, so enough with the introductions. On with the shows.

CCA is unleashing a new batch of Fine Arts MFA students into the wild Thursday night. With 66 artists total, this year’s MFA show (which runs at the San Francisco campus through May 15) is one of the largest in recent memory. The cream from CCA tends to rise to the top pretty quickly, so here are some names worth looking out for in white cubes, near and far, in the future.

Llewelynn Fletcher’s interactive sculptures aren’t aiming to take a particular pulse, but will probably slow yours down. For Please Lie Down, she has created several enclosures of lead, ceramic, wood, and felt that completely cover the head, forcing you, per the piece’s title, to lie down on the floor (thankfully, she’s also constructed camping-style palettes for comfort). The mini-meditation huts, evocative of beehives as well as certain medieval torture implements, have the additional effect of transforming the wearer into something of a sculpture.

Maggie Haas’ mixed-media pieces could easily be mistaken for installations-in-progress. But her arrangements and treatment of construction site detritus — sawhorses, wooden slats — cannily gut minimalism, This Old House-style, by preferring to hang out in the workshop with Donald Judd et al., turning the means of production into the piece itself. Endless Escape in particular performs a neat rope trick that yokes Robert Smithson and Yayoi Kusama with the ease of an Eagle Scout.

Hilary Wiedemann’s installations, which frequently combine sculptures and projection, are far more elusive — and unsettling. In Untitled, a plaster cast of what looks to be a bullet hole-riddled surface (glass, perhaps?) leans against the wall; on the floor, laminated sheet glass has been contorted to resemble discarded tissue. Both components record the violence of the transformational processes that have brought them to their current states. It’s not comfortable viewing — as if you’ve stumbled on a crime scene before the police tape has gone up.

Someone put Doron Fishman in touch with a textiles manufacturer, stat. His gorgeous ink-on-paper works, all black tendrils of liquid smoke, let it bleed. They’re begging to be transferred to chiffon. The witchy Mulleavy sisters, of Rodarte fame, would be smart to look him up.

Well worth the trek to the other side of Potrero Hill is Ping Pong Gallery, which is currently showing Gwenael Rattke’s dark, hypnogogic collages (through May 14). The collection’s title, “Oktogon,” refers to a street intersection in Budapest and also to the Ottoman-style “Kiraly” baths built during the Turkish occupation in the 16th century. These layers of history, architecture, exposed flesh, and power are not wholly self-evident in the psychedelic grandeur of Rattke’s straight-razor wizardry — which recalls, among many associations, the graphic punch of Tadanori Yokoo and Keiichi Tanami’s 1960s poster designs, the homo-plagiarism of Jess’ massive Narkissos (1978/91), and the profondo rosso beloved by Dario Argento. Rather, they form the deep structures to these mandala-like works in which Op-Art geometrics collide with Art Nouveau scrollwork and leather daddies are refracted into Busby Berkeley chorines. The corner in which 14 of these pieces have been hung draws you in, like some black hole. Proceed with caution, and awe.

Also closing toward the end of the month (May 22 to be exact) is Beverly Rayner’s “Accretion” at Braunstein/Quay, an elongated housecoat covered in the day-to-day paper ephemera — greeting cards, bills, receipts, inspirational quotes, correspondences — that one accumulates over the course of a lifetime. “Go paperless” is one takeaway. That such a load is too much to bear — psychically as much as environmentally — is another. *

CCA GRADUATE THESIS EVENTS

Through May 14, free

California College of the Arts

1111 Eighth St., SF

(415) 703-9500

www,cca.edu

GWENAEL RATTKE: OKTOGON

Through May 14, free

Ping Pong Gallery

1240 22nd St., SF

(415) 550-7483

www.pingponggallery.com

BEVERLY RAYNER: ACCRETION

Through May 22, free

Braunstein/Quay Gallery

430 Clementina, SF

(415) 278-9850

www.bquayartgallery.com

The vision thing

0

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART All artists, to some degree, are visionaries. They envision something the rest of us can’t or haven’t been able to. That “something” can also be the envisioning itself, a way of seeing made manifest. An articulation of that vision should hopefully leave us questioning what it is we see before us, how we have come to see before this encounter, what we haven’t seen or noticed until now. One measure of an artwork’s efficacy, then, could be to what extent we find ourselves continuing to stumble along this line of inquiry, opened up by the work, long after we have left its presence.

In this respect, the art of Morris Graves (1910-2001), which has so often been hailed as “visionary,” is particularly efficacious. The latest testament to this unsung great of midcentury American art is “The Visionary Art of Morris Graves,” Meridian Gallery’s fantastic retrospective curated by Peter Selz. Taking over the first two floors of the former beaux-arts mansion, the 45 works in this comprehensive survey encourage much pleasurable stumbling.

This exhibit takes its title from San Francisco Renaissance man Kenneth Rexroth’s laudatory 1955 essay, “The Visionary Painting of Morris Graves,” which rightfully recognized that Graves’ art could not be reduced to the sum of its influences: whether the Asian calligraphic and brush painting traditions he studied from primary sources, such as the 15th century master Sesshu, as well as their reinterpretation by fellow Northwestern artist Mark Tobey, or the wilds of coastal Washington, a region from which he drew his color palette and which he called home for a great period of his life.

I will admit that all this talk of Graves’ visionary status colored my initial approach to his art. It was hard not to first fixate on the birds, serpents, chalices, and flowers — enough to fill a tarot deck — with their aura of hermetic significance and iconographic associations. But, as Rexroth’s observations underscore, to regard Graves’ work solely as that of a sylvan mystic, as Life magazine did in its famous 1954 spread “Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” is to see it myopically.

Graves’ vision is legible on the surfaces of his paintings. Many bear traces their initial contact with the tempera, oil paint, or ink, like dampened tissue spread out to dry. One has to get close to see how Graves’ intimately imbricates his figures with the sensuous textures in which they are situated. The spermatic flower delicately zig-zagging atop an ombre sea of undulating ink wash in Effort to Bloom (1943), or the bird buried within a calligraphic nest of white hatch-marks and seemingly endlessly retraced filigree in Bird in Moonlight (1939) are just two of the more dramatic examples of how Graves combines figuration and abstraction to create an insistently tactile whole.

Jarrett Earnest, Meridian’s assistant director (and full disclosure, a personal friend), articulates this quality of Graves’ work in his catalog essay when he writes, “[Graves’ paintings] ask you to experience their surface as you would the anatomy of a lover, looking as if caressing.” This tenderness, so markedly displayed in the large color paintings, also comes through in the simpler ink portraits of animals on the second floor. In Untitled (Hibernation) (c.a. 1954) the sleeping, whiskered donut of fur Graves depicts — in just a handful of measured brush strokes — so vividly evokes a deep sense of peace that I wish it were possible to spoon. To be in its presence makes one take stock of one’s own presence.

It would be reductive and essentializing to dovetail Graves’ deep sensitivity with his openness about his homosexuality, remarkable at a time when same-sex desire was criminalized. And yet, as Earnest also concludes, there is something about the sensuality of Graves’ work — one so removed from the masculine athleticism of Graves’ Abstract Expressionist contemporaries — that makes it truly visionary. Graves’ friend John Cage called his paintings “invitations.” Don’t be afraid to accept their offer to get close.

THE VISIONARY ART OF MORRIS GRAVES

Through May 15

535 Powell, SF

(415) 398-7229

www.meridiangallery.org

The O word

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johnny@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART There is no doubt that “James Castle: A Retrospective” is a treasure trove. On view at the Berkeley Art Museum, this comprehensive gathering of the self-taught artist’s many and varied works would be utterly overwhelming if its many miniature pieces and slight changes of form and approach didn’t encourage a certain freedom on the viewer’s part. In this regard it’s quite different from the recent traveling Joseph Cornell retrospective that had a stay at SFMOMA, where in a single viewing Cornell’s box constructions quickly became exhausting to engage with due to the sheer relentless volume and repetition of the presentation.

Cornell’s name is a charged one to evoke in relation to Castle, because just as one could — though perhaps few writers do — draw comparisons between the artistic themes and tactics of Cornell’s art and the art of Henry Darger, Castle also shares some traits with Cornell (and, in turn, with Darger). In the realm of Castle, it is helpful to flip the script so to speak, and see that whereas Cornell is renowned for his boxes, Castle frequently turned box material — cardboard — into imaginative open space. Of course, a certain invisible wall separates, or separated, the eccentric but successful Cornell from Darger, who toiled in near-absolute obscurity and isolation, and from Castle, a deaf man who created at home in a familial farm environment with little public recognition until late in his life.

Which brings us to the word outsider, ever-present in art-speak during Darger’s 1990s rise to posthumous cult stardom, yet curiously absent from the majority of writing about Castle. To be sure, notions of outsider art far predate Darger, even if he has become its best-known recent representative. Roger Cardinal’s book Outsider Art, first published in the U.S. in 1972, catalogs its definition of the term, with an emphasis on outré words such as madness and primitive, and a focus on violent creative forces such as Adolf Wölfli. With the coronation (however rightful) of Darger, it’s as if outsider art became cuter, with even Darger’s romantic and gender-bent view of little girls discussed in relative terms of endearment. Kid gloves, as it were — since Darger was so thorough an outsider, locked in imagination instead of literal action, he was safe.

No such illegal undercurrent runs through Castle’s work, even if, like Cornell and Darger (and a plethora of artists and other human beings today) he recreates pop images of childhood and innocence. But the measured focus of the meticulous and valuable discourse around Castle’s work — traits shared by Tom Trusky’s biography James Castle: His Life & Art; Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary of the same year, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist; and editor-writer Ann Percy’s monograph for the Castle retrospective — risks the creation of an overtly (perhaps the t should be subtracted from that last word) self-aware viewpoint. The evidence is in the flatness of the titles. If Castle is to claim a rightful place among great American 20th-century artists, here’s to future dialogue about him that allows for the same irreverence and uncensored opinion afforded those who were wined and dined and made megabucks. In addition, he could be spoken of in the same breath as talents as disparate as Darger and Wölfli in a manner that rescues outsider art from shame-based erasure.

The aforementioned o word doesn’t appear until the halfway point of James Castle: A Retrospective, which also rejects the idea of Castle as folk artist. (Interesting, since Darger’s commercial apex has occurred with New York folk museum realms.) Even then, it’s placed within conversational quote marks by the painter Terry Winters. Encouragingly, Winters later flips the notion and mentions “insider” art, a notion that probably is intended in commercial terms, but could just as easily signify those artists whose creative life has an inbuilt insularity. For now, the atmospheric and perhaps emotional darkness of so many of Castle’s soot-and-spit works is in the light, and it would be an honest mistake to view those works as cute. His books, assemblages, and drawings are as complicated as the people they render, and possess as many open doors as the houses or homes they depict. 

JAMES CASTLE: A RETROSPECTIVE

Through Sun/25, $5-$8 (members and children under 12 free)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510)642-0808

Believe it!

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arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART What would you do if you had been born with a treasure chest? This is a real-life Pippi Longstocking-tale: Jaina Bee is a quirky lady who sports a pink glam crewtop, was raised with minimal parental interference, and is undeniably devoted to her friends. Like Pippi, she was given a suitcase full of gold coins and owns a home.

Thirteen years ago, when Jaina Bee was in her late 20s, she purchased her Potrero Hill property with a vague vision of creating a collaborative-art utopia.

Each chamber of Granny’s Empire of Art has been given a fitting nickname. Sitting in the trophy room, named for its collection of taxidermy, it’s hard to imagine it as just another blank slate with off-white walls. “There’s a difference between decorating and transforming,” Jaina Bee says. Now: antique sofas, stripes of plaid and French country wallpaper, a haunting brick-based collage of cigarettes and electrical plugs, a hanging chandelier, and portraits of Jaina Bee with chickens — and of the benefactors of her inheritance, her step-grandfather Fred Davis and his father Edwin — fill the living room.

“Seriously, the deepest and most inescapable influence was my mother, who was a total prankster, trickster, nonconformist type,” she says. “As soon as I got out of high school and went into college, she lived out her trippy communal fantasy in Santa Cruz.”

As an experiment based around her deep curiosity about people, Jaina Bee’s mother threw open her doors. Those who came in were mostly freeloading Dead Heads of the 1980s. It was a madhouse.

“I took what I learned from observing that and inevitably turned this into my own semi-open house,” says Jaina Bee. “There are lots of people who make this place their home when they’re in town. They’re all creative, and they all contribute in some way to the household, whether it’s designing lights or creating rooms. And when I’m out of town for months at a time, people come and go just as freely as if I were here. So the house has a kind of life of its own. It’s bigger than all of us.”

“You can’t try to control it,” responds Jenny B, who did the lighting for the house and is staying over.

While her mother was watching her lawless social study, Jaina Bee was attending San Francisco Art Institute, where she befriended many artists who would later be involved with Granny’s.

Her professor Tony Labat challenged her to test, trial-and-error-style, without knowing the results. “That gave me the courage to experiment with collaborating with people not necessarily knowing where it was going to go,” she explains. She took this mentality seriously when she began working on her home. “The whole reason things have turned out the way they have here is that I didn’t try and control it too much — just enough to keep it from going into complete chaos.”

Of course, this is not the first art-home assembled by an eccentric heiress. Granny’s Empire of Art follows a tradition extending from Isabella Stewart Gardner and Sarah Winchester to Peggy Guggenheim and Doris Duke. But none of these comparisons quite fit because of Granny’s particular emphasis on collaboration and experimentation.

“It’s an unusual circumstance with Jaina, because she really wants people to do what they’re good at doing. She’s not sitting there saying she wants it this way. She has a lot of trust with her vision,” explains Christine Shields, who met Jaina at SFAI and has done work on the home since the initial painting sessions when she chose red for what would later be known as the opium den.

“When the whole house started, I thought it was so disparate. It seemed very hodgepodge and very crazy-quilt style. But the more time that goes by, the more it becomes this big vision and it has this cohesion that I couldn’t really see in the beginning,” Shields says. “But I know Jaina saw it.”

Granny’s two homes — an old farmhouse in the back and a Victorian in the front — contain a Ripley’s-Believe-It-or-Not!-worthy staircase covered with pencils that leads to a vintage Circus Circus carpet, a Gaudi-meets-the-Yellow-Submarine bathroom with glow-in-the-dark-slices hidden in the tiles, a fur meditation room, a haunted parlor with multicolored drywall, found photographs compiled into a pseudo family albums, and an old-timey phonograph. All this — and more — comes together to form a fairytale dollhouse that expands with the bite of a cookie, just like Alice’s wonderland.

“This is beyond my wildest dreams of the perfect environment. I’m always discovering things I didn’t notice before,” says Jaina Bee. “I think sometimes my friends have actually stuck things in here without telling me.”

Unlike the Peggy Guggenheim Collection or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, there’s an energy that emanates from the life within the home. Jaina Bee says she’s thought about the future of Granny’s Empire of Art and the possibility that it might become a place for an artists residency program, but says she’s made no official plans. Granny’s is alive and growing.

There are even lovely sister cats, Crackle and Quilty, who share the home. “They wrecked a lot,” Jaina Bee says matter-of-factly. “I think in one year these kittens did $1000 in damage — to masterpieces. But that’s art as life. I don’t want it to be so precious I can’t be comfortable.”

www.jainabee.com

Inspirationstitute

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I don’t do regrets, but I do wish that I’d arrived in San Francisco early enough to catch more than the hot tail end of the Popstitute years. (A show of Popstitute-related archival objets d’art is on display at Goteblud starting Sat27.) In another way, though, the Popstitute era continues, perhaps more forcefully, now. Whether or not the participants have ever encountered or read about Popstitute, the spirit of the postmodern — savor the late ’80s-early ’90s-ness of that term — music-art-and-protest group is reborn in various forms within the most fab current Bay Area happenings, from the Thrillpeddlers to Hunx and His Punx to High Fantasy.

The past year or so has seen Marc Huestis’ 1982 new wave movie Whatever Happened to Susan Jane get a digital facelift, and Patrick Cowley’s 1976-79 recording project Catholic introduced to different generations thanks to Honey Soundsystem. For the thirstiest seekers left in SF and its stronger wings, the time is right for a fresh taste of Popstitute, and “Boredom=Death: The Popstitutes 86-95” is set to deliver the DayGlo dyed-hair mania to old friends and lovers and new eyes. On display at the zine treasure trove Goteblüd, it promises a barrage of ready-to-rule-today paper mementos, as well as banners, photographs, and Mylar photo ornaments. Opening night deserves to be a scene. A happening. An event that inspires wild ideas that bloom into wilder actions.

It’s overly simple to call Popstitute a punk and new wave next-generation answer to the Cockettes, even if there are corollaries between Hibiscus’ role as the Cockettes’ chief fount of inspiration and the late Diet Popstitute’s (a.k.a. Michael Collins) galvanizing role in Popstitute the band, club(stitute), and overall entity. The Goteblüd show is accompanied by a terrific fluorescent zine that gathers flyers (featuring Alvin Popstitute, now a writer), newspaper articles (by Don Baird and others), and zine excerpts, which all hint at Popstitute’s untamed variety.

The “Boredom=Death” zine includes some fantastic pages from Tantrum, a zine put together by Tyler (a.k.a. Tyler-Bob, or Tylenol) Popstitute. Behold Tyler’s drawing of Truthstar the Unicorn — Tyler was way ahead of the unicorn trend curve — bungee-jumping with Yoda and current 73-year-old-of-the -moment Yoko Ono. Clip out his mortifying Madame mask and wear it to a party. A few years back Butt magazine included a photo of one of my favorite art acts ever in SF, Tyler’s amazing H.R. Giger-like gay male circuit queen gym body, which was plaster cast and made from a latex-like material. I remember running into Tyler one night at a SoMa club when he was wearing it. It was pure Popstitute art: irreverent, brilliant, pop-influenced in a completely inventive and unpredictable way, both fun and scathing at the same time. Like Popstitute, it wasn’t sterile art for art’s sake. It was art brought to life.

 

BOREDOM=DEATH

Sat/27, 6-8pm (continuesw through May 29)

Goteblud

766 Valencia, SF.

www.goteblud.com

Trapped in the museum

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VISUAL ART Have you heard? SFMOMA turned 75. There is a lot to take in across the museum’s related exhibits, from the “Anniversary Show” centerpiece to the small retrospectives devoted to specific artists that SFMOMA has fostered relationships with over the years. While everything is certainly worth a gander, below are some pieces worth more than your while.

 

SINGLES GOING STEADY

Next to Bruce Conner’s Ray Charles-and-found-footage shotgun wedding Three Screen Ray (2006), in the other media gallery, you’ll see a series of music-related or somehow “musical” single channel video works (cannily titled “The Singles Collection”). Media arts curator Rudolf Frieling has played DJ with the archive, going from Steina’s 1970-78 violin-powered video-drone to Cory Arcangel’s hilarious crotch-centric re-edit of footage of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park reunion concert.

The chart-topper, however, is undoubtedly Michael Bell-Smith’s dizzying 2005 piece, Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously. As explained by its title, the piece exploits the identical backing track used throughout Kelly’s magnum opus, introducing a new audio and video layer with each successive repeat of the bass hook until all 12 chapters are going at once. Bell-Smith’s condensation of Kelly’s soap opera reduces the series’ increasingly labyrinthine narrative to pure affect, in a sense exposing R&B’s McLuhanian truth that the medium is the message. As the visual field moves from palimpsest to whiteout, so too does the audiotrack transform, kecak-like, from discernable speech into a buzzing monsoon of indecipherable chatter, melisma runs, and huge swells of nonverbal emotionality. The idea and execution are so simple and brilliant as to come off as almost self-evident (alternately, I wonder if Kelly just didn’t plan it that way). Here’s hoping Bell-Smith will make a sequel with the other 10 chapters.

 

BAD BOYS AND BEESWAX

Recently, art critic Roberta Smith humorously posited the three career stages of artistic bad boys: “beginner (there’s still time to turn back), over the top, and over the hill.” I wonder where she would slot Matthew Barney. SFMOMA has had a long relationship with the SF-born artist: the museum put on Barney’s first non-gallery retrospective in 1991, followed by the co-acquisition with the Walker Center of the Arts of Cremaster 2 in 2000, and most recently, the massive Drawing Restraint retrospective in 2006. Certainly, there is something of the “beginner” in the 1991 installation Transexualis — part of a “Focus on Artists” exhibition that include sections on Diane Arbus, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, and others — with its petroleum jelly-cast decline bench set in a walk-in cooler. Like a teen bodybuilder, its aesthetic perfection is visually arresting, yet there is something about such over-development that is off-putting and faintly obnoxious. Such is the vanity of youth, perhaps?

Robert Gober’s beeswax torso in the adjacent gallery, made a year before Barney’s Crisco home gym, takes the opposite tack. Slumped on the floor like a throw pillow, Gober’s untitled Eva Hesse-like form simultaneously welcomes you with the upright repose of a postcoital lover (that happy trail that leads the eye up and down from a small cloud of chest hair is made of human follicles), only to then take on the cast of something long past its prime to be taken out with the trash. It is a body many of us have seen, or had, or have. It is a wingless Pyrrhic victory that still manages to fly miles above Barney’s Super Bowl half-time show deconstruction of masculinity. Who’s bad?

THE ANNIVERSARY SHOW

FOCUS ON ARTISTS

LONG PLAY: BRUCE CONNER AND THE SINGLES COLLECTION

Through May 23 (“Anniversary Show” through Jan. 16, 2011)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Cities and memory

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arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART Tucked into the first floor corner of Berkeley Art Museum’s Matrix gallery, Ahmet Ögüt’s Exploded City — installment 231 in the MATRIX series — doesn’t look like much at first glance. Originally commissioned for the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, the installation centers around a mini-metropolis of meticulously constructed scale models of buildings arranged on concrete risers. On closer inspection, you notice that high-rise hotels abut mosques, and what look to be modest earthenware homes stand next to towering, anonymous office buildings. There is even a train, far below, that sits unmoving on tracks that loop between the risers.

What unites the buildings, sites, and vehicles of Exploded City is that all have figured in acts of violence and terrorism over the past two decades. A large, clear plastic legend features renderings of each structure and vehicle located in the model, along with its name, real world locale, and the date(s) it was subject to attack. From the Europa Hotel in Belfast, Ireland, which was damaged 33 times by Provisional IRA bombs between 1972-94, to most recently, the Oberoi, Trident in Mumbai, which was taken over in the 2008 terrorist attacks on that city, Ögüt has assembled a condensed, three-dimensional map of terrorism’s far-reaching geography.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us wouldn’t be able to identify by sight many of the buildings Ögüt has selected, or be able to piece together what grim distinction they all share. It is an ignorance set into relief by constantly going between the model and the wall key, connecting a particle board and plastic stand-in to some real life tragedy, the details of which we can only ascertain through our own empathetic imaginations. (Ögüt doesn’t give any information about how many unsuspecting people were killed at each site, or for which cause others willingly gave their lives.)

This makes the absence of the Twin Towers from Exploded City all the more pointed (the Oklahoma Federal Building is included). Ögüt’s decision to sidestep what has become a fetish object for the right wing — one that the Bush administration used to justify the atrocities depicted in Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings, also currently on view at BAM — and instead focus on those sites which history has perhaps already forgotten, such as the two Afghani homes that were both accidentally bombed during wedding receptions, is a humbling reminder that no country or philosophy has a purchase on tragedy.

At the same time, Exploded City is not simply a necropolis. Ögüt has referred to his piece as a “3-D archive,” an index to be searched through and activated, rather than as, say, a memorial. Perhaps in a nod to its first Venetian home, a second, lengthy wall text describes the installation from the point of view of Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s 1972 book Invisible Cities, in which Polo spends his days recounting fantastic cities from his voyages to the Kublai Khan. “This city is from the future,” Ögüt’s text reads. “Those who live there have emigrated from faraway lands, with dreams of traveling to the future. When they realized that there was no finding the future, they decided to build this city.”

A city of the future imagined by inhabitants whose real world futures would invariably be violently curtailed, Exploded City is a utopia in all senses of the word: an ideal that can never exist. Ögüt’s Polo describes meeting residents who can detail the exact manner in which they will die, and yet, it is implied, more will come to the site of the Exploded City to rebuild over their remains and the cycle will start anew. Ögüt’s model city captures that moment in freeze-frame, following the advice for survival that Calvino’s Polo dispenses at the novel’s end: “See and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

AHMET ÖGÜT: EXPLODED CITY/MATRIX 231

Through April 11, $5–$8 (free for Berkeley students/staff, and children under 12)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

Clouds and mirrors

1

Carl Fisher turned a mosquito-plagued, malarial sandbar into Miami Beach, “The Sun and Fun Capital of The World,” in less than a decade — dredging up sea bottom to build the island paradise, an all-American Las Vegas-by-the- Sea, where Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason partied and Richard Nixon received two Republican nominations for president. Art Deco hotels lined the beach, bold as Cadillacs, defiant in the path of hurricanes, their confident Modern lines projecting postwar American power. Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainebleau Hotel, understood that the skin-deep city Fisher conjured out of neon and sunshine was a stage for the leisure fantasies of the ruling class. When his iconic Collins Avenue hotel opened in 1954, Lapidus said he wanted to design a place “where when (people) walk in, they do feel ‘This is what I’ve dreamed of, this is what we saw in the movies.'”

For many years in Miami, that movie was Scarface, as Colombian drug lords shot it out in mall parking lots. A shiny new downtown skyline of banks and condos emerged during a recession economy from the laundered proceeds of drug smuggling. Today the cocaine cowboys have all died, or done their time and moved on. Their descendents are selling art.

Art Basel came to Miami Beach in 2002, and the rise of Miami as an international art world capital neatly coincided with the glory days of the housing bubble. According to Peter Zalewski of Condovulture.com, around 23,000 new condo units were built in and around downtown Miami during the Art Basel era — twice the amount built in the 40 previous years. The success of the international art exhibition has inspired a fever dream among city leaders, in which Miami’s skyline and neighborhoods are radically transformed by art world-related real estate development.

Cesar Pelli’s $461 million, 570,000-square-foot Carnival Center for the Performing Arts opened in 2006 in a moribund section of downtown known for its proximity to the faded 1970s-era mall, the Omni. That same year, the Miami Art Museum (MAM) hired as its new director Terence Riley, the former curator for architecture and design at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Heralded in his new city as “the Robert Moses of the new Miami millennium,” Riley initiated the development of Museum Park. This 29-acre complex would be home to new buildings for the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. It was to be built on the site of Miami’s last public waterfront park, Bicentennial Park, long a sort-of autonomous zone for Miami’s homeless residents. While the new MAM is not scheduled for completion until 2013, by 2007, a 50-floor, 200-unit luxury condo development, 10 Museum Park, had already been finished across the street.

Art Basel Miami Beach brings an estimated 40,000 people to Miami each year to look at art, party, and more important, look at celebrities as they look at art and party. The art fair, once dubbed “the planet’s highest concentration of wealth and talent,” generates an estimated $500 million in art sales each year. Yet while Miami leaders seek to present to the world Basel’s image of wealth and glamour, the iconic image of South Florida today has abruptly become the newly built and entirely empty condo development. Zalewski estimates that 40% of the condo units built since 2003 remain unsold. Florida’s foreclosure rate is the second-highest in the nation, and for the first time since World War II, people are leaving Florida faster than they are arriving. Just months before this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, a New York Times cover story told of the lone occupant in a towering Broward County condo that had gone entirely into foreclosure. As the fair approached, I wondered: can art really save a city like Miami? Or is its reliance on art world money part of the city’s collapse?

ATLANTIS CITY

At this year’s Art Basel, the glitz was, of course, played down, what with the global economic collapse and Art Basel’s main corporate sponsor, top Swiss bank UBS, now the subject of an FBI probe on charges of helping billionaire clients evade taxes. In the weeks before the opening of the fair, it was announced that the legendary UBS free caviar tent would not be open this year. One could not help but notice that the ice sculptures on the beach itself, hallmarks of the recent boom, were gone, already as fabled as the lost city of Atlantis.

Still, the epic “Arts and Power” issue of Miami magazine hit the stands on time, luxurious full-color spreads on oversize glossy pages. Press from all over the world wrote a month’s worth of previews leading up to the event, and on the day of the VIP vernissage, TV news reporters from all continents were there to dutifully record the arrivals of billionaires, celebrities, and fashion models at the Miami Beach Convention Center. As Art Basel Miami Beach 2009 opened, the floor of the convention center was eerily quiet, with hardly a sound except a hushed, determined whisper a bit like paper money being rubbed together. It seemed to me like everyone was doing her or his part, as if the whole art fair was a sort of performance art piece demonstrating the vigor of the free market in dark times.

This murmur ceased completely, and the air filled with the muted clicking of camera shutters, as Sylvester Stallone passed me on the convention floor. Stallone, too, was stoic, his expression hidden by dark sunglasses at mid-day. He stopped next to me and began to talk to TV news cameras about his own paintings on display, presented by the gallery Gmurzynska. Close-up and in person, clumps of the actor’s face, now just inches from mine, seemed to lay inert and dead like the unfortunate globs of oil paint he had arranged on his own canvasses. Pieces of puffy cheek hung limp and jowly under taut eyebrow skin, Botox and facelifts fighting age for control. For a paparazzi flashbulb moment, I thought I saw in Rambo’s sagging face a metaphor for the doomed efforts to prop up a whole failing way of life.

The Miami Beach Convention Center’s 500,000 square feet had been blocked out into booths and concourses that comprised a pseudo-city of art. As a city, it most resembled some parts of the new Manhattan — crowded yet curiously hollowed out and lifeless, under relentless surveillance, full of nostalgia for its former, more vital self. Groundbreaking art that once had the power to shock, move, or startle — Rauschenberg’s collages, Richard Prince’s Marlboro men, Barbara Krueger’s text block barrages — were presented here as high-priced real estate. In the city of art, time stood still; Matisse, de Kooning, and Duchamp had all retired to the same street. A sailor portrayed in a 2009 life-size portrait by David Hockney seemed to gaze wistfully across the hall toward a 1981 silk-screened print of a dollar sign by Andy Warhol. The life-size portraits by Kehinde Wiley felt just like the city in summer, how the radio of every passing car seems to be blasting the same song. A print of a photo of Warhol and Basquiat together in SoHo stood catty-corner to a 1985 Warhol paining of the text, “Someone Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building.”

I wondered if this city of art offered clues as to the kind of city that developers imagined Miami might become.

ART MAUL

Across Biscayne Bay, away from Miami Beach in the city of Miami, the fever dream of art was turning a down-and-out neighborhood in the poorest city in America into an outdoor art mall. Fifteen satellite art fairs and 60 galleries staged simultaneous exhibitions in Miami during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach. Virtually all this art was crammed into about 80 square blocks north of downtown Miami, bisected by North Miami Avenue. The area included Miami’s African American ghetto, Overtown, the warehouse district of the low rent Puerto Rican neighborhood, Wynwood, and the resurgent Miami Design District up to its shifting borders with Little Haiti.

Walking up North Miami Avenue and Northwest Second Avenue the night before the exhibitions began, I could see the usually moribund main drags transforming before my eyes. Warehouses vacant the other 50 weeks of the year were hastily being turned into galleries or party spaces. Solely for Art Basel week, the Lower East Side hipster bar Max Fish had built an exact replica of its Ludlow Street digs in an Overtown storefront. In Wynwood, the paint still appeared wet on a fresh layer of murals and graffiti running up and down the streets.

The modern-day Carl Fisher most perhaps most responsible for dredging this new art world Miami up from the bottom of the sea is Craig Robins. “I transformed the image of my city from Scarface into Art Deco,” is how Robins put it when I talked to him in the Design District offices of his development firm, Dacra. Widely considered to be the person who brought Art Basel to Miami Beach, Robins is, at a youthful 46, the man who perhaps more than anyone embodies the values and tastes of a new Miami where art and real estate have become as inseparable as fun and sun. Robins takes art seriously — he is a major collector of artists like John Baldessari, Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Richard Tuttle — and he made his name and fortune by restoring the derelict Art Deco motels on his native Miami Beach during the early 1990s into the international high-end tourist destination now known as South Beach. Today Robins is one of the principal owners of the warehouses in the Miami Design District and Wynwood.

With his casual dress, shaved head, and stylish Euro glasses, Robins could easily fit in as one of the German tourists who flock to the discos on the South Beach that he developed. His offices offer a rotating display of the works of art in his collection. Around the time of Art Basel, his staff had installed many works by the SoCal conceptual artist John Baldessari, in honor of Baldessari’s upcoming career retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. Robins was friendly and projected a relaxed cool; when I’d met him on the convention center floor and asked for an interview, he gave me an affectionate shoulder squeeze and said, “Call my assistant and we’ll hang, OK?” A few days later, he grinned somewhat impishly when I sat down said, “I notice you sat in the Martin Bas chair,” as if it was a Rorschach test. Honestly, it was the only piece of furniture in the design collector’s office that looked dependably functional.

Not surprisingly, Robins was adept at explaining the art theory behind his development projects, and the ways Dacra is bringing art, design, and real estate together “to make Miami a brand name.” He said he learned from the successful preservation of historic buildings in his South Beach projects that consumers were starting to reject the cookie-cutter commodities of the mall and “starting to value unique experiences” made from “a combination of permanent and temporary things.” On the streets of the Design District and Wynwood, Robins sought to bring together restaurants, fashion showrooms, and high-end retail stores, surrounded by parties, international art shows, and public art. “This gives a richness to the experience of Miami,” Robins said. “That is the content that Miami is evolving toward right now.” I thought of Lapidus, the Godfather of Art Deco, and his quote about the Fontainebleau: In Wynwood, Robins wanted to turn not just a hotel lobby but an entire neighborhood into a place where visitors feel they have entered a movie.

Robins grew more excited as he discussed his vision. “With my work at Dacra, I build communities,” he told me. “When we brought Art Basel here, Miami immediately became recognized as a world-class city.”

Others are skeptical. “Miami will always be an attractive place for people to visit in December, but you can’t graft culture onto a city,” says Alan Farago of the widely read blog Eye On Miami. “It’s a mistaken belief that art can be a totem or a symbol of a great city without there being any substance. Miami will continue to be a pretender because there is no investment in local culture beyond building massive edifices like the Performing Arts Center.”

Indeed, the center — now renamed the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center, in honor of a wealthy benefactor — has become perhaps another in a long line of tragicomic failed improvements for the area. Bunker-like, it has been likened by some architecture critics to an upside-down Jacuzzi. Though 20 years in the making and long heralded by boosters as a building that would instantly make Miami a “world-class city,” the center has operated at a deficit and suffered from poor attendance since its opening. The future of Museum Park suddenly turned cloudy a month before the opening of this year’s Art Basel, when Miami Art Museum director Terrence Riley unexpectedly resigned days after unveiling the architects Herzog and de Meuron’s final model for the new buildings. Riley sited a desire to return to private practice as an architect, but online speculation had it that he already knew cash-strapped Miami would ultimately be unable to raise the money to build the museum.

Farago wonders what would change if the city did have the money. “In Miami on one hand, we have public school teachers using their own salaries to buy art supplies for their students,” he says. “Then we have these one-off art events and a performing arts center that brings us road shows of Rent, Annie, and 101 Dalmatians.”

When I asked Robins what lasting benefits Art Basel provided to the community, he cited a roster of new restaurants opened by star chefs and fashion showrooms. “It encourages people to come down here year-round,” he said. It was clear that Robins was discussing amenities designed for tourists, or for a speculative community of future residents who might be enticed to come to Miami.

I suggested that there were actually two different communities in Wynwood with potentially opposing interests. I told Robins I’d attended a community meeting held by the activist groups Power University and the Miami Workers Center. There, Wynwood residents discussed how their rents had doubled, how the city continued to neglect the facilities at Roberto Clemente Park, and how the increased presence of police escorting the art patrons to the new galleries had made them feel like they didn’t belong in their own neighborhood.

Robins, who had been very loose and calm during the first 45 minutes of our talk, became visibly upset. He launched into a sustained rant. “Well, look, active communities are a good thing,” he said, shaking his head. “But just because a community is active doesn’t mean it is rational. You go and sit in these meetings and half the people are nuts. Half are just there because they are miserable people and they have some soapbox to go and rant about all these things that they think they have some entitlement to attack government about when they never do anything themselves for anyone. I find that 20 percent of these people are totally irrational, mean-spirited people who would never agree with anyone about anything good.”

“What kind of people do you mean?” I asked.

“People who feel disenfranchised! They’re very angry. They have psychological problems and they want a forum to vent. I’m not implying we should stifle democracy — I’m a big believer in it! I’m saying these people should not be taken seriously by enlightened people!”

Robins rose to look at a clock on his desk. Not surprisingly, our time was up. I politely excused myself to the restroom. When I returned it was like no tantrum had ever happened. Robins’ impish grin even returned as I asked him to pose for a photo in front of one of his Baldessari prints. I had him stand in front of Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That are Different (By Sight/ First Version), a 1972-3 triptych of photos. As the artist looks into a mirror at clouds over his shoulder in the sky, he blows out a mouthful of twisting cigar smoke, trying to match their elusive shape in the air.

GIMME DANGER

Out on the streets of Wynwood, it was still mostly quiet, expectant, but the scene at David Lynch’s art opening gave one a sense of what the coming weekend would be like. Lynch was presenting photos from a book of staged stills he is releasing with a CD of music by Danger Mouse. Hundreds of hipsters, mostly locals, guzzled free booze and gawked when new Miami resident Iggy Pop showed up, shirtless as usual, in a Miami Vice-style blue blazer. As I watched the Godfather of Punk pose for pictures with his arm around Danger Mouse, I thought of the city of art, the Jackson Pollacks and Donald Judds together at last, on the convention center floor. I had the eerie feeling that the Internet had come to life.

I left the opening and walked at random through the streets of Wynwood at 2:00 a.m. While looking at murals and thinking about the changes Art Basel had wrought, I unexpectedly came upon a small street party of people I knew. The side street intersection was lit up like a stage with an enormous floodlight. Street artist SWOON stood high on a scissor lift, painting a mural on a warehouse wall, while below a couple of kids dressed like old tramps wrestled with a big, brown stuffed bear.

The bear split open, and thousands of tiny white particles of stuffing poured out into a warm Miami breeze, swirling high into the air and reflecting the glow from the floodlight. I ran to join the kids, who were now playing and laughing in the sudden snowstorm. A guy I recognized from Brooklyn rode by on a tall bike. Bay Area artist Monica Canilao went careening by on a scooter with no helmet. A cop drove by and smiled and waved. Guys from Overtown with cornrows and gold teeth were laying out a spread of huge chicken legs on a flaming grill. Some punk kids from Brooklyn sat on the curb, drinking beer. A girl in the group laid her head on a boy’s shoulder as they all watched SWOON work.

For a second, I flashed back to the Stallone scene earlier in the day, back on the convention floor. Here, in this intersection, I had found something living and breathing. This could be the real city of art. But I also knew the SWOON mural was commissioned by Jeffrey Deitch. I stood and watched the painting and the dancing and laughing and eating in the fake December snowstorm and contemplated what the city would be like if we all had the free time, resources, and permission to take to the streets and transform the city any way we pleased. Was this a window to a different world where anything might be possible?

Or was it just art?

The second half of this essay will run in the Jan. 27 Guardian. *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Art, work, and artwork

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VISUAL ART The global financial crisis continues to impoverish and displace those within reach of its residual tremors. Yet in the art realm, there have been signs of hope. Recent fairs — Frieze Art Fair in October and Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month — brought reports of strong sales and optimism within the distressed economy. So why are artists everywhere worried about their futures, and more critically, panicking about their present tenses? The squeeze has to do with the work in artwork. More often than not, artists aren’t getting paid for their work.

The general prosperity of the current art market does not reflect the financial success of most artists — it just means that artworks are selling, and many of those works are by artists who are already established or dead. The other artists, the worried ones, the ones scraping by on paint chips and uncreative, menial part-time jobs and unpaid internship after unpaid internship, are starting to organize. And talk. Worried as well, I recently attended two events, one in New York and the other in Oakland, that call for a shift of terrain in art/work.

The New York event, titled, “What Is the Good of Work?” — the second in a four-part series organized by Goethe-Institut New York — was more abstract in its approach, seeking to redefine work through film and literature. For instance, when British novelist Tom McCarthy roused Herman Melville’s character Bartleby in order to express the potentials of “recess” in a “recession” and promote a politics of pause as escapist rather than reactionary, an audience member inquired: “But how can this be implemented in real life?” Here, McCarthy went quiet. The rest of the panel, too, including the nihilist philosopher Simon Critchley, only seemed capable of speculating on a new function of work, as opposed to how this new work would, well, work.

Comparatively, the Oakland event was more concerned with brass tacks. Organized by Sight School, an artist-run storefront newly opened in November, its aim “to create dialogue around new modes of living and being in the world in order to reveal connections between art and life” was actually visualized.

The evening began with local artists and writers reading primarily from a newspaper compiled by the Chicago-based collective Temporary Services. In it, more than 40 artists and writers pinpoint problematic issues and propose a way out. The front page introduction succinctly outlines its motivations:

We can see how the collapse of the economy is affecting everyone. Something must be done. Let’s talk. No, it can’t wait. Things are bad. We have to work things out. We can only do it together. What do we know? What have others tried? What is possible? How do we talk about it? What are the wildest possibilities? What are the pragmatic steps? What can you do? What can we do?

FREE / TAKE A COPY. MAKE AN EXHIBITION.

HOST A DISCUSSION IN YOUR TOWN.

The urgency of this situation was emphasized most strongly by Julian Myers, an assistant professor of curatorial practice at California College of the Arts. He fervently read the group Research and Destroy’s “Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life,” which was drafted in response to the current University of California crises. Myers conveyed the text’s uncomfortably accurate detail of a bankrupt future not just for students, but anyone not already financially secure. The text incensed everyone in the room, as they realized the gravity of student debts and of academia as a new factory — a neverending rabbit hole of false security.

The last reader, Natasha Wheat, decided not to read at all; rather, she turned to the audience and asked, “What does a just art economy looks like?” Immediately, people chimed in. The space turned into a sauna of conjectures, arguments, personal anecdotes, and pleas. A variety of ideas and subjects — everything from emphasizing the importance of guilds and collectives to providing braces for children — were bandied about. These rants often lacked direction. Many were fueled by emotion and gave way to incomprehensible babble about new economies without realizing the previous paths paved by Marx, Adam Smith, and Keynes. But the passion, heretofore dormant, was inspiring.

Interestingly, the only thing missing from all the cries of desperation was a focus on artwork itself. In this small storefront room, everyone — artists, writers, curators, historians, and spectators — was hyper-aware about the lack of funding. But ironically, art had gone missing as well. Not many will disagree with the assertion that workers deserve payment for their labor, but what if their work blows? If I actively paint a canvas for eight hours a day, and no one finds it of value, why should I get paid? If money were a given, we’d all be doodling for dollars.

Zachary Royer Scholz, one of the readers and most intelligent contributors to the discussions, ended the event with a similar concern. He shifted the blame away from the economy and back toward the art. “Canada has strong government and institutional funding for its artists, but look at its art … it sucks!” Just then, a man on the opposite side of the room descended on Scholz, barking in protest. His ass-length dreads swung in tandem with his raised fists. It looked like a fight might break out, but the affront turned out to be performative — the room was filled with artists, after all.

I don’t find it coincidental that Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Essays On Beauty (University of Chicago Press, 152 pages, $22) stirred from its coma this year. Its polemics could not be revived at a better time. First released in 1993, the book has been out of print for several years. Hickey originally pulled the plug because the “intensity and icy aggression” of The Invisible Dragon’s provocation was too great. In other words, people were pissed because Hickey insisted on the importance of art’s beauty.

In the collection’s first essay, “Enter The Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,” Hickey argues that beauty has been replaced by meaning, and laments the art market baton swap from art dealers to institutions. “The institution’s curators hold a public trust,” Hickey writes. “They must look attentively and genuinely care about what artists mean, and what this meaning means in a public context — and, therefore, almost of necessity, they must distrust appearances.”

The problem, according to Hickey, parallels the one in Michel Foucault’s 1975’s Discipline and Punish, wherein punishment shifts from the external, via physical torture as public spectacle, to the internal — torture of the soul and mind via incarceration and criminal psychiatry. In effect, it’s a shift of gaze and surveillance: we now internalize this gaze and monitor ourselves.

But what does this have to do with art? Art limited to meaning loses its subversive potential; it gets too worried and existential. By contrast, allowing art to express itself through appearances also allows it to find new folds within an otherwise predetermined economy of signs — an economy controlled exclusively by arts institutions.

I imagine if Hickey had been in that room that evening, he would have stood up early on to demand that everyone stop acting like economists: You’re artists, dammit. You’re not here to fix the economy, you’re here to create things. Now go out and make shit — but for Christ’s sake, make it beautiful. *

www.sightschool.wordpress.com; www.temporaryservices.org

Glitchy kisses

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marke@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART "I’m interested in the destruction of everything. I was the kid who screwed up all his toys," Toban Nichols (www.tobannichols.com) says over the phone from his studio in Los Angeles. The longtime San Francisco resident and multimedia artist is still unpacking from his recent move to the capital of schmooze, but he’s been frantically yo-yoing up to the Bay to attend three concurrent gallery openings, a "trilogy of terror," of his work here. "It’s been very weird, to put it mildly. I moved to L.A. partly out of frustration with my lack of traction in the San Francisco art world, and then as soon as I get down here I’m offered three shows at once. Maybe I should have moved sooner."

Maybe he should have, although the gay club scene sure misses his smiling presence and that of his DJ husband, Jonathan. Slyly undermining notions of camp and kitsch with painterly electronic fuck-ups, Nichols’ work is as varied as it is entrancing. And the exciting threesome of shows introduces a trio of delectably unique lines of aesthetic inquiry that will tickle any deconstructivist’s — queer or otherwise — mental bone. Shall we count them off?

JIGSAWMENTALLAMA This sundry group show at David Cunningham Projects contains works from Nichols glitchy-smeary "Lockup" series, summoning contemporary architectural forms and based on machine error. If Gerhard Richter appropriated Amon Tobin CD covers, you’d probably get something like Nichols’s Giclée prints "Appaloosa" and "Unicorn," both from 2008. Other entries in the "Lockup" series keep the sharp and sensuous rainbow smudges but introduce fields of gray or black hatch marks that bring to mind both industrial metal ramping and early post-punk 12-inch single artwork. Nichols trained as a painter, but moved on when he felt painting "wasn’t speaking" to him. "I now start with a photographic image —and through a computer process I discovered completely by accident, overtax the output until it’s corrupted in a way I like," he says. In a wonderful related series, appropriately titled "Overtax," which you can see at his Web site, Nichols eerily haywires a Windows force-quit error box into an apocalyptic sleigh ride.

Through Dec. 19, free. David Cunningham Projects, 1928 Folsom, SF. www.davidcunninghamprojects.com

"THE TRAGEDY COLLECTION" Bewitched, bothered, bewildered — the "Tragedy Collection," five pieces of which are on display on the fourth floor of the LGBT Center, hilariously filters televised camp iconography through Nichols’ handheld: "I wanted to create something accessible to show I could do it, so I took pictures of the TV with my crappy cell phone and printed them." Dynasty‘s Joan Collins gnawing on a chicken bone, Tyra Banks’ legendary Top Model freakout, Bewitched‘s Agnes Moorehead hissing like a cat on a rack … the prints somehow update queer histrionics while burying traditional camp sensibilities deeper than Susan Sontag.

Through Jan. 10, 2010, free. San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center, 1800 Market, SF. www.sfcenter.org

"OPPROBRIUM" Nichols’ show at Adobe Books, opening Dec. 11, is a meditative compression of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manners (Conde Nast, 1969). "That book is so funny. It’s completely outdated, full of advice that’s so alien to contemporary readers. When you read it today there’s all kinds of complex humor from a feminist and class perspective. But that humor was on too many levels for me, I wanted to shrink it into a single joke. So I thought, ‘Why not hire an engineer to write an algorithm that replaces every third word with PUSSY?’ So I did." Two copies of the book will be on display as well as a deliberately loopy video of Nichols’ artist statement — "Who wants to stand around and read something long on a wall?" — featuring a voiceover by comedian Deven Green of Brenda Dixon parody and "Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else" YouTube fame, "plus some random images, whatever".

Opening reception Thursday, Dec. 11, 7 p.m.-9 p.m, free. Through Jan. 10, 2010. Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, 3166 16th St., SF. adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com

Crosses and losses

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART "Amish Abstractions," the de Young Museum’s exhibition of 48 quilts made primarily by anonymous Amish girls and women, gains its conceptual interest from the unusual pairing of the words Amish and abstraction.

The collectors of these quilts were initially drawn to them by their similarity to works by 20th century abstract artists. While the attendant monograph asserts this juxtaposition several times, within the show itself you only get a disclaimer by curator Robert Shaw. "Many have compared the abstract geometry of Amish quilts to the works of acclaimed modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Victor Vasarely," he writes. "Any such comparisons are problematic, however, because they are built on visual coincidence, not on any documented historical connection or known influence in either direction."

The collectors behind "Amish Abstraction," Faith and Stephen Brown, add Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt to such a list. Still, with the exception of Albers, and to a lesser degree Stella and Vasarely, the visual coincidence feels forced. As Shaw points out, it’s a big leap from the ideals of Abstract Expressionism to the ideals of Amish culture: submission to a masculine God, submission to husband and father, humility, community. We are told by the exhibition notes that the quilts are "individual and expressive" and "contradict our preconceptions of Amish society," but there is little exploration of how, why, or where this might be the case within in a culture that restricts both self-expression and self-representation.

Having actually slept under frumpier and more polyester Amish quilts — ones my Amish grandmother and cousins made — I came to this show with low expectations. The quilts, however, are stunning. The concentration of geometric patterns, optical illusions, and bright colors create an energy in the room that feels anything but Amish. The quilts suggest extravagance, hedonism, and the revolt of the body against whatever abstract principle might be crushing it.

It certainly seems that these Amish women might have intuited aspects of Albers’ color theory. Their optical illusions are considerably more restrained than Vasarely’s, and the palette considerably more subdued than Stella’s. Few rainbows here; the Amish women favored black backgrounds and less busy juxtapositions that allow a sense of calm to pervade the constant movement suggsted by the patterns. Yet even the names of some of the patterns are hallucinogenic: Crazy Quilt, Jacob’s Ladder, Crosses and Losses, Old Maid’s Puzzle, Stairway to Heaven, Broken Star, Crazy Star, Sunshine and Shadow.

The radiance and abstraction of the quilts in "Amish Abstractions" suggest transcendence, deep spiritual harmonies, and the pleasures to be found in egolessness. In our own culture, with its pathological celebration of self and merging of personality and advertising, the idea of dispensing with the ego altogether might seem healthy. As Shaw says, "[The quilters] proceed from the place modern artists sought to find, and they reflect the stoic quietude of the Amish — their rich interior world of spiritual calm, shared values, and mutually beneficial self-denial."

The curators do an excellent job of elucidating, in very specific ways, the relationships between Amish and non-Amish communities, and the relationships between quilting patterns and specific local Amish traditions. They discuss the evolution of these specific traditions, but by restricting the quilts on display to the period from 1880 to 1940, they have trapped the Amish in the past, before the widespread use of synthetic fabrics or the "discovery" of Amish quilts by the art market.

Suggesting that historical specificity doesn’t apply to the timeless Amish, the large blow-up photographs throughout the exhibit of Amish children playing and Amish men building barns freeze the Amish in a different past. The photographs date from the 1980s, before the disappearance of affordable farmland sent young Amish men into factories, and before the Amish brand was tainted by meth-fueled megaparties of Amish kids on rumspringa and reality TV shows about corrupting "the innocent."

Since the 1930s, the major function of the Amish, for Americans in general, has been to represent an innocence the rest of us have supposedly lost. America, like the Amish, is imagined to have once been peaceful, rural, white, and untroubled by introspection. But surrounded by the bold colors and intricate stitching of "Amish Abstractions," it is easy to imagine that the Amish women who created them were secret sensualists or feminist mystics. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess they were created by revolutionary cells, possibly lesbians, who drank mushroom tea and let their hair out of their bonnets while their men were out working the fields.

But I do know better. My Amish grandmother was a young woman in Ohio during the 1930s, and so it is possible, although not likely, that she had a hand in one or two of the quilts on display. She left behind a written record of her life, condensed from diaries, a litany marked by births, weddings, and deaths, barns struck by lightning ("There was nothing to do but let it burn …"), accidents and near-accidents, bedbugs and prayer, dead children and epidemics of diptheria, influenza, whooping cough, measles, and delirium. This record is more than 100 pages long, and at times incredibly detailed about trips taken, people visited, and beets canned. Yet three years pass in a single paragraph which begins, "In the summer of 1945 I had a nervous breakdown." My father remembered little about his mother’s "nervous breakdown," but he thought she had probably been given some tranquilizers.

For the Amish, what a person might feel or want is never removed from what the community demands, from the work to be done, and from theological doctrine. Whether this constitutes spiritual calm and mutually beneficial self-denial or deeply oppressive self-abnegation is another question.

AMISH ABSTRACTIONS: QUILTS FROM THE COLLECTION OF FAITH AND STEPHEN BROWN

Through June 6, 2010

de Young Museum

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive

Golden Gate Park, SF

(415) 750-3600

www.famsf.org