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Visual Art

Copy this

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Do you copy? If people who still like books — rather than people who stare at screens all day — are the zombies, then secret zombie networks are forming and strengthening throughout the Bay Area. An example is "One to Many," a group show at the homey Partisan Gallery: 20 artists — including Tauba Auerbach, Keegan McHargue, Emily Prince, and Leslie Shows — use and abuse toner cartridges to contribute an edition each to a box set of zines, and to create single pieces that are larger than the 11-by-17-inch maximum often associated with photocopying.

A handsome cardboard-encased object, the "One to Many" zine collection has a kinship to Noel Black’s Angry Dog Midget Editions, a 2003 collection I contributed to that Art on Paper caught up with last year. It also shares the folding tactics of Los Angeles artist-curator Darin Klein’s recent book projects. Both in and outside of the book format, the act or art of photocopying is an excuse for many contributors to paint it black — Lindsey White’s standout piece uses the white of the page and darkness of the ink to create misty effects.

Casual visitors to Steven Wolf Fine Arts routinely mistake Molly Springfield’s current show "Translation" for a series of Xeroxes. In fact, Springfield uses graphite on paper to create a handmade version of photocopied pages from the first chapter of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Working from four different editions, Springfield generates 28 drawings, each an uncanny act of meditation and dedication (she’s admitted that the couple-weeks-long process of creating a single piece can be physically painful). She renders the ghost scratches where ink doesn’t take to the page, and the smudges and waves in the center where two pages meet.

To what end? The subject of matter in its literal and figurative forms has been at the fore of Springfield’s past projects. In selecting Proust’s classic memory piece as a source to work from — and upon — she mines a rich vein. Speeding ever-faster into a frenzied post-material future, do we only have time to ingest portions of the very beginning of Proust’s remembrance? By recreating Proust’s text, does Springfield translate it? In the seven-part series "A Brief Note on the Translation," she travels through the editorial stages of an introduction she’s written for a soon-to-be-published book of these drawings. Stories about her work (and about her collaborator Bill Berkson’s connection to Proust’s last maid, Celeste Albaret) linger and transform within, and outside of, the text. (Johnny Ray Huston)

ONE TO MANY

Through March 21

Partisan Gallery

www.partisangallery.blogspot.com

MOLLY SPRINGFIELD: TRANSLATION

Through March 21

Steven Wolf Fine Arts

49 Geary, SF

(415) 263-3677

www.stevenwolffinearts.com

Naked kiss

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› johnny@sfbg.com

One of the things that I appreciate most about Curt McDowell’s art is its shamelessness. It is shameless in a lively, funny, righteous, even virtuous manner that should embarrass prudish American moralists. "An uneven dozen broken hearts," a show of the late filmmaker’s paintings and drawings, is a revelatory pleasure because of how directly it conveys McDowell’s lust for and love of simple revelry. A scrapbook of photos and drawings attests to McDowell’s appetite for asses and fascination with faces, but ultimately, it’s a testimonial to a sexuality that shirked labels as it stripped off clothing. A collaged wall of comics and portraits brings one in close contact with McDowell’s rich sense of community — one that blurred love and friendship, and mixed family members with figures of imagination.

McDowell’s untamed and uncensored spirit couldn’t be more refreshing today, when pornography (whether commodified or autobiographical) is endlessly subcategorized. But while McDowell’s big heart and healthy libido make for predictable discoveries, his serious talent as a painter comes as a surprise. As a filmmaker, McDowell blazed his own path with short works such as 1971’s self-explanatory yet unexpectedly rich Confessions and 1980’s equally direct Loads. (In 1972’s Ronnie, he merges porn and biographical portraiture with unmatched potency.) His most famous work is the two-and-a-half hour pornographic epic Thundercrack! (1975). It turns out he was just as fierce and skillful with a paintbrush or a set of Magic Markers as he was with a camera.

One of the show’s centerpieces is Untitled (the Beatles in autopsy), a nearly life-size oil-on-canvas naked and dead portrait of the Fab Four from 1968 that deserves a spot in the rich museum of cryptic Beatles iconography and perhaps even within the hall of pop art classics. John has his left arm over Paul’s shoulder while a diminutive Ringo, lying on his side, is nestled into Paul in a manner suggestive of a child seeking comfort. George is isolated — he’d be looking off in the other direction from the other three if his eyes were open, but like theirs, his are closed in eternal drowsiness. The languid full-frontal sexuality of the painting is tonally different from the sexual high jinx in McDowell’s movies. Melancholy emanates from the image, as much due to its dark colors as its subject matter. And there’s an eerily prescient element: the late John’s and George’s names are visible on their corpses’ ID tags, while Paul’s and Ringo’s remain obscured.

"[Curt’s] beefcake was hot off the streets and the cheesecake was equally tart and titilutf8g," McDowell’s closest peer George Kuchar writes with quintessential alliterative brio in a note for the show. "All of this was served in a blue plate special that was generously filled with obsessions immune to none." Anyone who has a heart won’t be immune to "an uneven dozen broken hearts," another inspiring act of queer revivalism by curator Margaret Tedesco.

CURT MCDOWELL: AN UNEVEN DOZEN BROKEN HEARTS

Through March 29

[2nd floor projects]

www.projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com

“transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix”

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REVIEW Spam, napalm, and derivative pop songs weren’t quite the only legacy of U.S. military sojourns through Asia — and specifically Korea and Vietnam — as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix" exhibit demonstrates. The artists gathered by curators Viet Le and Yong Soon Min are the children of Andy Warhol and Coca-Cola.

Credit goes to the organizers for pointing to the connections between Vietnam and Korea, which are seldom at the foreground stateside: both shared a history of rapid modernization facilitated by U.S. wartime adventures, and Korea benefited economically for their hand in the Vietnam War, as the second largest foreign military and economic presence. Trade in pop culture — film, music, TV, fashion — has evidently continued between the two countries. But despite the presence of a book and zine reading room filled with Korean, Vietnamese, and American transplants’ ballads, bubblegum, rockers, and protest music, this grab bag of an exhibition manifests little of the fizzy wit and energy implied in its title. Instead it assumes a primarily somber, somewhat cryptic tone — more wall text would have helped. This solemn quality is most forthrightly and movingly manifested in Dinh Q. Lê’s video triptych, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2007).

The exceptions make their mélange of pop and politics simultaneously pointed and explicit: examples include Tiffany Chung’s video works, Lam Truong (2007) and the scooter-guys (2007), which juxtapose the frenetic movements of Viet boy bands with bands of working delivery boys; and Min Hwa Choi Chul-Hwan’s 2006 To the Rockers paintings of lost-looking urban youth, paired with Twentieth Century — 1972.6 III (2006), his blown-up deconstruction of AP photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 image of a naked Vietnamese girl burnt by napalm running toward the viewer. Would Warhol have approved? And do any works make as much of a stealth impact as Oh Yongseok’s video montages Drama No. 3 and Drama No. 5 (both 2004-2005)? Cornered by these pieced-together panoramas, which appropriate snippets of Asian films and TV, one is confronted by both the Korean tradition of landscape painting and small, startling moments of violence and disquiet that rupture the stillness at the edges of the frame.

TRANSPOP: KOREA VIETNAM REMIX Through Sun/15. Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $6; $3 seniors, students, and youth; free for members (free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

“Yan Pei-Ming: YES!”

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REVIEW James Elkin starts off his wonderful book What Painting Is (Routledge, 1998) with the simple statement that "painting is alchemy," an elegant encapsulation of the process by which combining oils and pigments, applying that mixture onto a canvas, and generally getting one’s hands dirty results in something as ethereal as one of Monet’s Water Lilies. Elkin’s words came to mind while looking at Franco-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming’s massive watercolor and oil paintings. Yan’s paintings are alchemical double exposures: we are asked to view them simultaneously as palimpsest-like records of their material creation and as indexes of their subjects. Their visceral emotional impact comes from the tension between these two ways of seeing, a tension that is present in every brush stroke and paint globule.

Take Yan’s portrait of our new president, painted last year. Obama regards us cautiously. His sober visage and weary gaze — the products of roughly brushed, smeared and daubed blacks, whites and grays — seem to anticipate the disappointment that will invariably accompany the enormous, near-impossible task before him. The spattering mist of paint droplets that streak his face and suit make the canvas look as if it has been left for the birds, so to speak. This is not the face of the Great Progressive Hope enshrined in street art hagiography. This is not a presidential portrait. This is a portrait of a man — a rightfully exhausted and undoubtedly doubt-filled man — who happens to be the president. The aggregated crudeness of Yan’s technique is not in the service of caricature or grotesquerie. Rather — much like Yan’s earlier portraits of Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, anonymous prostitutes, and himself — Obama displays the battle scars of a forceful struggle with portraiture itself.

The political resonances of that representational struggle echo resoundingly throughout this solo exhibition, and the struggle is often one of life and death. On the wall adjacent to Obama, there are four equally large black and white oil portraits depicting unnamed U.S. soldiers and veterans. Each is ambiguously titled Life Souvenir, followed by a different date. Do the numbers mark when these people returned home, or the hour of their death, or both? A morbid terminus is suggested, metonymically, by Returning Home (2008) which depicts the flag-draped coffins of the recent war dead; an image that the Bush administration so pointedly tried to remove from the public domain. A similar ambiguity suffuses the more recent "New Born, New Life" series: I couldn’t help but think of the gore porn photos used by anti-abortion extremists when looking at Yan’s watercolors of newborn infants emerging from murky pools of placental red. Even Obama faces a presidential memento mori in the massive watercolors of U.S. currency on the gallery’s upper level, each mottled denomination bearing the portrait (in this context, rendered worthless as legal tender, while being worth quite a lot, since Yan tends to receive blue chip bids at auction) of a "great man" who has come and gone.

YAN PEI-MING: YES! Through May 23. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 749-4563, www.waltermcbean.com

“Michael Light: New Work”

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REVIEW After viewing Trevor Paglen’s contribution to the SECA Art Awards exhibition at SFMOMA, you can stroll six or seven blocks to Hosfelt Gallery, for a small — yet vast — sample of new work by Michael Light. The walk is a revealing one in terms of SF’s urban landscape, and once you’ve had the Alice-like experience of stepping out of Clementina’s abandoned-alley atmosphere through the Hosfelt’s enormous door, you can dwell on the influence that San Francisco resident Light has had on Paglen’s photography, and the back-and-forth (not to mention the up-and-down) between their vital visions.

"I work with big subjects and grand issues," Light told Robert Hirsch in a 2005 interview. "I am fascinated about that point where humans begin to become inconsequential and realize their smallness in relation to the vastness that is out there." In the past, this fascination has revised moon landings and nuclear testing in a revelatory manner. Light’s current work has him shooting the American West as part of an ongoing project that has sported tentative titles such as Dry Garden and, more recently, Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West. This project ricochets off of Paglen’s recent written and photographic studies of black spots in Nevada, as well as Olivo Barbieri’s aerial film-and-photo endeavor, Site Specific_Las Vegas 05, which had a stay at SFMOMA not too long ago.

The film segment of Barbieri’s Site Specific_Las Vegas 05 followed a trajectory from the ambiguous Nevada desert to Hoover Dam and then Sin City. The overall flight path of Light’s project is even more ambitious. While Barbieri’s imagery is stunning, it lacks the figurative and symbolic depth of Light’s gorgeous, absurd, disgusting, and lovely shots of landscapes under human siege. Light has argued that the oracular power of books is strengthened when set against the playpen of the Internet. The book he’s put together for this show — a citizen’s update of Timothy O’Sullivan’s congressional railroad surveys of the 1870s, displayed on a cinematic camera tripod — is too good for a screen and awesome on the page.

MICHAEL LIGHT: NEW WORK Through March 21. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

A search for patterns in the light – and dark

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A search for patterns in the light — and in the dark

ENIGMATIC: TREVOR PAGLEN AND THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

Trevor Paglen’s section of the 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition is somewhat centrally located — you have to pass through it to get to Jordan Kantor’s room, as well as to a small room containing pieces by all four awardees. This positioning resonates, for Paglen is nothing if not conscious of maps and their meanings, and his contributions have visual connections to the other three artists. The dizzying, multicolored swirls of Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, a c-print from 2008, aren’t far from Tauba Auerbach’s post-op art graphics. The night skies in Paglen’s photography aren’t far from the deep blues and flaring lights of Kantor’s 2008 oil-on-canvas Untitled (lens flare), where the painted camera effects are also suggestive of one of Kantor’s Paglenesque earlier subjects, the 1986 Challenger explosion.

Such ties are helpful, because the flagrantly governmental subject matter and complicatedly political perspectives of Paglen’s work make it too easy to downplay or ignore its artistic facets. The white spots of 2008’s PARCAE Constellation in Draco (Naval Ocean Surveillance System, USA 160) are a photo-corollary to those found in Bruce Conner’s lovely late-era ink drawings. (Like Paglen, the late Conner kept his eye on activities the U.S. hides in plain sight, and that awareness adds undercurrents to works of his that might otherwise be coded as purely spiritual.) When Paglen, from a mile away, uses a long-lens camera to uncover the ambiguous activities of an unmarked 737 in a black spot in Las Vegas, I’m reminded of the telescopic images of cruelty at the end of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1957 Salò. But unlike Pasolini, Paglen is far from being in full charge of the staging, so his seductive images can only blurrily hint at barbarism or sinister motive.

"Photography — and this is especially true after September 11 — is a performance," Paglen told Thomas Keenan in an Aperture article from last year. "To photograph is to exercise the right to photograph. Nowadays, people get locked up for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge." Paglen’s pictures are the most successful portion of his SECA contribution — his presentation of emblematic Pentagon patches, while provocative and even aesthetically playful, raises (much like William E. Jones’ so-called 2007 film Tearoom) problems of authorship. By looking up at the sky and revealing that it’s looking back down at us, Paglen creates a grounded answer to the work of aerial photographers such as Michael Light, whose visions reorient one’s perspective. Paglen isn’t out to make you see clearly. He wants you to look deeper. And wonder. (Johnny Ray Huston)

For a review of Trevor Paglen’s new book, Blank Spots on the Map (Dutton), see Lit, page 42.

HER EMPIRE OF SIGNS: NOT-SO-RANDOM NOTES ON TAUBA AUERBACH

Tauba Auerbach is shaking up her spin-off sphere of the so-called Mission School with optical investigations into that interzone between the figurative and abstract, representational systems and what they communicate, order and chaos. This Bay Area native — at 27, the youngest of the current SECA Award winners — was likewise shaken to the core as an eight-year-old during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "Actually I was at gymnastic class on Judah Street and on the uneven bars," she recalls by phone from New York City, where she now resides. "I was swinging from the low bar to the high bar when it just moved away from me and I fell. It was absolute chaos. Adults screaming conflicting instructions to us. I saw the windows bow in and out, and I remember driving home over the hill and seeing smoke and thinking our house was gone."

The memory bubbles up — as vivid and close to the surface as Auerbach’s perusal of chance and broken glass, Shatter II (2008), in the SECA exhibition — while she talks about her latest project: a piece for the Exploratorium’s "Geometry Playground," which opens in September. The title sounds like a perfect fit: a brain-teasing sense of play underlies many of Auerbach’s projects, including the design of new mathematical symbols for Cambridge University logician Byron Cook’s research into computer science’s famed termination, or halting, problem. "I think there are shortcomings in any coding system," she muses. "Binary is so interesting because the components are so limited…. Every time you want ambiguity in a binary system, you have to simulate it."

Auerbach’s darting intelligence peels off in many directions, much like her eye-boggling patterns. The artist’s old day job, in which she learned the lost art of sign painting at New Bohemia Signs in the Mission District, dovetails with her witty, abstracted deconstructions — or explosions — of writing and semaphore systems, assorted alphabets, Morse code, and eye charts. Two such 2006 works, The Whole Alphabet, From the Center Out, Digital V and …VI, which layer letters drawn from a digital clock, are on display at SFMOMA.

Penetrating glances into chaos and change yielded Auerbach’s largest pieces — the 2008 Crumple paintings — in which she crumpled paper, photographed the results, and then translated the creases onto canvas with halftone printing and paint carefully applied by hand. The folds materialize as one steps further back — and break down into dizzying pixels close up. Multiple entry points exist down this rabbit hole, first carved out by Op artist Bridget Riley. But as with Auerbach’s 2008 Static chromogenic prints, which saw her looking for randomness in analog TV static, the hidden spectrums and other visual tricks are rendered with an elegance a scientist would appreciate. (Kimberly Chun)

NEGATIVE LIGHT: BEYOND THE CANDID CAMERA WITH JORDAN KANTOR

In Jordan Kantor’s paintings, meaning is candid. When the word "candid" entered the English language in the 17th century, it was closer to its Latin roots, meaning "bright," "light," "radiant," "glow," or "white," with whiteness symbolizing purity and sincerity. Later, as the word approached then copulated with the critical language of photography — that crazy new field of "light writing" initially accused of everything from demonic possession to being a potential assassin of traditional visual arts like painting — "candid" gave birth to its common usage today, meaning "frank," "blunt," "severe," a harsh snapshot, brutally honest vision. So severity in art became intertwined with truth.

Kantor’s local gallery, Ratio 3, with its emphasis on projects’ overall coherence, is a welcome home to his current trajectory. His pieces for the SECA Art Award exhibition are alive with many truths at once, their spaces equally negative and positive. The three Untitled (lens flare) paintings and Untitled (HD lens flare), all from 2008, make you step back, only to feel as if your are standing closer than before. Untitled (Surgery) (2006–07) and Untitled (Eclipse) (2008) glow with negative light. This work is in stride with Kantor’s participation in important group shows at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paolo ("This Is Not a Void," 2008) and New York’s Lombard-Freid Projects ("Image Processor," 2007) that dealt with our unstable relationship with images. It confirms that he is a photographer who just happens to use paint. I see aspects of Linda Connor’s slow, large exposures here, as well as Cindy Sherman’s foxes-in-the-headlights humans.

Kantor isn’t hardened by academia, though he has a PhD from Harvard and teaches at California College of the Arts. The brilliant candidness in his pictures is tied to an aesthetic understanding of human desires and scientific pursuits, but also to a humanistic refusal to be neutral. If you spend enough time with his work, you start to see that it is candid in its celebration, not just in its criticism. It reminds me of the ending to poet James Wright’s "A Christmas Greeting," from Shall We Gather at the River (1963), where the dead and the living ask the same questions: "Charlie, I don’t know what to say to you," the poet pines to someone he might have known or just imagined, "Except Good Evening, Greetings, and Good Night, / God Bless Us Every One. Your grave is white. / What are you doing here?" (Ari Messer)

She’s a magic woman

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SECA ART AWARDS




› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002’s Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005’s Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television’s Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let’s raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.

From Cindy Sherman’s faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy’s return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman’s work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006’s Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.

"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don’t see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd’s response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman’s work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it’s not hard to see why.

However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman’s rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece’s hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman’s art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.

This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF’s Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.

The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other’s homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman’s delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy’s and Mike Kelley’s assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."

Holman’s collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television’s most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country’s current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.

In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN

Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

The SECA art awards

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SECA, SECA now. Behold a free-floating netherworld where masked versions of Roseanne Barr and Bill Cosby boogie down together. Stare for one last time into the static of the soon-extinct analog TV to see what patterns emerge. Take an x-ray of Manet. Spy on government secret agents. Peep through the Guardian’s viewfinder at the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art’s biennial award exhibition devoted to Bay Area creators.

The 21st installment of the SECA Art Awards brings the strongest overall group of awardees in some time, four individuals — Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, and Trevor Paglen — whose contributions form a unified vision that’s been missing from the exhibition of late. You might not know it from reading the somewhat contentious artist discussion at the close of the exhibition’s booklet (where Auerbach’s plainspoken interjections are refreshing), but it’s easy to form a chain of symbolic connections that spans from one end of the exhibition to the other.

Holman is this issue’s cover star, partly because her recent playful representations of TV’s first families have proven refreshingly prescient regarding the national identification with (if not of) Barack Obama. And partly because it’s time to put a weird mask on the front of the newspaper. It’s a pleasure to present Matt Sussman’s take on Holman’s drawing-and video installation The Magic Window — no one could better identify the "Soft Pink Missy" beat of its heart. Elsewhere, Kimberly Chun gets systematic with Auerbach, Ari Messer scopes out the camera candor of Kantor’s paintings, and I map the photographic investigations of Trevor Paglen. Let’s take a look.

“Every Sound You Can Imagine”

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REVIEW Art is in the air at City Hall, thanks to Bill Fontana’s "Spiraling Echoes" installation. In contrast, an ambitious exhibition at New Langton Arts explores the visual properties of musical pieces. Curated by Artforum contributor Christoph Cox, "Every Sound You Can Imagine" is rife with inkjet or offset prints of compositions — Morton Subotnick’s smudgy pencil jottings are an exception. A hefty percentage of works avoid standard notation to create sight-based sonic suggestions. To glean from just one small segment or wall, devoted to late-1990s works: Ryoji Ikeda’s Variations for Modulated 440hz Sinewaves is wonderfully nauseating in its op art effect, the score for Signal’s Lines conjures clouds in the sky, and William Basinski’s Shortwavemusic suggests the jagged lines of a seismograph or Richter scale.

These works are strictly black-and-white, but Cox’s survey contains many small rainbows of playful pencil and Magic Marker musicality. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses isn’t alone in its crayon radiance — Jim Hodge’s Sea of Love, Leon Kirschner’s Study for "String Quartet No. 3," Allan Bryant’s Pitch Out, Yasuo Tone’s Ten Haikus of Basho, and John Cage’s Aria (which likens jazz to dark blue and Marlene Dietrich to the color purple) all deploy the color chart as musical chart. Barry Guy’s Witch Gong Game includes felt-tip images of mandalas, pointed stars, graphic diagrams, and moon slivers, while Rainer Wehringer’s responds to Györgi Ligeti’s Artikulation by creating black and brown combs or hair clippers. Kinetic geometric designs — the circles of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, the bird flock of check marks that is Cage’s Study for Piano and Orchestra — aren’t far from the graphic potency found in Jonny Trunk’s handsome 2005 monograph of LP covers The Music Library.

Splicing songbooks to fuse Mendelsohn to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the collage aesthetic of Hodges’ A Line Drawn in the Dark is, along with a piece by Steve Roden, one of the more inventive works here. The late Bruce Conner’s Untitled (music) has an effect similar to Will Yackulic’s recent experiments in drawing with a typewriter, while his contemporary, Wallace Berman, mines language and numeric systems. Downstairs, Christian Marclay’s video, Screenplay, sets many of these free-thinking compositional concepts into motion.

EVERY SOUND YOU CAN IMAGINE Through March 28. Tues.–Sat., noon–6 p.m. New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom, SF. (415) 626-5416, www.newlangtonarts.org

Hear, here

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› johnny@sfbg.com

As I walk into City Hall, I hear a horn from the street — not a car horn, but a single trumpet. Further inside, what might be a few notes from a harpsichord hover in the air, followed by the twitters and chirps of swooping birds. A man sits on the steps at the foot of the rotunda stairs, looking up in slight bewilderment, wondering where in the hell the trees and small jungle might be. The source of these sounds is above him, by the rotunda’s dome — eight transducers installed by sound artist Bill Fontana that employ echolocation as part of a site-specific sound sculpture titled Spiraling Echoes.

A few days later, I step out of the rain and onto a wet 22 Fillmore bus, with a persistent hum, drone, or whine in my ears. I’m wearing headphones and listening to Jacob Kirkegaard’s latest recording, Labyrinthitis (Touch Music/Fonik). I hear hearing: Kirkegaard produced the piece by inserting tiny microphones into his ears to record the frequencies — otoacoustic emissions — produced by hairs within the cochlea. Labyrinthitis is both a recording and a live performance, and the live version, during which the audience’s ears are transformed into an orchestra conducted by Kirkegaard, might be even more radical and inventive.

While one work might seem vast and exterior and the other almost infinitely interior in nature, these two sound projects have more than a few things in common. The CD version of Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis includes a short piece by the composer Anthony Moore, who conducted an extended interview with Fontana in 2005 that surveyed Fontana’s projects. Labyrinthitis comes with a more extensive essay written in San Francisco by Douglas Kahn. A deeper resonance, however, stems from audio and visual correlations between City Hall’s rotunda and the human ear. Photos of the rotunda’s dome visibly echo the images of the spiraling interior roof of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, where Kirkegaard created Labyrinthitis, a roof that plays a central role in the recording’s material packaging. Both structures evoke the interior of an ear.

Spiraling Echoes is a more playful work. It’s in keeping with some of Fontana’s other pieces in iconic sites — through sound, he’s taken apart Big Ben’s timekeeping, replaced the traffic noise around the Arc de Triomphe with sea ambience, and brought Niagara Falls to New York City’s Whitney Museum. For more than thirty years, Fontana has made a practice of bringing the "natural" into man-made realms — there is a potent current of environmentalism within his aesthetic. This is true of Spiraling Echoes‘ quicksilver collage of bird chatter, trickling water, and streetcar and church bells, which darts up and down four public-access floors of City Hall in a manner that magnifies the beauty of the architecture and plays with historical markers, such as the smile on a statue of Harvey Milk. (One can imagine Milk enjoying this piece and, eventually, being driven batty by it.) The infusion of nature is a subtle hint to not trash monuments, and in turn the environment, in order to create newer architecture. It’s tempting to suggest prankish unauthorized versions of Fontana’s project in commercial sites such as downtown malls.

Another characteristic that Spiraling Echoes and Labyrinthitis share is the ability to produce disorientation. Fontana’s piece brought out the Scotty Ferguson in me through its combination of surprising sound and potentially dizzying height. Kirkegaard incites a similar lack of balance no matter where one is standing — the title of Labyrinthitis refers to a balance disorder that can be related to tinnitus. It’s easy to imagine a Pekingese ripping out its owner’s jugular upon encountering the recording’s relentless low-key yet high-pitched intensity, what musicologists might refer to as "Tartini tone." With Labyrinthitis, Kirkegaard has given new and revelatory meaning to the idea of a cochlear implant. I hope he performs his piece in San Francisco one day. Recombinant Media Labs, for one, would be an ideal setting.

SPIRALING ECHOES

Through May 8, free

City Hall

www.sfacgallery.org

“Fabliaux: Tom Marioni Fairy Tales”

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REVIEW I like Tom Marioni for the same reasons that I dig New Order. Though the band came after Marioni’s early sound sculptures, both arose with driven clarity, holding up 20th-century culture to the eye of the storm. They’re like woodsy fairy tales gone splendidly, mockingly urban: you’ll remember the imagery, hear the melody, find them in your dreams, and hallucinate them on old concrete walls long after you’ve left the show. So it’s fitting that "Fabliaux: Tom Marioni Fairy Tales" includes both a selection of Marioni’s printmaking work, published with various master printers at Crown Point Press, and a book of sardonic, remixed fables, with the prints as illustrations of the tales’ philosophies. From the ghostly aquatint Process Landscape (1998) to the bold, blood-like lines of A Door Must Be Either Open or Closed (2002), the exhibition summons noisy spirits and stands up to multiple listening sessions.

I suffer from an inability to experience art, especially "silent" or conceptual art, without hearing things, and Marioni, a keystone in the California Conceptual Art movement and a San Francisco resident since 1959, makes it outright impossible for me not to hear a soundtrack alongside his prints, whether New Order’s song "Your Silent Face" or the faint sound of a poet repeating herself in the Northern California fog. At the recent Martin Puryear exhibition, across the street from Crown Point at SFMOMA, Puryear’s painterly forms had a hypnotic effect, and the most striking of Marioni’s prints here — A Rose … (2008) and Flying with Friends (Drypoint) (2000) — ring out like a reversal, a dis-assemblage, of that exhibition’s solid circles of wood, which were described by the curators as "wall-mounted ring forms" and by Puryear as "occupying the same space as paintings yet lacking a center." A Rose … references Gertrude Stein’s unforgettable phrasing, and looking at Marioni’s grassy drypoints I hear Stein’s wry lilt, her words running round and round.

Or maybe I just hear things because of all the free beer. Marioni recently staged a comeback of his seminal project, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970-ongoing) at a time when, as friends remind me every time Kanye West starts whining on the radio, nobody’s popping champagne.

FABLIAUX: TOM MARIONI FAIRY TALES Through Feb. 21. Tues.–Sat., 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Crown Point Press, 20 Hawthorne, SF. (415) 974-6273. www.crownpoint.com

“Takako Yamaguchi”

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REVIEW For anyone who has attempted to stare down one of Bridget Riley’s hypnogogic vortices or contemplated the point at which two color blocks mesh in a Rothko, Takako Yamaguchi’s recent set of paintings at Jancar Jones Gallery should produce some pleasantly familiar sensations. Upon entering the shoebox-size space, one sees five three-by-four-foot canvases that form a seemingly continuous horizontal vista of graduated lines and patterned strips done in earth tones and blues, with the occasional wink of metallic shimmer. (This panorama effect is offset when one realizes that an outlier has been sneakily hung in the back office area.)

Viewed individually, Yamaguchi’s warm bands of color and geometric repetition start to take on the cast of Southern Californian geography — oceanic expanse, suburban sprawl, and stretches of desert. Interlocking white donuts and intestinal curlicues suggest clouds; hills and waves roll ad infinitum; distant mountains have the repetitive crenulations of a side-scrolling video game; the faintest line of gold leaf could demarcate city lights twinkling midground, or a sliver of sunset. And yet your eyes never fully adjust to the precise play of blurred and crisp elements, which is especially forceful in the two halves of Strangely Familiar. What looks fuzzy in your peripheral vision sometimes stays that way when studied head-on, just as Yamaguchi’s palette toggles between subtle abstraction and figurative hooks. In this sense, her canvases are Magic Eyes in reverse: if you stare long enough, the geographic reference points start to flicker into the background, like unstable mirages. So meticulous and subtle are the gradations of color — so light is Yamaguchi’s brushwork — that at times you forget you are looking at a painting. (This is underscored by the way in which each landscape continues around the sides of the canvas, as if the image were sprayed onto it and then stretched onto a slightly too-small frame.). Jancar Jones may be the smallest gallery in the city, but from the vantage point of Yamaguchi’s landscapes, you can see for miles and miles.

TAKAKO YAMAGUCHI Through Feb. 28. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, suite 120, SF. Thurs–Sat, noon–6 p.m. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com

“Who Got the Chickens” and “Love Can Build a Bridge”

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REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.

The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.

Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.

WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Round and round

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› johnny@sfbg.com

David King and I are staring at a baseball, some screws, and some bolts. More specifically, King and I are looking at Satellite #2, a nine-inch pointy yet round sculpture he constructed from those ingredients for an upcoming show. "To me, this is one of the more successful pieces," King says, as we look around the warehouse art studio at SF Recycling and Disposal Inc. To our left, Christine Lee — who, like King, is an artist-in-residence at the Dump — is working with James Sellier on a wood-based project. To our right, there are many spheres, some suspended, others on pedestals.

A few of the spheres are made of green floral tubes, cassette tapes, lanyards, and balls. A couple brightly colored ones incorporate hair curler ends and board game pieces. "This piece made from curtain rod brackets is one of the first," King says, pointing to an 11-inch silver mass. "I thought I’d try to glue them to a ball, but then I began using string and fishing lines. It looks like a death star." He picks up a huge circular mass of Cliffords, teddy bears, and other stuffed animals that is akin to the work of Mike Kelley (or locally, Matt Furie). A Tickle Me Elmo laughs. "A guy drove up and dropped off two huge bags of stuffed animals. It’s so random. You wonder, ‘Did your daughter no longer want these? Or did someone die?’"

The sense of mortality and waste in those questions is present in King’s new work, particularly through titles that refer to allergens, viruses, and bacteria. But his latest pieces also possess a strong current of playfulness. It manifests via comic shapes and bright cartoon or sleekly attractive colors. King’s sculptures are a departure from his 2-D collages in a series such as last year’s "Beneath All We Know," but they’re also linked to such past projects through a recurrent use of circular shapes that have scientific or metaphysical connotations. With the cellular structures of "Beneath All We Know," King began to foreground floating energy masses that had previously taken the form of jeweled grapevines or crochet patterns. Now those patterns seem to have leapt off the paper of his collages into the three-dimensional world.

In fact, though, they’ve been gleaned from the Dump. "I wanted the challenge of doing something new, of finding a new way of being creative," King says, when asked what motivated him to seek out a residency at the site. "On a personal level, I wanted to put myself out there more and step outside my own studio. The first couple of weeks, it was pretty daunting to witness the sheer volume. I thought, ‘Oh, what have I gotten myself into?’ But over time, I realized you shouldn’t look for a particular thing. Whatever ideas you come in with, you have to let go of — the whole thing is about responding to the waste stream. It was very intuitive. I like to find a lot of one thing: plastic lemons or icicles, bits from chandeliers. When I saw a lot of one thing, I grabbed it."

The sheer volume of material at SF Recycling and Disposal is indeed daunting, if you’re looking for one very specific object. Micah Gibson from the site — who might have been referencing the trash compactor aesthetic of TV Carnage when he titled his 2008 Art at the Dump show "Casual Fridays" — leads me on a quick tour through a small portion of its 40 acres. We walk by enormous seagulls, around a hill covered with carousel horses and capped by a giant ice cream cone, through transfer and sorting stations, and past a pit as a big as football field and 15 feet deep, until we reach a sculpture garden designed by Susan Steinman.

We pause by Bench Curl, a recent piece made by Scott Oliver during his residency. The scent of trees is strong, yet Gibson says it isn’t from the surroundings, but rather a large number of trees in the IMRF (Integrated Materials Recovery Facility). Earlier in the day, when I first showed up, a different mega-pungent smell had been dominant. "It happens whenever food from cruise ships is boiled down," Gibson says, noting that kids on school trips enjoy coming up with descriptions for the occasional olfactory assault.

When Gibson and I return to SF Recycling & Disposal’s main building, I spot a sculpture by Henri Marie-Rose, who has exhibited at the de Young Museum, and who has a long-term artistic relationship with the site. Back at King’s show-in-progress, there are tetrahedrons- and icosahedrons-in-progress, made of cardboard, and a wreath comprised of Chinese food containers is mounted on a wall.

King has discovered a certain joy in multiplicity — he’s capable of cutting 1,000 diamonds out from a waist-high stack of Sotheby’s auction catalogs. Through dedication to repetition, he has used collage to transform the 1980s men’s exercise magazine pinup Scott Madsen into a Shiva figure. With its wide-open skies and mammoth hills — whether green or trash-strewn — his latest creative stomping ground makes for an interesting contrast from the gardens he tends when isn’t making art. It resembles a parody of the Arcadian vistas in his earliest collages. "Sometimes I feel like I want to be narrative, and sometimes I want to be looser," he says, discussing elders and contemporaries he admires, such as John O’Reilly and Fred Tomaselli. "I like the effect of a shift in perspective from a microscope to a telescope, between the tiny and the super large."

DAVID KING: ATOMS, SATELLITES AND OTHER ORBS

With "Christine Lee: Linear Elements"

Fri/23, 5-9 p.m.; and Sat/24, 1-5 p.m., free

SF Recycling & Disposal Art Studio

503 Tunnel, SF

(415) 330-1400

www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

“Brad Noble: Chaotic Resolve”

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The recent Washington Post obituary of Andrew Wyeth reveals that the figurative painter considered himself an abstract artist, because he didn’t depict but rather evoked a metaphysical vision. This idea is at least as old as 1907, when antimodernist Max Nordau hurled it as an accusation at French symbolist Puvis de Chavannes, and while few use the word abstract with this meaning, I find the conception sympathetic rather than pejorative. If we can call it a lineage, then Brad Noble is part of it. His Beach Girl (2007-08) could be a symbolist painting, evoking rather than dispelling mystery. Is the reclining nude partly buried in the sand, or is she becoming sand? Or is the sand becoming her? Up close, she seems to be eating it. This scene is abstract in that it takes representational elements and recombines them in nonrepresentational ways.

Most of the works in "Chaotic Resolve" lack recognizable landscapes, though Lucid Dream Lab features a woman seated on the ground with her back to us, forearms wrapped in ribbons, gazing into a receding horizon. The landscape’s vagueness is complicated by metallic paint that shows through, and many works have a metallic gleam impossible to capture in reproduction. Quagmire features a nude man in profile against a brown surface so shiny it looks lacquered. His back is stooped; thorny vines wind up his legs. His penis is obscured by one arm, but a lone tendril of hair curls out from between his legs at crotch-level: this, like many of Noble’s images, is fraught with uncertainty, lifting as if erect, then curving down impotent, then circling back on itself, suggesting infinity. Exacerbating the whole is the man’s cracking body, his missing brainpan, and the hatchet wounds dividing his neck. A couple pieces, such as Third Party, are less successful, but on the whole, this art is of productive opacity, subtly in tune with the host gallery’s orientation toward surrealist abstraction.

BRAD NOBLE: CHAOTIC RESOLVE Through Feb. 24. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Weinstein Gallery, 301 Geary, SF. (415) 362-8151. www.weinstein.com

Martin Puryear

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REVIEW It’s exhilarating to see, upon entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, one of Martin Puryear’s most renowned works, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), installed with such noiseless bravura: the 36-foot sapling grows slender and seems to disappear even faster into space as it floats above the elevators. Puryear’s eloquent exercise in perspective and comment on Washington — and his philosophy of slow progress and steady struggle in the fight for racial equality — gathers even more resonance today, thinking of 2008’s lengthy political campaigns and the calls for sacrifice in the recessionary year ahead.

After the conceptual games of SFMOMA’s "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" and the almost-fetishized objects of "246 and Counting: Recent Architecture and Design Acquisitions," there’s a lot to surprise — and refresh — the eye in this Puryear retrospective. If "246" startles with its museum recontextualization of almost mundane gadgets like the iPhone, this survey accomplishes the opposite: it quietly brings a primal sense of wonder to the act of walking 360 degrees around sculpture that seems both familiar and alien, bearing all the humble hallmarks of functionality but amplified to the level of fine art. Engineers and architects, woodworkers and basket-weavers, Sea Ranch aficionados and even Olafur Eliasson buffs will find much to ponder at Puryear’s elegant intersection of the raw and the handmade, the organic and the geometric. What comes across clearly in this gradually, gently elucidating exhibit — in which Puryear’s works are displayed thematically rather than chronologically, culminating with an effect akin to a camera aperture slowly swiveling its nautilus eye wide open — is the respect the artist so clearly has for those who study and perfect a craft or trade. It’s as if Puryear has writ large the notion of making: lionizing the utilitarian (Some Tales [1975-78], Lever #3 [1989]) and making it big and beautiful, even witty (Pride’s Cross [1988], Sharp and Flat [1987]), almost Dada-esque in its cerebral and political provocations (Le Prix [2005], C.F.A.O. [2006-07]), and as ovoidally opaque and as fascinated with the negative space within as the surrounding space it so handsomely cuts, without (Maroon [1987-88], The Charm of Subsistence [1989]).

MARTIN PURYEAR Through Jan. 25. Mon–Tues, Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.). (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

“A Trip Down (False) Memory Lane”

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PREVIEW The Lexington Club is an underground landmark of San Francisco. If you’re queer, and especially if you’re a lesbian, the bar has probably played a role in your life at one point or another, and something important probably went down there, by the jukebox or in a graffiti-lined bathroom. In "A Trip Down (False) Memory Lane," curator Jessica Silverman of Silverman Gallery taps into the Lexington’s importance and its history through an ambitious but also human-scale group show that’s been more than a year in the making.

The Lexington has hosted some excellent art at times (I’ve seen paintings by Alicia McCarthy there, for example), though you might not know it. "About a year ago, I was there and I asked [some bar-goers] what show was up, and they didn’t know," says Silverman. "No one was looking at the art. That was bothersome to me. I also wanted to do a show that addressed the space."

Silverman has brought together an array of local and international artists — including Susanne Winterling, Bruce LaBruce, and Slava Mogutin — to create individual works for the exhibition and smaller works for a limited 50-edition box set. Some people, such as New York’s Daphne Fitzpatrick, have never been to the Lexington, even if they have friends who work there — in such cases, they create works that imagine the site, or forge a connection to it. I’m looking forward to seeing Luke Butler’s collages, photographer Job Piston’s sculptural piece, and Tammy Rae Carland’s c-print. Some other potential highlights: Brandon Herman’s jewelry box containing a lighter — which overtly plays off of the ritual of smoking a cigarette in front of the bar — and a postcard invitation from Danny Keith.

A TRIP DOWN (FALSE) MEMORY LANE Reception: Tues/13, 7–9 p.m. 3464 19th St., S.F. (415) 863-2052, www.atripdown-false-memorylane.blogspot.com

“Pinball as Art and the Art of the Pinball”

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PREVIEW One Bay Area artwork that made an impression in 2008 was William T. Wiley’s Punball: Only One Earth. For the centerpiece of a large solo show at Electric Works, Wiley took a 1964 pinball machine from Gottlieb and redesigned it — with characteristic humor — into a global warming game in which "eye scabs [were] melting" and (to quote a review by Guardian contributor Ari Messer) "globes [were] drunk on their own worldliness."

Wiley’s machine isn’t included in "Pinball as Art and the Art of Pinball" at Lucky Ju Ju Gallery, but curator Michael Schiess has organized an 11-artist group collection of pinball machines, paintings, photographs, back-glasses, and playfields. He’s out to demonstrate that the medium exemplifies art just as thoroughly and effectively as other popular forms like comic books or cartoons. The venue is ideal: Lucky Ju Ju Pinball is a paradise for vintage pinball and — after some arresting past shows such as photographer Linda Kramer’s "American Carnival Portraits" — this is its gallery’s 50th exhibition.

PINBALL AS ART AND ART AS PINBALL Through Feb. 4, 2009. Fri.–Sat. 6 p.m.–midnight (party Wed/31, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.), $5–$10. Lucky Ju Ju Pinball Gallery, 713 Santa Clara, Alameda. (510) 205-9793, www.ujuju.com

Best in show

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YEAR IN REVIEW The time is right to pay tribute to the Bay Area’s artists and galleries. Without further ado, here’s an alphabetical guide to 2008’s delights.

A is for the amazing SF art opening section at www.artbusiness.com; and for Ryan Alexiev, whose "Land of a Million Cereals," at Mission 17, hit Larry King and Damien Hirst with sugary comedy

B is Todd Bura, whose "Misfits" at Triple Base used minimalism to make one see things anew; Jonathan Burstein, whose "Visage" at Patricia Sweetow Gallery turned museum recycling into the year’s best portraiture; and Luke Butler, whose "Invasion," at [2nd floor projects] tickled with Spock landscapes and Republican presidential beefcake

C is for Victor Cartagena, "The Invisible Nation," at Galeria de la Raza; Julie Chang, "Ox-herding," at Hosfelt Gallery; Ryan Coffey, "Recent Works," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

D is for Lauren DiCioccio, threading through the death of the newspaper era in "Lauren DiCioccio, Aliza Lelah," at Jack Fischer Gallery; and Emory Douglas, making his own activist news in "The Long Memory: Works Past and Present," at Babylon Falling

E is for David Enos, Frank Haines, and Wayne Smith, pronouncing "Zen With a Lisp," at [2nd floor projects]; and 871 Fine Arts, the Bay’s best art books, now at a new site.

F is for Matt Furie and his "Heads," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery; and "Nature Freak," at Jack Fischer Gallery

G is for the Great Tortilla Conspiracy, who — with help from a Paris Hilton Endowment for the Tortilla Arts — served up "Tortilla Art for the 21st Century," at SomArts Gallery

H is for Jay Howell, who teamed up with Matt Furie for Receiver Gallery’s "Return to Innocence," and brought curatorial goodness to 111 Minna

I is for inventiveness

J is for Bill Jenkins, whose self-titled show at Jancar Jones Gallery was the understatement of the year; and Ian Johnson, whose "Other Voices/Other Rooms" turned jazz into color bursts at Park Life

K is for the brother duo George and Mike Kuchar, presenting dinosaur and dog love via "paintingsdrawingspaintingsdrawingspaintings," at [2nd floor projects]

L is for Ruth Laskey, and the amazing intricacy of her "7 Weavings," at Ratio 3; and Frank Lyon and David Wilson, "Enter the Center," at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

M is for Dave Muller, " Medium (Six Times,)" at Anthony Meier Fine Arts

N is for nothing

O is for Open Studios

P is for Nathan Phelps, turning a corner from white to black with "The Neti Project," at 20 GOTO 10 Gallery

Q is for Queen’s Nails Annex, which saw the future with Maximo Gonzalez’s "Recession: The Alternative Economies of Maximo Gonzalez."

R is for onetime Bay Area queer punk Gwenaël Rattke, bringing collage back with "Nouveau Système," at Ping Pong Gallery; and Lordy Rodriguez, blasting us with color in "201 Drawings," at Hosfelt Gallery

S is for Bott Scarry, tweaking op art and his name with "Weezing the Juice," at CCRider

T is for David Tomb, heeding the call of the wild with the beautiful paintings of "Birds of the Sierra Madre," at Electric Works

U is for underground art that you keep at home and show only to friends

V is for Jacques Villegle, whose "Decollage from 1965-2006" brought the art of torn posters to Modernism Gallery

W is for William T. Wiley, turning ecology into pinball at Electric Works’ "Punball — Only One Earth"; and Michael Wolf, whose "The Transparent City" eyed city-of-now Chicago, at Robert Koch Gallery

X marks the spot

Y is for Will Yackulic, "A Prompt and Perfect Cure," at Gregory Lind Gallery

Z is for "Zebulun," by Goldie winner Kamau Patton, at Queen’s Nails Annex; and for all the zzzs needed to rest up before the barrage of Bay Area art in 2009.

Don’t look back

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Twelve months ago, as I sat down to write a year-end appraisal of 2007, I was still in awe of "© Murakami," the Takashi Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It brilliantly captured the crass apex of global capitalism, mostly through celebrity-studded receptions and the appropriated — call it sculptural — form of a Louis Vuitton boutique. What a difference a year makes. At the close of 2008, the whole art world is watching as the highly regarded MOCA teeters precariously on a financial abyss, while Vuitton maven Marc Jacobs recently canceled his extravagantly performance-arty holiday party in the name of "recessionista" austerity.

Suddenly, commentaries on luxury goods seem so ’07, as evidenced by the critical response to a Chanel-sponsored, Zaha Hadid-designed quilted handbag exhibition that landed in Central Park this fall. "If devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional," architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff opined in The New York Times. At this particular moment, it’s as difficult to summon up the flush feeling of the recent past as it is to contemplate a belt-tightening future.

To look forward is to confront anxious uncertainty. Optimists, however, anticipate a period in which art is tempered by a sense of hopefulness and focus rather than being driven by auction reports. Contemporary art will become more thoughtful, they predict. A good percentage of San Francisco art dealers jetted off to Miami for the recent spate of fairs, fingers crossed, expectations lowered. Word on the street said the outcome wasn’t as bad as expected, though sales were slow. Collectors actually had time to look and think about the art they were interested in, in contrast to automatically joining the grab-and-go sellers’ market of years past. Like everything else in our culture, the art world appears poised to embrace a more manageable scale. I wonder if this also means that art activities will become more homegrown.

This fall, the Bay Area saw a whole lot of contemporary art from China, with big shows at the Berkeley Art Museum ("Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From the Sigg Collection") and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ("Half Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art") providing a welcome crash course in Far East art production. It seems unlikely, though, that either will have a lasting impact on community consciousness. Interest in Chinese art mirrors an American preoccupation with economic miracles. Numerous Western galleries opened Beijing outposts this year, positioning for anticipated new markets, but fantasies of financial success have been exposed as illusion — much like the sounds and images from Zhang Yimou’s over-the-top opening of Beijing Olympics.

The Bay Area museum scene was robust in the summer. Unsurprisingly, "Frida" gave SFMOMA a summer blockbuster, albeit one outsold by "Chihuly at the de Young." The latter presented a problematic expression of the tensions between art, craft, and design — Kenneth Baker’s slam review in the San Francisco Chronicle incited a welcome, if contentious, flurry of public online dialogue. The Contemporary Jewish Museum opened its new building in June with solid shows and events, making that institution a more prominent cultural resource (albeit one that still needs to prove itself through upcoming programming). There were lower budget alternative visions to be found. A plethora of apartment and hallway galleries popped up around town. "Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding," Ratio 3’s summer show honoring a now-legendary mid-1990s gallery in the Mission, , generated a surprisingly broad buzz, thanks to its range of notable artists with SF roots.

And then there was "Bay Area Now 5," a show that people, unfortunately, weren’t really talking about. Ambitious in intent, this edition of the regional survey hoped to offer a spin on international biennials. It included artists who recently moved to the area from distant countries, some guest-curated shows-within-the-show, and off-site events. But the result felt unfocused. Its off-kilter array of bizarre inclusions — such as Edmundo de Marchena’s jaw-dropper of a sculpture, a jiggling prosthetic genital homage to SF’s history of sexual compulsion — failed to please artists (both in and out of the show), appease local galleries whose artists were not represented, or register with a public looking for the current pulse of San Francisco art. Challenges to the market-based art world and programs that avoid the usual suspects are welcome strategies. But in this case, the quality of individual projects was subsumed by the muddled institutional vision of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. What is the point of "Bay Area Now" again?

Perhaps the misfired attempt would be forgivable if it hadn’t been bracketed by equally undercooked exhibitions ("The Way That We Rhyme," "The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres," and the cryptic "transPop: Korea Vietnam Remix" — a show in dire need of contextualizing wall labels). YBCA has a new visual arts director, former San Diego Museum of Art curator Betti-Sue Hertz, who will take the helm in early 2009. She has her work cut out for her.

As resources become more precious, frugal ingenuity is likely to take precedence in local art offerings. To cut costs, museums will be having fewer exhibitions with longer runs (some extending beyond six months). These time frames offer opportunities for deeper scrutiny — or heavier bouts of boredom. Something like SFMOMA’s current "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now," even if it doesn’t live up to its promised scope, reflects an interest in collaborative involvement and the appeal of low-rent materials — rubber bands, anyone? Audiences are enjoying themselves, maybe even making repeat visits.

Perhaps homespun critical fantasy is the order of the day. The Wattis Institute’s "The Wizard of Oz," for example, fused a ragtag collection of contemporary art and historical artifacts into an amber-hued vision of the crumbling American dream. I wish I’d been able to see the Jeff Koons sculpture installed in the Château de Versailles, a more extravagant example of a visually and conceptually pointed spectacle — Koons’ mash-up of European and American relics forms another kind of dreamy Oz. Click your heels three times and repeat after me: there’s no place like home.

GLEN HELFAND’S 2008 TOP 10

1. "Oranges and Sardines," Hammer Museum

Returning SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels’ current "conversations on abstract painting" exhibition in Los Angeles is one of the most satisfying, artist-friendly shows ever.

2. Philippe Vergne, lecture at San Francisco Art Institute

The recently-appointed director of the Dia Art Foundation offered incisive, inspirational, and witty takes on the melancholic state of the arts.

3. Speed Racer: The IMAX Experience (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 2008)

This color-drenched amusement park ride of a movie lacks coherence and features the world’s most irritating child actor, but two-plus hours of nonstop electric rainbow CGI at IMAX scale turns eye-tickling into an endurance sport.

4. Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95)

As economies tank everywhere, there is no better time to get Thornton’s insider view of art fairs, auctions, art schools, and the like — it already seems like glam art history. Plus it’s great fodder for art opening chitchat.

5. Brendan Lott, at SF Art Commission Gallery and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

Lott’s paintings — farmed out to painting towns in China and based on appropriated culturally revealing Flickr images of American teens — provided a remarkably concise picture of globalization.

6. Fritz Haeg, lecture at SFMOMA

Though the notion of garden-as-participatory-eco-artwork is beginning to seem rote, Haeg, a key figure in this movement, convinced skeptics with his self-aware and pleasurable take on social sculpture.

7. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (Dennis Dugan, USA, 2008)

Adam Sandler’s crude, sure, but in this under-appreciated lark he joyfully takes on Arab-Palestinian conflict, the joys of intergenerational sex, the mall-ization of Manhattan, and vintage Paul Mitchell unisex cuts.

8. Park Life and Electric Works

These two relatively new gallery-bookstore entities, Park Life in the Richmond District and Electric Works in SoMa, have made good art seem accessible — in the collector sense — to everyone. If you can’t afford the originals or prints (Electric Works makes ’em), then you can buy into the highly selective inventory of art books at either place.

9. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France 2007)

This down-tempo spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961’s A Woman Is a Woman and Jacques Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg restored my faith in French cinema, not to mention musical melancholy.

10. "Josephine Taylor: Bomb Landscape," Catherine Clark Gallery

Taylor first made a splash with delicately rendered, almost wispy epics of extreme family dysfunction and abuse. Her latest show is startling in its visual darkness and more dreamlike but still frightening surrealistic imagery.

Picks, pans, and a top 10

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CHUCK MOBLEY, CURATOR AT SF CAMERAWORK


Pan: SF Art Institute’s furlough

A humble proposal to those laid off for a month: exchange your individual voice for a collective one and begin intervening by employing the crafty tools of activism as an artful device of communication in order to effect positive change for your institution. As culture workers you are bound to succeed.
Pick: The Size Queens, Magic Dollar Shoppe (Bitter Stag)

A lineup of Bay Area all-stars have produced a multi-layered disc of anti-globalization, anti-pop culture anthems filled with pathos and wit. By turns literary, cheeky, melancholic, and celebratory, this music is the perfect accompaniment to a protest or a Naomi Klein lecture.

XYLOR JANE, ARTIST


Pick: P&H 2 (Behemoth), 2007, oil on canvas, 84" x 92", from "Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular,"

at Tang Museum, Saratoga, NY

This painting stares you down and sizes you up. I lock a gaze. I’m a little scared. I can hear and smell every single thing near me. IT makes you bristle, puff, straighten and square the challenge, feet planted for a tussle. The hot center smokes and glows blood fire, breathes through clamped jaws, "What the fuck are you?". Turns a thick neck and swings an armored tail. THWACK. Hit, jolted, burnt? Part of me melts away, Oh, just my outers, clothes and skin. Hair.

LAWRENCE RINDER, DIRECTOR OF BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE


1. Odetta at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival
2. Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s documentary film October Country
3. Conspiracy of Venus at Adobe Books
4. "Ajit Chahuan: Milky Way of Breeding Stallions That Roll, Ejacuutf8g By Themselves," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
5. "Paul Schiek: the thing about you is that you will end up like me," at Stephen Wirtz Gallery
6. Leah Marks’ senior show at California College of the Arts
7. Jennifer Blowdryer
8. Andy Goldsworthy’s The Spire in the Presidio
9. Brontez at Dog Eared Books
10. Frederic Rzewsky, solo piano at Mills College

WILLIAM E. JONES, FILMMAKER


Pick: Odires Mlászho

At São Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho this fall, I saw the sexy and cerebral, disciplined and dissipated work of Mlászho for the first time. He juxtaposes ordinary mortal faces and Roman portrait sculptures with geometric rigor in his collage series "A Fossil Dig Full of Hooks." He cunningly cements pages of reference books together in his sculpture Enciclopédia Britânica. His most powerful works (from a series called "Butchers and Master Apprentices") involve elaborate collage rearrangements of male nudes that manage to look at once disemboweled and bloodless. Diaphanous yet strong, a body becomes a deconstruction of a flesh-colored Herman Miller lamp.

AVA JANCAR, CO-OWNER OF JANCAR JONES GALLERY


Pick: The current Berkeley Art Museum

A few months ago I found a pamphlet-like publication at an antique shop in Alameda, its cover austere, reading simply University Arts Center. Detailed within were the elevation plans of the elegantly modern yet utilitarian Mario Ciampi design for the Berkeley Art Museum’s current site. Opened in 1970 and constructed in a brutalist manner, with fanning interior cantilevers around an airy core, the concrete building is to be replaced soon with a design by international architect Toyo Ito. My past year of visits to the museum has been colored by this knowledge, and I’ve begun to mourn its impending loss. In spite of the current structure’s seismic instability, it remains baffling to me that a community is so quick to dispose of this local icon, not yet 50 years old. "The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms," an awards jury wrote in 1966 regarding Ciampi’s plan. "We believe [it] can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time."

HENRY URBACH, CURATOR OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN AT SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART


Pick: "Lautrec in Leather: Chuck Arnett and the Birth of the San Francisco Scene," at the GLBT Historical Society

If you missed the show, you can still see Arnett’s rendition of Michelangelo’s David in full leather gear (on view in the Historical Society’s exhibition on 18th and Castro), or you can make an appointment to visit the organization’s extensive queer archive.

Pick: The Federal Office Building by Morphosis, Renzo Piano’s Academy of Sciences Building, and Toyo Ito’s design for the Berkeley Art Museum

These buildings point the way to a new civic architecture.

Pick: The Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park on Easter Sunday

Street theater at its finest.

Pick: Nice Collective’s "Voix de Ville" Collection

How fortunate we are to have these brilliant designers among us.

Pan: Proposition 8

MATT FURIE, ARTIST


Pick: "One-Thousand Twenty-Six Eyes," at Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter

One thousand twenty-six eyes is a lot of eyes and it’s also the name of an awesome group show I saw this year at Hamburger Eyes. I like eyes. The show featured a ton of cool photos from the kids at Space 1026 in Philly. The best thing there was a large glowing geodesic dome with tie-dyed pillows all around it. I sat on a pillow and discovered a little peephole with a tiny photo inside. Turned out this structure was lined with tons of little viewfinders and each hole had a different pic! They also had a great merch booth in the back with a bunch of handmade prints, zines, t-shirts and stuff. I bought an awesome hamburger-with-eyes t-shirt there by artist Chris Kline. He rules.

DARIN KLEIN, PROGRAMS COORDINATOR AT THE HAMMER MUSEUM AND CURATOR


Pick: Fag School #3

Naked men (Jewish Jason, Bob the Handyman, and My Best Friend’s Weiner), hilarious cruising reviews, mortifying blackout reviews, advice columns by Telfar and Allison Wolfe, interviews with New Bloods and Billy Cheer. All of this and more, created with scissors, markers, glue, and a manual typewriter. Nothing fancy, experimental or tricky about this project. Just rants, raves, and snapshots, served up hottt by San Francisco’s very own Brontez in glorious black and white photocopy. The price is right at just $3.50. Warning: Playing the weird Lovewarz DVD that comes with this zine could ruin a preppy gay birthday party!

“Dream On!”

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PREVIEW ‘Tis the season for Bay Area art to slow to a near standstill. Many galleries are closed through 2008. Those still open tend to favor group shows that double as holiday sales — a tough proposition this year. Mission 17 is bucking the trend with "Dream On!," a juried exhibition put together by director-curator Clark Buckner and three others. The show’s dream theme is a mighty wide one. It allows for photographic work by Jessica Rosen (showcased in the Guardian‘s annual August photo issue) and Jason Hanasik, whose verdant Steven in a bed of flowers displays a light touch while grazing up against potentially unsubtle topics such as homoeroticism, militarism, and Andrew Wyeth–like Americana combinations of human and landscape portraiture. (Hanasik is fond of depicting figures in repose.) Mission 17 sneaks some playful and thoughtful art into the city — Ryan Alexiev’s summer solo effort, "The Land of a Million Cereals," was one of 2008’s most enjoyable shows. This group collection, 20 artists strong, holds promise.

DREAM ON! Through Jan. 31, 2009. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m., or by appointment. Mission 17, 2111 Mission, SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org>.

“incidental films for an accidental audience”

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PREVIEW The Bay Area is no stranger to outdoor projection: the past few years alone have brought Melinda Stone and Liz Keim’s "A Trip Down Market Street" program; a series of "Illuminated Corridor" get-togethers in Oakland; and of course, numerous installments of Film Night in the Park. But Michael Damm’s "incidental films for an accidental audience" is something new — a more ephemeral, relatively (in the artist’s words) "unannounced" projection event taking place in various transit spaces or zones. "I’m interested in the anonymity of people seeing [the projections] in passing," Damm explains, during a recent phone conversation. "It presents a different way of thinking about how people see things. A glimpse can be an interstice — a glimpse in passing can leave a question hanging."

Though "incidental films" is an extension of an ongoing project with Portland, Ore., curator Stephanie Snyder, Damm happened upon the idea of projections shortly after moving from SF to the East Bay. "Oakland is a lot more about driving, and about the freeway," he says. "I became curious about those transit corridors." Damm found himself drawing ideas from the German architect and urban planning theorist Thomas Sieverts, in particular Sieverts’ idea of the Zwischenstadt, or "in-between city." Though Damm is guarded about the specific visuals he’s projecting, expect to see views of life-in-motion as you speed past his sights or sites.

INCIDENTAL FILMS FOR AN ACCIDENTAL AUDIENCE Through Dec. 21. Evening commute hours. In Oakland: viewable from the westbound platform of the West Oakland BART Station, and from passing trains northwest of the station. In San Francisco: viewable on Folsom (between 15th and 16th streets) and intermittently on the 80, 880, and 101 freeway corridors.

www.davidcunninghamprojects.com, www.invisiblevenue.com, www.suddenly.org

Beauty, reappraised

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

First look by Matt Sussman:

The deYoung Museum’s retrospective of the late, great Yves Saint Laurent’s 40-year career designing haute couture comes at an awkward moment for fashion and its fans. With the country facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, “recessionista” is the buzzword du jour and Vogue and its ilk are trading their trend watches for old bromides such as “investment pieces” and “necessary luxuries.”

This strange timing is certainly no fault of the de Young, which had the foresight to begin planning this massive retrospective (and to ensure that SF was its only US stop) in 2002, well before the designer’s untimely passing last June. Amid the profligate bailouts, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” not only offers up a snappy lesson in fashion history, it provides a necessary helping of that luxury so often promised, but debatably afforded, by public art institutions: beauty, reappraised.

Saint Laurent collected beautiful things — his homes in Paris and Marrakech were exquisitely appointed with Louis XVI furniture and paintings by Picasso and Goya — and he made the creation of beautiful things his life’s work. One can walk through the exhibit and simply appreciate this — the jackets that flawlessly capture Van Gogh’s brushwork through sequins; the evening cape that’s a cataract of autumnal feathers. But Saint Laurent is a master because he consistently made all the paillettes and feathers and evening gowns and safari suits telegraph what Tim Gunn likes to call “a point of view.”

Saint Laurent’s point of view was that beauty is a form of power and nothing is sexier than confidence. “The body of a woman is not an abstract idea,” he once said, “[A dress] is not made to be contemplated but to be lived in, and the woman who lives in it must feel herself beautiful and right in it.” Even on unobtrusive mannequins, you can see how Saint Laurent’s silhouettes were always conscious of — and gracious toward — a woman’s body. Many garments would be as flattering on a 20-something gamine as on a woman in the fullness of middle age. Perhaps this is why Catherine Deneuve has continuously worn YSL since 1967.

This is immediately apparent in the two rows of garments, backlit in soft blue, that form the entryway to the rest of the exhibit. Here are all the Saint Laurent hallmarks: transparency, androgynous tailoring, the perfected detail — all executed with a sly playfulness and flair for drama. A 1968 evening gown of sheer black silk chiffon, with a ring of ostrich feathers discreetly placed just below the navel, shocks first with all that it leaves exposed, and then with its elegance. A more modest 1991 two-piece evening ensemble dedicated to ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire (to whom Joseph Cornell also paid homage), evokes the casual ease of a dancer’s cool-down outfit — save for the exquisite bugle bead embellished hems. Several examples of Saint Laurent’s signature Le Smoking ensembles — his feminine remake of the tuxedo — are also on display, each one a master class in fit and proportion.

The “Yves Saint Laurent revolution” was not merely a matter of taking cues from street style and changing social mores and gender roles. Like Coco Chanel before him, Saint Laurent’s prerogative was to make clothes for women who wanted to dress for themselves, and not for the Social Registry circuit that still dictated the shopping habits of couture clients when he took over Dior, at the tender age of 21, in 1957.

Granted, many of Saint Laurent’s repeat customers — those names printed on the bottom of the exhibit’s explanatory cards like cartouches in an Egyptian temple — still went to charity luncheons, galas, and season openings. But clad in YSL, they could cause tongues to wag, cluck disapprovingly, or flutter with lust. Saint Laurent’s 1971 ’40s-inspired collection initially struck a sour note with fashion critics, who turned up their noses at what they saw as tasteless “Vichy chic.” But looking at that collection’s signature piece now — a sumptuous, acid green fox fur jacket with shoulder padding befitting a linebacker, or Joan Crawford — one sees a kind of social armor. It says, “don’t fuck with me,” in the classiest way possible. No wonder Naomi Campbell wore the jacket (with just a pair of tights and heels) in Saint Laurent’s farewell retrospective.

“I’m the last couturier,” Saint Laurent intones in a voiceover near the beginning of David Teboul’s intimate 2002 documentary Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris. It’s hard to scan how serious the gently self-deprecating Saint Laurent is being — although his visible physical frailty belies the sharpness of his instincts and his eye as he designs his final spring/summer collection.

Since Saint Laurent’s death, fashion has become yet more rapaciously capitalistic and pragmatically democratic: houses have become branches in multi-brand luxury conglomerates, designers sell to both Target and Barney’s, and haute couture has largely become an accessory to advertising. Saint Laurent’s “last couturier” statement comes off as a declaration of purity in the face of such seismic shifts. A palliative for these sour times, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” grants us unprecedented access to the beautiful world he crafted, whose dignity he sought to protect until the end.

YVES SAINT LAURENT: 40 YEARS OF FASHION

Through April 5, 2009

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF

www.famsf.org

———–

Second look by Kimberly Chun:

Menage A Trois: Looking And Longing And “Yves Saint Laurent”

TAKE ONE The flat, pop, almost banal brilliance of Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) hinges not on tragically trite dungeon-mistress corsets but on the critical tension between the silently exploding, sexually exploratory interior life of Severine (Catherine Denueve) and her frigid-to-frozen good-bourgeois exterior, impeccably framed by Yves Saint Laurent’s prim-chic uniform-esque daywear. These costumes continue to inspire imitators’ collections today — who can forget the jingle-all-the-way opening scene, where Severine rebuffs her handsome surgeon husband during a carriage ride? Her suave Prince Charming abruptly orders their coachman to roughly drag his resistant, now-struggling bride into the fairytale forest — the brass buttons on the men’s coats perfectly rhyme with those on Severine’s five-alarm scarlet wool suit — where they tie her up, tear off that perfectly tailored jacket, whip, and molest her. Bien sur, this is just Severine’s idle before-bed rape and violation fantasy, made all the more pungent by the perverse spoiling of Saint Laurent’s exquisite getups.

At this point in his career, the designer was fully occupied, dreaming up four full collections a year — two for ready-for-wear and two for haute couture — composed of as many as 100 ensembles. Yet he still loved to design for stage and screen. This job led to a lifelong friendship with Deneuve. One iconic frock from Belle de Jour — the sublimely austere, black wool barathea A-line with proper white satin collar and cuffs — is on display at “Yves Saint Laurent,” the exhaustive YSL retrospective at the de Young. An ever-so-slightly-hip-slung black patent belt nearly disappears beneath an invisible front placket closure: black on black. There may be more memorable outfits in the film — particularly the buttoned-up Severine’s protective-shell outerwear — but this piece, redolent of maids, nuns, schoolteachers, and other archetypal images of traditional female service — throws the distance between Severine’s desire for debasement and her icy, blue-eye-shadow-frosted hauteur into stark relief. It’s a study in contrasts: puritanical, yet in its girlish, unconstrained, almost innocent lines — also found in the gray trapeze dress Saint Laurent dreamed up for Christian Dior in 1958 — it eschews the predictable sexuality of the previous era’s “New Look,” with its nipped waists and full womanly skirts.

TAKE TWO Saint Laurent never shied from fantasy, and the Orientalist/colonialist dreams of the designer, who was born in Algiers and spent much of his later life in Morocco, are in full effect at the de Young — Jean Paul Gaultier dined out on the hyper-exaggerated cone breasts that Saint Laurent first conjured in his 1967 African collection. But equally fantastic, if pegged to more utilitarian, workday pursuits, are the examples of women’s wear influenced by salty Mediterranean seafarers, pin-striped swells, and animal-skin-clad hunters. Saint Laurent takes the functional and elevates it until it is almost painfully, acutely sensuous: witness 1968’s suede thigh-high boots accentuating an all-legs Amazon, accompanied by a figure-masking suede tunic and visor-ed hood. Nearby is his first safari jacket from 1968, laces descending from the neckline above a hip-riding ring belt, shorts, and tall boots. Tom Ford borrowed such insouciant lacing to revive moribund Gucci in the ’90s. Veruschka famously struck a pose in this outfit for the fashion press, but I can’t help but imagine longtime Saint Laurent muse and his femme counterpart Betty Catroux as its genuine inspiration.

Less lioness than angular blonde whippet, perpetually booted, putf8um blonde, and a permanent member of her and Yves’ imaginary band Les Saints (Catroux’s maiden name is Saint), the androgynous Catroux — who haunted the exhibition’s media preview at the de Young — was a mannequin for the house of Chanel when Saint Laurent spied her at a nightclub and insisted she work for him instead. A year after their meeting, Saint Laurent designed his first smoking jacket or tuxedo for women: “It was his first step in the exploration of masculine dress within a feminine framework,” writes Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Back Bay, 2006). “The idea of girls dressing like boys and the tensions and attraction that could evoke was a daring new concept in fashion after a decade characterized by graphic, doll-like dresses, white tights, and bouncing hair.” This huntress is the flip of Belle de Jour‘s anti-heroine — aggressive, sexually liberated, and ready to loosen those lacings.

TAKE THREE Bridal gowns inevitably close couture shows, and while some fabulist fashionistas might prefer Saint Laurent’s opulent 1980 tribute to The Merchant of Venice-style Shakespeare or his outrageous but borderline gimmicky 1999 bridal Eve in a pink silk rose bikini, flower ankle bracelet, and train, I prefer the laugh-aloud audaciousness of his “queen baby” infanta/infantile 1965 bridal sock. Call it a divine bride-in-a-sack. Wittily foregrounding the untouchable yet phallic purity of bride-as-fantasy-virgin, Saint Laurent wraps his imaginary maiden in an intricately hand-knit, fisherman-style, ivory wool swaddling. The knobby knit encapsulates her head. Her arms disappear behind poncho-like slits. The designer’s beloved ribbons and bows punctuate her face, waist, and ankles, and pilgrim-buckled shoes poke out beneath. This is bride as a baby bottle cozy, ready to pop — evoking some creamy, dreamy, organic future, as well as some alien yet recognizable, marriage-as-Iron Maiden past.

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