• No categories

Visual Art

“Bernd & Hilla Becher: A Survey – 1972-2006”

-
0

REVIEW The problem, or perhaps the benefit, of a survey of photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher in an environment like the Fraenkel Gallery is the institutional quality the space projects onto the work. Although a sense of sterility is key to the Bechers’ photography, and while it can be contended that the 49 Geary Street site only accentuates the Bechers’ attempt at objectivity, such a setting also brings the success of the work in the marketplace to the fore, rather than providing a hermetic environment in which to operate.

This conundrum is interesting in light of the deadpan documentation of the water towers, grain elevators and blast furnaces that are the subject of the Bechers’ black-and-white photographs and, seemingly, the Fraenkel show. Arranged in grids for side-by-side comparison, each industrial structure is consistently the same size within its frame. As a result, there is a sense of impartiality, which prompts a discourse between the documented structures and, more broadly, between each photograph. The Bechers’ appear to be simultaneously operating within a system and outside a system. They implement something akin to a turn-of-the-century scientific classificatory technique in which the camera is used to document a subject’s unique features, but they also aestheticize the subject.

Bit the neutral stance of the Bechers’ photographs eschews Blossfeldt-like modeling. Instead, it appears to take cues from the Bauhausian model — one in which the built environment was celebrated, along with the camera, as archetypically modern. Yet while both styles of photography might be influences (perhaps especially so because of the couple’s respective academic training), the Bechers’ photography consistently removes clear reference points. Because of this, the stance of the gallery in which the work is exhibited becomes more apparent. Despite its prime examples from — and comprehensive look at — the German couple’s work, this survey situates their photography within a historical context rather than accentuating its conceptual relevance.

BERND & HILLA BECHER: A SURVEY — 1972-2006 Through Fri/3. Tues–Fri, 10:30–5:30 a.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary, SF. (415) 981-2661. www.fraenkelgallery.com

“Intricacies of Phantom Content” and Trickle-down: Yours for the Mining

-
0

REVIEW Diamonds are certainly Hilary Pecis’ and Elyse Mallouk’s best friends. But even though the sparklers in their complimentary exhibits at Triple Base Gallery let off a familiar, enticing shine, do they reveal new facets?

Like antlers, rainbows, and feathers, gemstones and crystal-inspired geometric forms have bobbed to the surface as a motif of the zeitgeist, as seen both on gallery walls and the loud prints and new rave colors that adorn the merchandise at Urban Outfitters (not to mention Lady Gaga’s day-to-day wardrobe). I don’t fault Pecis’ art for its timing. Her untitled ink, collage, and acrylic laden panels, which intertwine black and white geometric patterns, gems galore, and cutout twists of metal and hair into eye-shredding nebulas, are indeed beautifully executed and easy to get lost in. But I wonder if their very au courant palette doesn’t time-stamp them to their disadvantage. Her acrylic paintings — all kaleidoscopic close-ups of Krypton-like surfaces, mostly in shades of gray — make a stronger case with their restraint. The continued influence of the original class Mission Schoolers (Alicia McCarthy, please raise your hand) have on younger local artists is striking.

One has to descend into the bowels of the Earth, as it were, to see Mallouk’s punnily-titled video installation Trickle-down: Yours for the Mining. A bare bulb scarcely illuminates a stack of diamond drawings (which viewers are invited to take). With the flick of a switch, the drawings come to life as the blackened space suddenly, literally, drips in a video projection of sparkling animated stones. Like the rhinestone cascade in the opening credit sequence of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life — itself already redone by filmmaker Matt Wolf in the sweet short Imitation of Imitation — Mallouk’s diamante mirrorball cannily reflects the emotional and material investments we make in artifice; art itself notwithstanding. Space may be the place upstairs, but I’m gonna side with Etta James on this one: in the basement, that’s where it’s at.

INTRICACIES OF PHANTOM CONTENT AND TRICKLE-DOWN: YOURS FOR THE MINING Through July 26. Triple Base, 3041 24th St., SF. (415) 643-3943. www.basebasebase.com

“2012: Super-Bato Saves the World”

-
0

REVIEW Energy must not be conserved in Enrique Chagoya’s universe. From his earlier pieces on paper through his show-stopping work on linen at the turn of the century (Le Cannibale Moderniste, 1999; Aparición Sublime, 2000; Pocahontas Gets a New Passport (More Art Faster), 2000), the experimental printmaker’s mock-specificity and hidden sensitivity — both aspects of a brilliant pictorial stubbornness — leave the whole body buzzing. This is art that gathers energy from its viewers as much as its subjects. An edition of eight fully-functional, gaudy, lusty, but also mystically calm slot machines in the style of souped-up Camaros, "2012: Super-Bato Saves the World" lacks the intentionally confusing expansiveness of Chagoya’s accompanying work on paper, but maybe that’s the point.

Spread out in one area of Electric Works is Histoire Naturelle des Espécies: Illegal Aliens Manuscript I, a 2008 contribution to an ongoing series that explains our country and the world at large, especially the art world, to "others." In this panoramic piece, creationists are represented by an ape kneeling before a paper-like flame, conservatives by a man in monk’s clothing, and neocons by a happy couple between human and ape; all are setting fire to Aztec iconography. Elsewhere art historians lay siege to the museums and emerging media artists visit the world in a UFO. Around the corner, Super-Bato grins.

The date cited by Chagoya doesn’t just mark the next U.S. presidential election — it’s also the end-year of the ancient Mayan 5125 year calendar. In Chagoya’s eyes, the world might have already ended, collapsing in a mockery of a sham. In addition to an obvious affinity with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s vision (the two have collaborated on some iconic books), Chagoya’s most affecting work here recalls Mildred Howard’s politically charged, lushly wrought assemblage sculptures and intricate installations. Both artists map aesthetic delights on top of the real world. What happens in politics no longer stays in politics.

2012: SUPER-BATO SAVES THE WORLD Through July 2. Electric Works, 130 Eighth St., SF

(415) 626-5496, www.sfelectricworks.com

Recession, renewal

-
0

johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW When it comes to the negative impact that economic recession has upon the art world, there are as many problems as missing dollars. Yet among contemporary artists, such times tend to skew various views back toward those whose work isn’t epically expensive to begin with, a development that can be welcome. Moreover, careful budgeting can inspire reflection rather than a mad dash to acquire the newest, most expensive, and trendiest work.

At least two significant survey shows in 2009 follow this impulse in search of revelation. Next month, SFMOMA is opening "Not New Work," for which artist-curator Vincent Fecteau has selected art owned but rarely-to-never shown by the museum. Currently, Berkeley Art Museum executive director Lawrence Rinder taps into his curatorial insight with "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible in the Night Sky," a multifloor epic exhibition that reveals the breadth of that institution’s art collection, and allows elements of it to ricochet off of each other in provocative ways.

Rinder is no stranger to such huge undertakings, having curated an installment of the Whitney Biennial and also co-conceived the landmark 1995 queer art survey "In a Different Light," one of the Berkeley Art Museum’s largest undertakings and banner shows of the previous decade. With "Galaxy," Rinder’s playful and subtly lively sensibility might even use a recent contemporary BAM exhibition as a trampoline of sorts. Last year, the site played host to Trevor Paglen’s "The Other Night Sky," a present-day photographic installation that provocatively muses on literal presences up above. With "Galaxy," Paglen’s literal stars and spy satellites are traded for the metaphorical celestial brilliance of artwork by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Dürer, Klee, and Rubens. One of the exhibition’s strongest facets is its tremendous array of remarkable etchings and engravings. Blake’s 1825 With Dreams upon My Bed and Behold Now Behemoth Which I Made with Thee are pettily awesome — worth an afternoon worth’s of scrutiny on their own.

While this excavation of canonical treasures tiny and large might be a new endeavor for Rinder, whose focus has primarily been on contemporary art, his selections and their arrangement are designed to trigger unpredictable associations and make a case for some comparatively-undiscovered contemporary local artists, such as Todd Bura. Thus a 2008 ink-on paper piece by Ajit Chauhan — who recently had a terrific show in a small side gallery at the de Young — holds its own and takes on added resonance next to works by Bruce Conner and Barry McGee, who might or might not count as Chauhan’s kin. In Chauhan’s A Mid Summer Night’s Cream … and McGee’s Untitled (2008), patterns of lettering and faces metamorphose into one another. Conner is one of a handful of recurrent artistic presences within "Galaxy" — his reappearance a testimony to his strong but varying presence and his influence upon Bay Area art.

Louise Bourgeois is another signature personality within "Galaxy," an impish creative force that darts in and out of different eras, styles and materials without ever seeming out of place. Rinder’s curatorial freedom allows for elliptical echoes that span centuries and floors of the museum. Bullfighting stampedes into the show in two different galleries, via an 1815-16 etching by Goya and a 1986 geutf8 silver print by Zoe Leonard. Etchings of village life congregate on one wall, landscapes and seascapes occupy a different area, experiments with color join up in groups of three and four. There are wave-like rhythmic patterns to the shifts between large-scale and miniature pieces.

A great sense of detail or flair has been given to the matter of framing many of these works, and Rinder’s use of framing extends to the show itself, which begins and ends with metallic or kinetic sculptural works that evoke Peter Selz’s 1966 Berkeley Art Museum exhibition "Directions in Kinetic Sculpture," while making a case for the tactile today. "Galaxy" begins with spinning metal discs and white button of Harry Kramer’s 1966 Jorg’s Chair, and closes with Edward Krasinski’s well-titled 1964 Perpindiculars in Space and Vassilakis Takis’ 1962-63 Tableau magnetique. In between these, there is a sense of queer flirtation and enjoyable perversity, thanks to the Caravaggio-esque crotch-pointing of Guiovanni Caracciolo’s 1610 oil-on-canvas The Young Saint John in the Wilderness, the eerie singed fringes of David Dashiell’s Dionysian 1992 Study for Queer Mysterties, the deathly delicacy of D-L Alvarez’s 1992 "In a Different Light" contribution Shawl (a net made of hair that likely degrades or is at least altered each time it is shown or moved), and a 1947 foam breast by Marcel Duchamp which asks to be touched.

Associations aside, "Galaxy" also is remarkable simply for exposing works so powerful that they stand alone. Such is the case with a 1955 untitled painting by Clyfford Still that takes the visceral and mortal concerns of the show into its deepest sense of experience. Gazing at this work is like passing through a threshold of elemental muck. In Still’s colors, beauty and horror entwine.

GALAXY: A HUNDRED OR SO STARS VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE

Through Aug. 30

Berkeley Art Museum

2625 Durant, Berk

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

“Leave the Capital”

-
0

PREVIEW What is it with Bay Area group art shows named after album and song titles by the Fall? Last month brought "I Am Kurious Orange," an exhibition and performance at David Cunningham Projects that slightly twisted the name of 1988 album by mush-mouth Mark E. Smith’s band. Now comes "Leave the Capital," a different multiartist endeavor that also slightly twists a Fall title, this time from a 1981 song, "Leave the Capitol." As the trade from o to a suggests, the 13 artists involved — including Zoe Crosher, Fang Lu, and Kamau Patton — address the economy and matters of rough trade in manners ranging from overt to oblique. Exit this Roman hell and enter the gallery.

LEAVE THE CAPITAL Sat/13, 7-10 p.m., continues through June 27; $2-$10. Root Division, 3175 17th St, SF. (415) 863-7668. www.rootdivision.org

Looking at ‘Looking In’

-
0

More on SFBG.com:
>>Johnny Ray Huston’s take on the epic SFMOMA Robert Frank retrospective

frank20609.jpg

"All original art looks ugly at first," Clement Greenberg wrote in defense of modern art. Implicit in Greenberg’s statement is the sense that time would eventually vindicate what was seen as anathema to prevailing tastes. Such has been the fate of The Americans, Robert Frank’s once reviled, now iconic photographic poem that traces the warped, smudged, and tattered fabric of our nation. Now 50, Frank’s odd little book (initially published in France in 1958 and brought to these shores the following year by Grove Press) of old glories, hardened faces, ghostly jukeboxes, in-between moments, and public rituals that captured the social inequalities and strangeness entrenched in the everyday of postwar America still cuts to the quick.

Frank, in collaboration with curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has given his magnum opus something of the CSI treatment in "Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans." As its title suggests, "Looking In" offers an expanded view of the original volume’s 83 photographs (displayed in their original order, with each of the book’s four sections in its own gallery), incorporating contact sheets and other behind-the-scenes artifacts from the Guggenheim Fellowship-funded cross-country road trips Frank made with his wife and two kids in 1956 and ’57, as well as selections of Frank’s earlier and later photographic projects. But so much context and annotation to what was, even in the strictest sense, a self-contained work, often results in more noise than signal.

Frank pared his final choices from 20,000 frames, ordering the images in such a way to form daisy chains that relay visual puns, common themes, shared details (a decorative star motif or the position of a hand), and stark contrasts among them. A personal favorite occurs in a series of photographs that touch on driving, in which the tarpaulin covering a ride in Long Beach deflates in the next photo into the cloth draped over a car accident victim in rural Arizona. As with all art, the power and pleasure of viewing The Americans comes in discovering these subtle affinities and motifs by oneself. At times the interpretative cues offered by the explanatory texts all but erect a neon sign directing you toward significance. Some interpretive breathing room would’ve been nice.

Conversely, Frank’s conflicted relationship to his most famous work in the decades following its subsequent reappraisal and canonization by the art world — when he started to turn his attention to filmmaking — is shoehorned into a tantalizing but all too brief section, "Destroying The Americans," at the exhibit’s close. (Sarah Greenough’s excellent catalog essay of the same title goes into further detail.) It is curious to end a retrospective that largely adds to the hagiography already surrounding Frank’s work on such a sour, doubt-filled note. But perhaps it can be read as a warning to those who would be quick to call The Americans merely a reflection of its time. Frank’s "sad poem," as Jack Kerouac dubbed it in his introductory text to the American edition, may no longer look as ugly as it once did. But we are still a nation riddled by racism and poverty, worshipful of false prophets and political theater; a nation of gullible consumers, fervent believers, and drifters forever tethered to the horizon. As Frank himself said in response to initial criticism of the book, "It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness."

That crazy feeling

-
0

>johnny@sfbg.com

369-frank3a.jpg
Robert Frank, “San Francisco, 1956”

The world writes a story far beyond — or deeper and more twist-riddled than — any author’s imagination. How else to explain the fact that Robert Frank’s peerless photographic book The Americans turned 50 the same year that Barack H. Obama was elected president of the United States? Looking in — again, and again — at The Americans, thanks to a handsome new edition (Steidl, 180 pages, $39.95), or at "The Americans," thanks to a traveling exhibition connected to Frank’s landmark work, one finds a vision of this country that is anything but dated.

Jack Kerouac raved about the way Frank captured "that crazy feeling in America," and to be sure, even if his prosaic descriptions of Frank’s photos come off a bit redundant now, there’s still some insightful gold to be gleaned from his observation that Frank was always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins. There’s been no shortage of writing about The Americans since Kerouac’s at-times stifled response. Is there anything left to say about The Americans? If there’s anything left to say about America, the answer is yes.

There are infinite views. One is Frank’s very particular sense of place. For a San Franciscan, that means an untitled image of a couple on Alamo Square, perhaps the most iconic of at least three Bay Area pictures. Frank has cited this photo as his favorite in The Americans, because the facial expressions of the couple he’s caught unaware bring across loud and clear what an intrusive presence the photographer is by nature. But this shot also is a document of the Western Addition when it was a thriving African-American neighborhood. It’s existence confronts the face of San Francisco today.

In a Charleston, S.C., image from The Americans, a pampered, already entitled-looking snow white baby looks out from the cradling arms of a black maid whose face — seen in profile — is more fascinating and harder to read. The picture is a blunt image of race in the South, and of race in America on the eve of civil rights uprisings. It also raises an interesting side question: why did it take European exiles to photographically render that subject with candor? This keepsake of Charleston by the Swiss Frank is the black-and-white counterpart to the Technicolor ironies that German expatriate Douglas Sirk brought to the 1959 version of Imitation of Life. (Racism was flagrantly institutionalized during the making of The Americans, and Frank has long had an critical eye for U.S. institutions — a Frank film series at SFMOMA doesn’t just showcase the Beat work Pull My Daisy, it also includes Me and My Brother (1969) a look at this country’s concepts of mental illness that’s more personal than, and just as direct as, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).)

369-frank4a.jpg
Robert Frank, “US 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas”

For any person who has lived with The Americans — spent time over the years looking through its pages, locking eyes on a particular picture and contemputf8g it — there’s a peculiar card-shuffle déjà vu-gone-slightly-askew-or-anew feeling to encountering the same photos in succession along the walls. This is the experience of looking at "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’" the Frank exhibition currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Alongside rather than on top of one another, an alphabet of American hats point in different directions, each one reflecting a viewpoint. An array of flags mask people’s faces, or point sorrowfully toward the ground.

One facet or extension of "Looking At" explores Frank’s influences, and in turn, his influences on, American photography. To be sure, Diane Arbus’s trannies and butches and Lee Friedlander’s broadcast TVs owe a debt to Frank’s visions of censored-or-taken-for-granted everyday 20th century life. The through line from the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to Frank’s look at a family crammed into a car in Butte, Mont., is obvious. Absent, though, are some definite predecessors and peers. Weegee’s hard-boiled naked city is nowhere to be seen — except in Frank (and frank) images such as one of people in Miami Beach. William Klein’s pictorial rephrasing of urban adspeak is absent save for a look at a department store in Nebraska, an arrow on the wall of a building in Los Angeles, or a newsstand in New York City or a sidewalk in New Orleans.

With one photo in The Americans, Robert Frank maDE gas pumps look like a series of tombstones, all gathered by a sign that declares SAVE. There are legions of artists today making images less contemporary or relevant. Take a look at The Americans, and you’ll find cowboys, starlets, funeral parties, boys in arcades, queens on stoops, leather rebels, bored or contemplative waitresses, street preachers, a parade of pedestrians, wheelers and dealers — and workers. Take another look at The Americans today, 50-plus years after it made its first impression, and you’ll probably find yourself.


LOOKING IN: ROBERT FRANK’S "THE AMERICANS"

Through Aug. 23, free–$15

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

ROBERT FRANK RETROSPECTIVE

Through June 27

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

“Otl Aicher: Munchen 1972” and “Veronica De Jesus: Do the Waive”

-
0

REVIEW The 1972 Munich Olympics is mostly associated with terrorism, with Marc Spitz running a distant second. But Otl Aicher’s graphic design for the event exemplifies the better possibilities of the fusion of humanism and capitalism that characterizes each incarnation of the international event. A member of the White Rose movement and friend of Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were arrested and executed by the Nazis, Aicher later made his name through graphic design concepts that possess a rare fusion of experience and imagination. Three years after his successful branding work for Lufthansa Airlines, Aicher created a friendly yet intricate pictorial language — or pictogram — system for the individual programs, posters, and even tickets of the Munich Games. While many exhibitions fail at presenting graphic design as a form with much soul or personality, "Otl Aicher: München 1972" has no shortage of either — or of refreshingly-deployed color, for that matter. A blue and green oasis within the SFMOMA behemoth, its pleasures spiral outward from the Op Art-like symbol Aicher used for the event’s main icon, into a number of engagingly basic and extremely influential renderings of the body in motion. Or in other words, iconic images of human striving.

The latest show by the contemporary Bay Area artist Veronica De Jesus presents an entirely different take on corporate branding and athleticism — one that nonetheless possesses a friendliness quite akin to Aicher’s work. Viewed alongside "München 1972," De Jesus’s "Do the Waive" comes off even more sharply as a satirical, at times hilarious, but also troubling take on the tyranny of symbols and supposed meanings wielded by the contemporary sports entertainment complex. Simply put, the logos for CNN and Shell don’t have the ingenuity of Aicher’s iconography. When De Jesus renders them — or the trademark colors of McDonald’s — via child-like scrawlings, the taken-for-granted commercialism woven into daily life to influence kids’ aspirant dreams seems questionable and dubious and absurd at its very core. Like Jenny Holzer with a far less dry sense of humor, De Jesus also has a talent for twisting received ideas or language, whether via creative misspelling or isolated bits of media chatter. (Three of her titles: Fry Anyone, Closed for the recession, and my favorite, People are going after the french fries.) "Do the Waive" is packed with treats. I enjoyed the life-size portraits and the connection between homo-affection and homo-aggression drawn — literally — by It’s a Battle and All Hugs. But the best works are smaller ones that layer media babble and athletic imagery into visions that are confusing, exhausting, and attractive all at once, like a day’s journey through an empire of signs.

OTL AICHER: MÜNCHEN 1972 Through July 7, free–$15. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

VERONICA DE JESUS: DO THE WAIVE Through June 16. Michael Rosenthal, 365 Valencia, SF. (415) 522-1010, www.rosenthalgallery.com

MORE AT SFBG.COM

This week’s museum and gallery listings.

Now you see him

-
0

It takes a lot to get your head around William Kentridge. His nebulous existence in the world of modern art makes him a slippery figure, able to exist between things we can name. Though he is an internationally known South African artist who works in etches, collages, sculptures, and performance (SFMOMA recently presented his rendition of Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses), he is best known for his "cartoons."

As on view in the current exhibition "William Kentridge: Five Themes," Kentridge’s animated drawings are sublime, provocative, and mesmerizing. He films a charcoal drawing, and by making slight changes using erasures for light and depth and then repeating the process, he tells profound stories about oppression, deterioration, and social justice — in less than 10 minutes. He later shows the drawings with the films as finished pieces. His mastery of drawing is magical. It can cloud judgment. We see William Kentridge; we do to not see William Kentridge.

William Kentridge: Five Themes (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $50), the monograph accompanying the current SFMOMA exhibit, suggests the breadth of Kentridge’s contributions — from opera set design to printmaking — and the depth of his explorations. Versed in opera, Kentridge centers much of his work on the form’s classic themes but updates, twists, and transforms them to speak of his native South Africa and current social conditions. Editor Mark Rosenthal mixes Kentridge’s commentary, plates, sketches, and photos with writers’ explorations of his process and purpose. Not quite a microscope, the result is more like a pair of tweezers, bringing the reader-viewer closer to someone who loves the word erasure.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: FIVE THEMES

Through Sun/31, $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Accidental, with purpose

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

What began as a frugal effort to make use of leftover paint, something all painters grapple with on occasion, has spawned a late career style that realigns everything previously thought about the artistic practice of Theophilus Brown, now 90 years old. Best known for his figurative paintings as a seminal member of a group of painters gathered around David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, Brown has also been associated with painters as diverse as Rothko and Picasso, both of whom he knew.

These new pieces, embarked on during the last decade, originated as abstract works composed on a peel-away palette. Brown then cuts and pastes his way to a new composition, adding acrylic paint when necessary. Part collage, part painting, the finished products have all the gravitas of the large canvases of the New York School. Although relatively small (they range from 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches to 17 by 21 inches), these works conceive a larger, formal enterprise reminiscent of the monumental experience projected by Conrad Marca-Relli’s smaller works.

On exhibit through mid-June at Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, "Theophilus Brown at 90: Recent Abstract Collages" reveals little evidence of Brown’s earlier figurative style other than a general nod to formal elements of spatial configurations; the collages on view are rather more akin to the Abstract Expressionist gestural emphasis, and to the movement’s early work when the Surrealist influence was greatest (of note here is Brown’s 1950s friendship with Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta).

Some undoubtedly will see this as an interesting turn in the well-known official account of Bay Area Figuration, which is commonly said to have diverged from the East Coast fixation with abstraction, in favor of emphasizing the figure, with the exhibition of Park’s canvases Rehearsal (1949-50) and Kids on Bikes (1951). Brown’s collages might evoke that narrative, with a new twist, or return, to abstraction.

But the official story belies a well-known truth among the painters themselves: many of these artists never fully abandoned abstraction. And many of the New York painters whom the Bay Area painters were said to oppose still rendered the figure at the height of Abstract Expressionism (for example, de Kooning’s "Woman" series began in 1950-52).

Theophilus Brown first came to prominence in 1956, when Life magazine published photographs of a series of his football paintings — cubist-influenced modernist compositions that somehow allowed figuration to coexist with the abstract. What may not be known is that these works were preceded by fully abstract experiments he started while living in post-World War II Paris on the GI Bill (Brown fought in the Battle of the Bulge when he was assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Corps), and in New York City among the burgeoning artist scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

These recent collages, then, are a re-engagement with the formal elements of abstraction that Brown experimented with when he was in the circle of Elaine and Willem de Kooning in the early 1950s. Less concerned with the hard edge and lines of those earlier years, Brown fully embraces greater ambiguity and freedom here, suggesting a surrender to the subconscious, which the Surrealists likewise sought to achieve.

These collages are non-objective color experiments and shape studies. Brown succeeds in presenting a finished canvas that evokes something accidental, yet with purpose — the natural expression of a skilled painter who has the courage to embark on a new path regardless of what those comfortable with his thought-to-be "settled style" might say. Ultimately, Brown’s figurative era will be seen as preparatory for this mature work. *

THEOPHILUS BROWN AT 90: RECENT ABSTRACT COLLAGES

Through June 15, free

Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery

49 Geary, suite 520, SF

(415) 981-1080

www.eesgallery.com

Call it Afro-Surreal

-
0

I’m not a surrealist. I just paint what I see. — Frida Kahlo

THE PAST AND THE PRELUDE


In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was "far more disjointed than [it] sounds … such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart."

Ellison’s allusion is to his book’s most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that "I may not see myself as others see me not." Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, "Listen Jack, don’t let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything."

And Ellison’s lead man enters a world of prostitutes, hopheads, cops on the take, and masochistic parishioners. He says of Rinehart, "He was years ahead of me, and I was a fool. The world in which we live is fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home." The marquee of Rinehart’s store-front church declares:

Behold the Invisible!

Thy will be done O Lord!

I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all.

You shall see the unknown wonders.

Ellison and Rinehart had seen it, but had no name for it.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas’ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life." The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

THIS IS NOT AFRO-SURREAL


A) Surrealism:

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical." Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement "is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black." Afro-Surrealism sees that all "others" who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist, per Frida Kahlo. The root for "Afro-" can be found in "Afro-Asiatic", meaning a shared language between black, brown and Asian peoples of the world. What was once called the "third world," until the other two collapsed.

B) Afro-Futurism:

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a "future-past" called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW, Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first black president.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this "browning" of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

THE PRESENT, OR RIGHT NOW


San Francisco, the most liberal and artistic city in the nation, has one of the nation’s most rapidly declining black urban populations. This is a sign of a greater illness that is chasing out all artists, renegades, daredevils, and outcasts. No black people means no black artists, and all you yet-untouched freaks are next. Only freaky black art — Afro-Surreal art — in the museums, galleries, concert venues, and streets of this (slightly) fair city can save us!

San Francisco, the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of buzzwords and catch phrases, Afro-Surreal is necessary to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.

It’s no more coincidence that Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) recorded the 1996 Afro-Surreal anthem "Blue Flowers" on Hyde Street, or that Samuel R. Delany based much of his 1974 Afro-Surreal urtext Dhalgren on experiences in San Francisco.

An Afro-Surreal aesthetic addresses these lost legacies and reclaims the souls of our cities, from Kehinde Wiley painting the invisible men (and their invisible motives) in NYC to Yinka Shonibare beheading 17th (and 21st) century sexual tourists of Europe. From Nick Cave’s soundsuits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the words you are reading right now, the message is clear: San Francisco, the world is ready for an Afro-Surreal art movement.

Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars, entering the city to hunt down clues for the cure to this ancient, incurable disease called "western civilization." Or, as Ishmael Reed states, "We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest."

A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL


Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown wonders!

1. We have seen these unknown worlds emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, whose Afro-Cuban origins inspire works that speak of old gods with new faces, and in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gives us new gods with old faces. We have heard this world in the ebo-horn of Roscoe Mitchell and the lyrics of DOOM. We’ve read it through the words of Henry Dumas, Victor Lavalle, and Darius James. This emerging mosaic of radical influence ranges from Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet. Supernatural undertones of Reed and Zora Neale Hurston mix with the hardscrabble stylings of Chester Himes and William S. Burroughs.

2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it. Like the African Surrealists, Afro-Surrealists recognize that nature (including human nature) generates more surreal experiences than any other process could hope to produce.

3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate 19th century slavery symbols like Kara Walker, and 18th century colonial ones like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce "madness" as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture.

4. Afro-Surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion, and hybridization as a form of disobedience. The collages of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the prose of Reed, and the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Antipop Consortium express this overflow.

Afro-Surrealists distort reality for emotional impact. 50 Cent and his cold monotone and Walter Benjamin and his chilly shock tactics can kiss our ass. Enough! We want to feel something! We want to weep on record.

5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the black male body applies to all art and culture: "There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself."

6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, filled with aliases and census- defying classifications. It has no address or phone number, no single discipline or calling. Afro-Surrealists are highly-paid short-term commodities (as opposed to poorly-paid long term ones, a.k.a. slaves).

Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous. "Am I black or white? Am I straight, or gay? Controversy!"

Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding, and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.

7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Leopold Senghor.

8. Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tally, the Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a "post-racial" world.

9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.

10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons.

AFRO-SURREALISM IN ACTION


San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora present the works of Mutu, William Pope L., Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Wiley, Shonibare, and Walker en masse, with Lam’s Jungle as a center piece. Lorraine Hansbury Theater stages Genet’s The Blacks and Baraka’s The Dutchman, while San Francisco Opera adapts Aimé Césaire’s Caliban and the Fillmore has an Afro-punk retrospective. Afro-Surreal adaptations of Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1937), and Marvel’s Black Panther will grace the silver-screen.

These are the first steps in an illustrious and fantastic journey. When we finally reach those unknown shores, we will say, with blood beneath our nails and mud on our boots:

This is Afro-Surreal!

“Open Endless”

-
0

REVIEW Not every art show allows you a chance to swim in the Pacific Ocean on a Sunday afternoon and experience the bracing cold of the water and the pull of the tide. But David Wilson’s "Open Endless" isn’t your average show, even if it is characteristic of Wilson’s community explorations of art and landscape under the Ribbons Publications rubric. Last year, he instigated a sleep-over happening at Angel Island that included live music. This month, as an extension of a show of drawings, he organized a casually beautiful mapped day and night of art in the Headlands.

No two people had the same experience. Besides a dip in the Pacific, mine included a trek up the paved trails of the North Cliff to a white diamond hung on the cliff’s face by Battery Townsley, where the duo Pale Horse sang songs in a tunnel, and then a walk back down to the beach where the duo known as Coconut played music in a little cove as two, three, four, five, six surfers took on the waves during sunset. I don’t have much to say about that latter experience beyond that it was the kind of moment that makes me completely glad to be alive. I left sated and went home and slept and dreamt deeply. Those who stayed ambled on through Rodeo Canyon to another Battery, where Canyon Cinema shared some cave cinema.

Wilson’s drawings, on display at Tartine, are a shifting sequence of meditations on the landscape and coastlines of the Headlands. His deployment of color and line is understated. The brashest aspect of the show is its use of material: the largest piece, a 22-foot watercolor of the ocean and shore, uses the blank-but-aged paper of record sleeves and the cardboard insides of albums covers as a backdrop. It’s a great tactic. Earlier this year at the de Young Museum, Ajit Chauhan performed a different but similarly large-scale trick with album covers, painting over their exteriors so that only eyes peeked from the original artwork. Wilson’s use of vintage music matter hints at the merging of art and that which is codified "nature" at the core of his events. I’m already looking forward to his next one.

OPEN ENDLESS Through May 28. Mon., 8 a.m.–7 p.m. Tues.–Wed., 7:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; Thurs.–Fri., 7:30 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.-–8 p.m. (415) 487-2600. Tartine, 600 Guerrero, SF. www.ribbonspublications.blogpost.com

Time passages

-
0

johnny@sfbg.com

The past is vanishing, more than ever before. Or so it seems, as so many temporal placeholders — including the newspaper you might be holding in your hands right now — give way to digital facsimiles. This quandary is a morphing source of inspiration for "Postcards & Calendars," a solo show by the New York artist and temporary San Francisco resident Matt Keegan, who is about to complete a teaching stint at California College of the Arts.

While Keegan engages a consistently time-based theme throughout "Postcards and Calendars," he does so via refreshingly varied forms and motifs. He’s dedicatedly studious enough to turn a trip to the GLBT Historical Society into an semi-installation, yet easygoing enough to use sexually-charged archival pieces as material, spontaneous enough to try out something different with each piece in his overall show, subversive (or formally perverse) enough to digitally photograph newspapers, and irreverent enough to break his own rules regarding what constitutes a record of daily life.

Keegan first stung my eyes and queer spirit with a piece from the Altman Siegel Gallery’s inaugural group show. It visually manifested the infinite recess of a ex-romantic relationship in a manner that interspersed teasing hints of still-extant attraction with a palpable sense of emotional loss. All of these aspects brought the "memory drawings" of San Francisco artists Colter Jacobsen to mind, so it’s only fitting that Jacobsen contributes a booklet to "Postcards & Calendars" that plays off of Keegan’s theme. In fact, one can draw further connections between Keegan, Jacobsen, and the NYC filmmaker Matt Wolf — three artists of roughly the same generation who share similar queer historical imperatives while allowing humor, traces of casual lust or longing and even some lovelorn aspects into their art. Keegan’s book AMERICAMERICA (Printed Matter, 140 pages, 2008), an exploration of national identity through the Reagan era’s "Hands Across America" phenomenon, possesses enjoyable parallels to Wolf’s films about the late David Wojnarowicz and Arthur Russell, and Jacobsen’s arrangements of trinkets and trash into expressions that find meaning or power in degradeability.

"Postcards & Calendars" is a direct array of works, often candid, and at times (in the case of the gay calendars from the ‘1970s) full-frontal. But the show’s lingering strength comes from more elliptical gestures, such as a wall of personal imagery that Keegan has rendered more enigmatic and evocative through an unconventional series of drawing and photo processes. In fact, to tap into the depth of what Keegan does here, you need to look closely at the walls themselves, where you might discover 31 passages of time.


MATT KEEGAN: POSTCARDS & CALENDARS

Through May 23

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, fourth floor, SF

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

New art and style on Geary

-
0

With a calm demeanor and a pulled-together, no-nonsense appearance, Claudia Altman-Siegel isn’t an obvious suspect when it comes to identifying the driving force behind a conceptual art show that draws well-heeled European tourists and people clad in Converse shoes and skinny jeans. Both types, and more, are drawn to Matt Keegan’s "Postcards & Calendars," where they’re confronted by an eight-foot list of days of the week and a larger-than-life photograph of a New York Times reader hidden behind dismal headlines.

The four month-old Altman Siegel Gallery is set apart from neighboring galleries by its inclusion of a window, a trait that trades art hermeticism for the possibility of sunshine. Street noise is present but not disruptive — a reminder that another world exists beyond the space’s light cocoon of images and ideas. It has a distinctively different aura from the other galleries in the 49 Geary St. building, something Altman-Siegel says she is "sort of blind to."

After 10 years of work in New York City, Altman-Siegel slipped over to San Francisco to fill a gap in the West Coast gallery scene, bringing emerging local and internationally established artists who are still early on the trajectory to significance in the art canon.

Local art or specificity is prominent in Altman-Siegel’s curatorial work to date. The current show, though by a New York artist, includes sketches of familiar San Francisco street corners. Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen’s surreal cosmic photographs were the focus of the gallery’s first solo show.

Across the street, mannequins wearing teal trousers topped by black, multipocketed jackets and craftily reconstructed vintage dresses stand defiantly among an installation of birch tree branches and rusted machinery. A former STA travel office has been transformed into Shotwell, a cutting-edge update of a funky Aunt Edna boutique.

Newlyweds Michael and Holly Weaver needed somewhere to hawk their extensive collection of vintage clothes. When they landed a lease at 36 Geary St., the shop expanded to fuse groundbreaking European fashion and clothes by Bay Area designers. Denim from local menswear line B.Son is paired with chic shirts by Parisian collective Surface2Air. Shape-shifting square dresses from the San Francisco duo Please Dress Up! hang alongside bold separates by British label Scout. On the other side of Silverman Gallery’s recent move to Sutter Street, the openings of Shotwell and Altman-Siegel suggest that something new and bold is creeping up on Union Square.

“Desiree Holman: Reborn”

-
0

REVIEW It’s time to dance — to sashay from the video installation within Nick Cave’s "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the video aspect of Desirée Holman’s part of the SECA exhibition, now in its last days at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. To hustle between the two is revealing. Not only do Cave and Holman share an irreverent interest in choreography and the unity or community that can spring from mutual movement, they also devote considerable creative energy to costuming. Most compelling of all, these strange kin tap into and surrealistically subvert (in Holman’s case) or explode (in Cave’s instance) conventions regarding race relations in the early Obama era. Think about it. Dance to this.

Closer to the Tenderloin at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Holman turns her attention to the feminine and maternal in "Reborn," a solo show that, much like her SFMOMA contribution, mixes drawings, mask-making (or more precisely here, doll-making), and video involving choreography. Holman’s drawings for the exhibition are as sickly they are lovely — a woman’s split ends take on a windswept weeping willow quality. In the alluring yet disgusting series of images, milk spills from mothers’ mouths as they nurse unsettlingly complacent babies. The video Reborn, nestled perversely in the cement block back room — or should I say back womb? — of Silverman Gallery, mines comedy and the type of incipient frustration that can grow into rage. It does so via games of duck-duck-goose, hummed lullabies, and the occasional bedazzled burka.

DESIRÉE HOLMAN: REBORN

Through May 30. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter, SF. (415) 255-9508. www.silverman-gallery.com

“Dean Smith: thought forms 2003-2009” and “Dean Byington”

-
0

REVIEW Call it the tumbling dice effect: dice keep appearing within Bay Area art this spring. First there was the gigantic 16-sided polygon by Brian Wasson at Ping Pong Gallery — a prediction device freed from its Magic Eight ball. Now viewers can roll with enigmas of a dice-centered video installation that is the most intriguing facet of Kent and Kevin Young’s "Jury Breaks DNA Deadlock" exhibition at Steven Wolf Gallery. They can also stare deep into a large-scale C-print of a many-sided die that doubles as a calendar in Matt Keegan’s show at Altman-Siegel Gallery, "Postcards & Calendars." Yet the best invocation of chance and rolling dice takes place just out of sight — or does it? — in a knockout piece within Dean Smith’s "thought forms 2003-2009" at Gallery Paule Anglim. Smith’s 2005 colored-pencil drawing thought form #11, from 2005, was generated by repeatedly rolling a tetrahedron. Smith’s process renders an object — a meta-die — that is both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and that ultimately collapses or blooms free from dimensionality. The piece’s shades of blue make this state of play a flirtation with the sublime.

The dice games mentioned above are something different from the clichéd forest animals and color-theory rainbows that invaded Bay Area art during stretches of the last decade, or the skulls that took over Artforum in the wake of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007) and Don Ed Hardy’s mass-production of tattoo imagery — they aren’t trendy gestures so much as chance manifestations. Smith’s thought form #11 is one expression within a multiyear project that yields ever-changing graphite on paper works and video. The pieces at Paule Anglim span from 2003 to 2008 and evoke everything from space ships or outer space community outposts to totems and medieval devices, while never remaining stuck in specificity. They’re well-paired with a one-room, four-piece show by Dean Byington, whose oil-on-linen extensions of collage are a Beatrix Potter-meets-Brueghel-in-paradise hallucinatory delight. "Oh my god, this is all diamonds!" a young girl exclaimed upon looking closely at one of Byington’s works, which seem like minimalist experiments with color from a distance. Step in closer and you’ll discover endless mountains, forests, and quarries; caves with cute yet unsettlingly prison-like windows carved into their sides; stacks of stalagmites; and greenhouses that resemble giant Cartier eggs. Oh, and the occasional strange half-fox half-rodent. Be sure to say hi.

DEAN SMITH: THOUGHT FORMS 2003-09 and DEAN BYINGTON Through Sat/2. Wed-Fri, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary, SF. (415) 433-2710. www.gallerypauleanglim.com

“Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations”

-
0

REVIEW One of my most uninteresting college professors used to insist that negatives only exist in language, but couldn’t explain what this meant. That’s funny, I thought, because I can physically feel a complete lack of interest in your class. In fact, I think you can feel it too; it’s contagious. Nonetheless, I was never bored as a child, and I’m still never bored. The boring and the uninteresting are different concepts. Julie Blackmon’s lucid, staged photographs of childhood fantasy worlds in the twilight of America are stunning for a ton of reasons, but first and foremost they get their signature bite and sting by recognizing that everyone in each scene is interested in different things. There is no sincere panorama. From the modern intrusions into Blackmon’s protoclassical, Dutch-inspired scenes — a miniature FedEx truck, Netflix mail — to trippy little things such as the almost lurid dog eyes and discarded gloves in Snow Day (2008), every person, place, and thing appears distracted by an otherworldly mission.

Adding to this sense of confused biography, Blackmon, the oldest of nine kids and now a mother of three, uses people and things from her life in her work like a novelist trussing out character relations pictorially. She reminds me of some essays by Orhan Pamuk about his daughter, Rüya. It’s not the stories themselves that are so thrilling, but the palpable feeling of love in their narrative arcs, plus the vectors they send out into Pamuk’s novels, where characters seem to have little aspects or shimmers of Rüya (even if she wasn’t born when the story was written): her young mind, her toys and delusions, the way she gazes out the window and finds it startlingly new every day.

JULIE BLACKMON: DOMESTIC VACATIONS Through May 23. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020. www.sfcamerawork.org

The new razzle dazzle

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

More on SFBG:

>>Q&A with artist Nick Cave

>>A guide to artists with famous namesakes

289-cover3.jpg

Where is the center of the Earth? According to artist Nick Cave, it lies somewhere between a night out at Taboo with Leigh Bowery and a Brazilian Carnaval parade. It can be found in Liberace’s glittering stage getups and Yoruba ceremonial hunting dress. Other possible coordinates include Yinka Shonibare’s Africanized rococo costumes, Cockney pearly suits, the hautest of haute couture, and the fun fur tribes of Black Rock City.

289-cover2.jpg

Thankfully, for us, Cave’s crocheted, sequined, bedazzled, embroidered, dyed, and encrusted vision of the heart of the world can be found locally. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "Meet Me At the Center of the Earth" presents the largest exhibit to date of the Chicago artist’s work, which straddles the realms of sculpture, high fashion, body art, and dance with a visual ferocity and level of workmanship that is alternately stunning and inspiring.

Cave’s art practically dares you to play chicken with your thesaurus. One would have to borrow a page (or several) from the descriptive reveries of Thomas de Quincey or Ronald Firbank to fully convey the cluster fuck of beading, psychedelic hair furs, plastic tchotchkes, yarn, tin toys, buttons, second hand sweaters, and enough sequins to cover a thousand ’80s cocktail dresses that he has quixotically and painstakingly pieced together.

289-cover5.jpg

The centerpieces of "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" are undoubtedly Cave’s Soundsuits — wearable sculptures that take their name from the sounds created by their movement. They fill YBCA’s largest gallery like some other-wordly pantheon of gods and monsters. Arranged in an X-shaped configuration with paths running down the center of each axis, the suits form a giant visual nod to the exhibit’s title. X, of course, marks the spot, and hanging above the room’s center is the Earth itself, swathed in several shades of inky sequins. On the adjacent walls hang two huge and possibly glitzier tondi — the Italian Renaissance term Cave uses for these round hangings — which serve as flattened counterparts to the globe.

289-cover1.jpg

The display lets you explore the Soundsuits from every angle. Designed to cover the entire body, the suits hide any individual traces of the wearer by creating a second skin, and then some. The suits with towering, festooned cage structures — which bring to mind both Balinese funeral pyres and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers — still have a vaguely human outline at their core, whereas the suits patterned in all sort of brilliantly colored fur-like human hair could very well be studies from an unrealized Jim Henson project. This lycanthropic aspect of the Soundsuits is explored most humorously in Cave’s more recent pieces, which take the reverse tactic of fashioning knitwear pelts for taxidermy models of bears and beavers.

While much of Cave’s work, to quote New York Times critic Roberta Smith, "fall[s] squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed," it also begs to be heard. It is unfortunate that YBCA wasn’t able to more fully integrate the sounds of the suits into their display. Although there is an adjacent gallery that shows several videos of the Soundsuits in action — including great footage of Cave and a posse of pom-pom covered lion dancer-clown hybrids inciting massive dance parties in public — the suits themselves stand silent. The audio/visual divide enforced by the two-gallery layout seems to point to the larger issue of static mannequins being the curatorial norm for costume and textile-related exhibits. I guess we’ll have to wait until May, when choreographer Ronald K. Brown stages his Soundsuit performances, to see Cave’s creations in action.

289-cover4.jpg

Cave writes in an artist’s statement for the show that he hopes "we will dream together" One would have to have a heart of stone not to take up the challenge and the invitation delivered by Cave’s art — and implicit in the exhibit’s title — to create another scene, to go beyond what’s familiar, and to transform oneself. I left YBCA dreaming of raiding craft stores, thrift shops, and fabric outlets. I dreamed of painting the town red, cerulean, silver, magenta, and neon green with sequins and glitter. I dreamed of dancing. I’ll see you at the center of the Earth. I’m halfway there.

NICK CAVE: MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Through July 5, $3–$6 (free first Tues.)

Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org


All photos by Jim Prinz

“Missed Connection: Souvenirs Of Brief Encounters”

-
0

PREVIEW If you, too, are an avid Craigslist missed connections reader, you already know about the creepy posts: "Morning gym workout — m4w — 36: Great to see you back in the gym this morning. I was beginning to think you started working out at a different time or different place." There are the hilarious posts: "Fremont Hooters Bartender — m4w — 26: What happened to that call? Did I get played?" And then, occasionally, there are the posts you think might be addressed to you: "Kinko’s Thursday at Noon — m4w — 27: To the 20-something brunette with her friend, I think she called you Michelle. I was a bit busy copying, but even with my back to you I could feel you move around the room. Any chance you read missed connections?"

I suppose that last post could also fall into the "creepy" category. But it also might warrant a response such as, "Well, I do read missed connections. But since my back was turned to you, I’m not quite sure what you look like or who you are. Were you the one printing on the neon pink paper? Tell me more."

And so it went. After a few back-and-forths, the 20-something brunette and the 27-year-old male decided to meet up. He is a robust young lad, and now we are happily planning our honeymoon.

Actually, we’re not, because the voyeur in me would never dare to respond.

Not so Climate Theatre resident artist Claudia Tennyson. Intrigued by the potential and the poetry of Craigslist missed connections posts, she’s been contacting and interviewing people who placed compelling inquiries. For all of us who are addicted to the forum but too timid to post or reply, Tennyson has translated the initial ads and her resulting interviews into a performance that includes a series of artworks that seek to embody each encounter. For fearless types, Tennyson is presenting the event as an opportunity to hook up.

MISSED CONNECTION: SOUVENIRS OF BRIEF ENCOUNTERS Sun/12, 6 p.m., free. Climate Theater, 285 Ninth St (at Folsom), SF. (415) 704-3260. www.climatetheater.com

Stormy weather

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

It’s a pleasure to see Sean McFarland receive the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. Last August, McFarland was one of the eight artists or groups showcased in the Bay Guardian‘s second annual photo issue. The Baum Award is a national honor designated for photographers at a pivotal point in their development, and in McFarland’s case, that development is the opposite of predictable. While many photographers work toward "dazzle ’em" displays of technical virtuosity, McFarland has moved away from earlier saturated digital color images toward simple Polaroid photos that possess ominous allure.

Did I say simple? McFarland’s dreamlike images of weather and landscapes are only simple in appearance — they require subtle combinations of photography and the increasingly popular practice of found-image collage. In terms of subject matter, they personalize and miniaturize the vast and unsettling images of the semi-settled West present in the camera art of Michael Light, David Maisel, and Trevor Paglen. The title of Lindsay White’s current show at Ping Pong Gallery, "A Field Guide to the Atmosphere," might just as well apply to McFarland’s work. The atmosphere is stormy, and as troubling as it is beguiling.

SFBG In the last year or two, your work has shifted away from urban views to elemental images: sky, sea, vast land. What has set you off in that direction?

Sean McFarland I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which the earth changes. In an urban environment, we build buildings, roads, and parks, changing the landscape. These are immediate and obvious alterations of our environment. Our actions also change the landscape as we alter the climate — more frequent and powerful storms, rising seas. By focusing on making images of the natural world, of the landscape, I’m interested in making pictures of us. How we change the earth and how the earth effects us.

SFBG Your work from the earlier 2005 era reminds me a bit of a short film, site specific_Las Vegas 05, by an artist named Olivo Barbieri. It has amazing colorful aerial views of Las Vegas in which the city really looks like it is comprised of toy buildings and cars. Were you looking for that kind of "making strange" effect when presenting views some might take for granted?

SM The work I was making from 1999 until around 2002 tried to take things that were fake and make them look real. When I first started re-photographing the collages I was making (in 2003), the miniaturization effect was an unexpected but welcome result. I was working in the other direction, making the real look fake. The collages are made by hand, so the edges are rough and messy. The selective blurring of images was there at first to hide where the images were put together, but it was that transformative quality of the focus that made the process intriguing to me. With the collaged images, I was taking pictures from all over, real images of real things, and by bringing those disparate elements together, the pictures raise questions about what was actually in the photograph.

The image of the park (in the Guardian‘s August 2008 Photo Issue), for example, has the playground from Dolores Park, but with the downtown skyline and bridge removed and replaced with a sky from another city. It may be the absence of the urban center normally in the background that makes the picture seem odd, or it could be that the light from the sky is not the same reflecting off the foreground. The relationship between fact and fiction is one of the strongest reasons I work with photography as opposed to other visual art forms.

SFBG You mention collage as a part of your process. That might not be so apparent to someone who casually glances at your photography. Can you tell me a bit about your approach to collage, and also if there are any collage artists whom you especially like?

SM Lately I’ve been working to make the collage process less apparent. In the past, the images took the final form of a C-Print, made in a darkroom. Now I’m using Polaroid film. Polaroids are mementos and souvenirs of moments, places, and things that actually happened; they imply that whatever is in the picture was witnessed, was real. Since I can’t really take the images I’m making, I’m using collage to do so. A good example is my image of the airplane flying over the black ocean and white land. The picture of the plane is taken from a satellite image of Earth, the land is a photograph I made in the Exploratorium (it’s a picture of an exhibit that shows how land is changed by wind currents).

SFBG Books are a big visual inspiration to me, so I liked seeing you cite the Field Guide to North American Weather and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas as two recent sources of fascination and perhaps material. What drew you to those books and what do you like about them?

SM I enjoy those books because they are both wonderful collections. I work from an archive of several thousand images. This is probably why Atlas is so fascinating to me. It’s the source material (mostly photographs) that Richter uses in his work and it made me even more interested in his work. I like the Field Guide because all the pictures in it are of weather-based natural phenomena. Some of the photographs in it are pretty hard to believe, but actually happened.

SEAN MCFARLAND: THE 2009 BAUM AWARD FOR EMERGING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS

Thurs/2 through May 23 ( reception Thurs/2, 5–8 p.m.), free or donation

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org

Off the wall

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

It’s Saturday morning, and Michael Rosenthal Gallery is crowded — because it’s playing host to a baby shower. The current show of paintings by Terry Hoff is partly obscured by the small celebration. In one corner, Rosenthal sits on a couch. Aside from the dark circles around his eyes, you wouldn’t know that he’s caught up in perhaps the strangest of a string of recent art thefts at SF galleries.

At 3 a.m. on Friday, March 20, police notified Rosenthal that his Valencia Street space had been vandalized. Arriving at the site, he was surprised to discover that while a pair of computers, an expensive printer and scanner, and a bag of Nikon cameras were still there, four paintings from the current show by Hoff were amiss. "The first two cops [to arrive] were totally uninterested," Rosenthal says, adding that when he gave the missing works an estimated value of $40,000, the answer he received was blunt: "They said, ‘Too bad — if the paintings were valued at $50,000, everyone would be here’" (SFPD didn’t return calls for comment.)

The theft of the Hoff paintings marks the third time in the past six months that a street-level San Francisco gallery was the target of a robbery. On Oct. 15 last year, two paintings by the late Margaret Kilgallen were stolen from the SoMa space Gallery 16, which was putting on a 15-year retrospective. (Unlike the majority of the exhibition, neither Kilgallen piece was for sale.) Less than a month later, someone walked into the Mission District gallery Triple Base and took a painting by Jay Nelson from the wall.

"It’s horrible," Gallery 16 owner Griff Williams says, when asked about the Kilgallen theft. "The whole experience continues to be horrible because we haven’t settled any of this. There’s a personal sadness — Margaret wasn’t interested in the art market, and didn’t sell her work by choice in the shows we did with her. It also points to the ugly side of the way things are valued, and how insurance companies want to undervalue the work."

"People don’t know that if they steal artwork or buy stolen artwork, it has no value in the market," says Triple Base codirector Dina Pugh. "It doesn’t have value unless you have the title to the work, and the gallery is always looking for stolen pieces."

The three recent thefts, while not necessarily related, share some commonalities beyond the street-level position of the galleries. Kilgallen, Nelson, and Hoff all knew or know the San Francisco artist Barry McGee, the sole focus of a lengthy April 2008 Artforum article on the proliferation and market value of stolen artworks. (In fact, Hoff owns work by both Kilgallen and McGee.) In a 2006 issue of ANP Quarterly, Darryl Smith from the Market Street gallery the Luggage Store recounts an experience buying a piece by McGee on the street.

"[The thefts] point to all these issues that the art world deals with in terms of valuation," says Williams, whose space has been vandalized more than once without any art being stolen. "As an art project, you could take someone’s work and see what you can get for it on the street. With Barry’s [McGee’s] work, there’s a street cred to stealing it."

The theft of the Terry Hoff paintings differs from the Gallery 16 and Triple Base robberies in one crucial way: the artworks were recovered. At press time, both the San Francisco police and the individual who returned the paintings were unavailable for comment. However, at 2 a.m. March 21, Rosenthal was awakened by a call from police informing him that the Hoff paintings were recovered, albeit with some scratches and damage. "It was a whirlwind of emotions," Hoff says of the experience.

In the current market, art might not seem to have strong value. "You’re gonna sell Terry Hoff paintings on Market Street?" Williams asks, only somewhat rhetorically. Pugh has a pragmatic view of the situation. "With the economy going down the tubes, there are so many things that come along with it — violence, robbery. People are desperate, and I expect more [thefts] to happen. It’s making galleries be more cautious and vigilant."

“Meet Me at the Center of the Earth”

-
0

PREVIEW This collection of "soundsuits" by Nick Cave (the Chicago artist, not the Australian musician) is the most anticipated show of the season. If, as this paper’s D. Scot Miller has observed, Afro-surrealism is in the air, then Cave’s art — a fusion of fashion, body art, and sculpture so imaginative that it might possess transformational qualities — is a prime example. His wearable constructions are eye-boggling counterparts to the Afro-surreal music of figures both present (Chelonis R. Jones) and newly revived-from-the past (Wicked Witch). Cave’s art also possesses aural qualities that won’t be evident until the show opens. A former dancer with Alvin Ailey and the current chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s fashion program, he’s also collaborating with choreographer Ronald K. Brown on some performances in May.

Cave’s soundsuits arrive in the Bay Area as a ceremonial contemporary extension from the fabulous but nostalgic European fashion on display in the de Young Museum’s Yves Saint Laurent show. In fact, the most bizarre and audacious of that exhibition’s pieces — a 1965 bridal gown that resembles an intricate cocoon or sock — might as well be an old colonial relative of Cave’s wearable works, which are constructed from a wide variety of natural and artificial material. These acid-trip Bigfoot creatures and dancing rainbow phallus totems are fun, but they kick. Cave made his first soundsuit in response to the Simi Valley aesthetics of the Rodney King verdict, and in an older project he rescued racist lawn jockeys, turning them into figures of promise and potential.

MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH Sat/28 through July 5, $3-$6 (free first Tues). Opening reception Fri/27, 8-11 p.m., $12-$15. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS. www.ybca.org

“The Caretakers”

-
0

REVIEW As the U.S. continues to blindly race forward, wise eyes look closely at what is left behind. In the case of Bill Mattick’s "The Caretakers," this means uncovering the lives hidden within — and the haunted spirit of — a defunct train station in west Oakland. Surveying the loss that saturates the American West, "The Caretakers" makes a great companion piece to Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town (2008), screening at Artists’ Television Access this week. It also is a kindred spirit to a pair of recent railroad-themed films, Bill Daniel’s Who is Bozo Texino? (2005) and James Benning’s RR (2007). Whether focusing on abandoned landscapes, engaging in cinematic trainspotting, or both, these artists have proven shrewd and prescient (Mattick’s project dates from 2004) about this country’s paths of foolishness. They’ve tapped into the new Depression long before Wall Street would admit it.

Mattick cites the peerless Robert Frank — the subject of a major retrospective coming to SFMOMA this year — as an influence. But while his images bear tonal similarities to Frank’s, people are less likely to occupy his frame of vision. He generates strong atmosphere from mid- and late-afternoon daylight: Stairs on Platform 2004-99 (810) sets aquatic shades of blue and white against the severe shadows of a staircase; the rich green of Distance 2004-186(810) varies from Daniel’s black-and-white treatment of similar subject matter; Paul’s Flowers 2004-108(810) updates Helen Levitt’s fascination with kids’ chalk scrawlings on the streets. Yet a contemporary human story emerged from this largely "empty" setting: that of Willy and Paul, whom Mattick discovered living at the station. They’re an odd couple of sorts: one messy, the other fastidious; one a religious eccentric, the other street-smart and battling addiction. These caretakers exert small acts of control amid society’s debris — things that share their castoff societal status. Mattick’s photography is an act of collaboration with them.

THE CARETAKERS Through April 30. Tues–-Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Corden Potts Gallery at Warnock Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 211, SF. (415) 680-5997, www.cordenpottsgallery.com

1...678...14Page 7 of 14

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org