Elise S. Haas diagram by Adam Machacek. Click image to enlarge. Click here to view interactive Haas Bequest diagram.

A little more than twenty years ago, devoted philanthropist and longtime advocate for the arts Elise S. Haas gave a remarkable group of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper to SFMOMA. Her vision and generosity are felt in many corners of the museum—SFMOMA’s  conservation studio bears her name, as does a senior curatorial post in painting and sculpture—but to most visitors her influence and largess are most visible on the museum’s second floor. Since 1991, anyone strolling these galleries has found works hand-selected by Mrs. Haas to survey the art of her time in Europe and the Americas—early and midcareer Picasso, iconic works by Matisse in almost every medium in which he was active, and lesser-known classics by Diego Rivera, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. She also presented the museum with a substantial body of work by British artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and provided us with our first holdings by sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Marino Marini and by Cubists Juan Gris and Henri Laurens.

Mrs. Haas’s bequest to SFMOMA includes much to celebrate, and the gift and the works it comprises have been focal points of many exhibitions and publications. Every five to ten years, for instance, the museum recognizes the importance of the gift by presenting it as an ensemble. Works like Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (1905) and Marini’s Cavallo (1947)—two of Haas’s favorite works, which research tells us were frequently installed together, with the horse’s neck outstretched toward the painting—have a natural affinity, or perhaps they acquired one over the years. Yet in presenting such well-known works—cornerstones of the Haas collection—one wonders if there is, in fact, new light to shed on them. Is there anything that hasn’t already been observed?

Installation view of Haas home with <i>Cavallo</i> and <i>Femme au chapeau</i>. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

My own attempt to address these objects from new angles brought me to the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, decades when Elise Haas was building the core of her collection. I became intrigued by the personal relationships that motivated or facilitated the entry of works into her care and ultimately into SFMOMA’s collection. All were supported by a constellation of individuals—artists, dealers, collectors, family members, mentors—who each had a special relationship to Mrs. Haas. In some cases their presences are overt, as with Sarah Stein; in others they are less perceptible, as in the models provided by Haas’s maternal aunts Aline M. Liebman and Agnes E. Meyer. Yet in each case something of these individuals is woven into the texture of the collection.

Haas had a tendency to demure when speaking about her collecting practice—“I do not call myself a collector but others do. . . . I just buy things I love.” But it doesn’t take an expert researcher to realize that, although she was an amateur in the literal sense, her art collecting was in no way a novice pursuit. A savvy networker and sophisticated broker with an exacting personality and a frank, forthright manner, Haas can appear both inspired and opportunistic within a single transaction. As a hub connecting a complex community of actors, Haas secured major works and ensured their placement at SFMOMA, all the while pursuing her own aesthetic sense and following what she referred to as “a purely personal attraction.”

<i>The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini</i> at SFMOMA showing Marino Marini’s <i>Cavallo</i> (Horse) (1947) and Henri Matisse’s <i>Femme au chapeau</i> (Woman with a Hat) (1905); photo: Ian Reeves, 2013

Although the collection now on view celebrates the gifts of one patron, it hardly reflects the unalloyed aesthetic sensibility of a single visionary. As I’ve come to understand it, the collection is more accurately viewed as an expert synthesis of material from many sources discovered and assembled by Mrs. Haas over decades. With more than ten artists in the collection represented by only a single work, it’s fair to say that cohesiveness was not a guiding principle for Mrs. Haas. And as the exhibition subtitle implies, the works she collected spanned multiple decades of art making, from Matisse’s “fauve” period in the early twentieth century to the work of Marini and his contemporaries in the 1950s and after. Haas had an ability to uncover great works across these periods, and her efforts resulted in a gift that in many ways represents a palette of different twentieth-century styles.

Although fascinating to me, many of the details surrounding these constellations of supporting figures didn’t find their way into the current exhibition, and a great deal of research landed on the editing room floor. Over the next two weeks, between now and the exhibition’s close on June 2, some of these stories will appear in Open Space, highlighting specific aspects of the Haas collection’s formation and telling a story of community, of relationships with artists and dealers, and of role models within and beyond Haas’s family and San Francisco sphere.

Caitlin Haskell is SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

Follow the Currents Within a Collection: An Alternative History of the Elise S. Haas Bequest series here.

Haas Bequest diagram by Adam Machacek. Interactive version will open in a new window.

Caitlin Haskell is SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture.

Follow the Currents within a Collection: An Alternative History of the Elise S. Haas Bequest series here.

When SFMOMA and the National Gallery announced plans to organize a retrospective of Winogrand’s work—now on view at SFMOMA, until June 2—Biondi contacted the curators and offered to speak about what it was like to be one of Winogrand’s subjects. He and SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Erin O’Toole spoke over the phone on April 10. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Erin O’Toole: Why don’t we start with you telling me your full name, where you’re from, and any other pertinent background details you’d like to give, just to give a little introduction.

Nick Biondi: My full name is Nicholas Biondi. Nick Biondi. I was born in Manhattan, New York. Lived there for most of my life, and when I was seventeen I went and applied to the Golden Gloves. I was making headlines during that time because I was having first-round knockouts. Garry Winogrand was assigned to do a photographic study for Sports Illustrated and got in touch with me. . . . He really came around when I had a twelve-second first-round knockout. I still hold the record for that year. Garry came to the third fight, and I won that fight; he took pictures. And he went to school with me, to my high school, to take pictures. And he followed me home one night, and that’s the picture you see at dinner. I have a number of those pictures, and if you look at the picture at dinner, you can see my father scolding me.

O’Toole: Were you a bit of a troublemaker?

Biondi: No, it was just a father-son thing, nothing that I can recall. But look at Garry! Where was Garry? You would get the idea that we were so used to having dinner guests that he just blended right in. Not so! When Garry was taking pictures, if we didn’t see a flash, we were suspicious—what did we know about cameras? Look at my father and mother, how natural they look. Garry was only the second guest we had in twenty years! [laughs]

O’Toole: Do you feel that had a lot to do with him as a person, that he made you feel comfortable?

Biondi: One of the things that still amazes me about the encounter was that neither I nor any of the other participants in the photographs were even remotely self-conscious. Normally when there’s a guy with a camera focusing his attention on you, a person might become self-conscious. Self-consciousness didn’t exist for me then, and looking at the photographs it doesn’t show itself in the pictures. I wasn’t aware of Garry the Photographer’s presence. He was like a ghost, and we simply went about our daily tasks. It helped enormously that he didn’t use flash, but it also made us wonder if he actually had film in the camera! In my opinion this ghostliness was a major component of his talent.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Courtesy Black Dog Collection

O’Toole: Something else I wanted to ask you was about the pictures from [your] clubhouse.

Biondi: Garry became fascinated that a seventeen-year-old kid had a social club in Manhattan, consisting of fourteen teenagers—a place they could go to socialize with their dates to get off the street corners, where the police would not arrest them. Where they would pay their dues and the rent each month and continue the social structure for five years. Garry came from the co-ops of the Bronx, and our club house was a co-op in Manhattan.

O’Toole: There was going to be a victory party there after the fight, but then you didn’t win the fight, is that correct?

Biondi: Right.

O’Toole: So what happened?

Biondi: Well, I got knocked out in the third round. You gotta understand I’d had three first-round knockouts—I’d never made it back to the corner. So in the fourth fight, when I should have known something about pacing yourself, I didn’t. I was exhausted. The fight was in Brooklyn, and afterward we took the subway back to Manhattan. Garry took pictures on the way, and he came to the party at the club.

O’Toole: You said that Sports Illustrated had commissioned the story.

Biondi: That was my understanding. And then they didn’t use it.

O’Toole: Because you didn’t win?

Biondi: That’s my guess. Then they sold it to Pageant magazine, and Pageant printed it, in May of ’55.

O’Toole: So it became a different kind of story.

Biondi: Same writer, same photographer, but it became a human interest story, an amateur boxer. Sports Illustrated probably wanted someone who won the championship, but that was not to be. The experience was fantastic, though.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: The gym was in your neighborhood?

Biondi: The gym was in the neighborhood; that’s how we did it then. The gym that I trained at was on Fifty-Fourth Street between First and Second Avenue in Manhattan and is still standing. I can tell you right off the bat, knowing a little bit about Garry, if I was having this kind of success in the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn, he wouldn’t have taken the assignment. He was strictly a Manhattan guy.

O’Toole: Yep, even though he was from the Bronx.

Biondi: Even though he was from the Bronx, he was strictly Manhattan.

O’Toole: And why do you think that’s the case?

Biondi: Why was he strictly Manhattan? He just was a Manhattan guy. You know, he became one. But John Szarkowski  [director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991 and a great champion of Winogrand’s work] called him a “city hick,” and I agree with that characterization 100 percent. Winogrand was fascinated with Manhattan.

O’Toole: How long did you continue to box?

Biondi: I started in November or December 1953, and the tournament for me lasted through January 30 of 1954. This is the period of time that Garry and I were together. There’s a picture in Pageant magazine on the front page where we’re running, me and a partner running in the park. Garry asked me, “Where do you run?” Run? Who ran? [laughs] My training didn’t encompass running. I would have been in better shape if it did! [laughs] So we said Central Park and decided to meet in Central Park. If you look at the picture in Pageant, we look surprised when we came upon him with his camera—he didn’t stage anything.

O’Toole: He just followed you around.

Biondi: Yeah. He said, “Run,” so I said, “I guess we’ll run around the reservoir once.” And he took the picture and he caught us, just caught a perfect picture. Then he went to high school with me. None of the kids in the drafting class that he took pictures of were self-conscious—it was amazing!

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene Schwartz; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: Was he just there with you the one day at school, or was he there for several days?

Biondi: One day at school, one day running, a couple of days at the club—all separate occasions. At the house one evening, and another time at the gym where I trained. He took lots of pictures at the gym. And then we became friends. Sometimes Coronet magazine or Collier’s would need some young teenager types, so I would get them for him and he would stage us for an assignment. Then I met Adrienne, his wife, and we went to the beach once with his kids. He did the boxing pictures that January, but I kept seeing him after that.

O’Toole: Tell me a little bit about his personality, or your impression of him as a person.

Biondi: C.H.H.I.

O’Toole: What does that mean?

Biondi: Character, Honesty, Honor, Integrity.

O’Toole: Is this your motto?

Biondi: Yes.

O’Toole: And you feel he fit that bill?

Biondi: Class A person. Nothing slimy or sleazy, nothing like that at all. Up-front and intelligent, creative. And I think when he was photographing it was like a gambler who’s into gambling, they just lose themselves. . . . There was a movie called The Leopard, by [Luchino] Visconti [based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa], and it says what we do in life from the minute we’re born is try to escape back into the womb. We do that by being involved in some occupation or pursuit and that’s when you’re the happiest—in pursuit of your dream.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

O’Toole: Did you feel that way boxing?

Biondi: Boxing was a great thing, yes, but I don’t know why I did it. In fact, when I think back on it, if I’d won my fourth fight, there would have been tremendous pressure on me to continue. And believe me, boxing’s a lousy way to make a living. I mean, the training! [laughs] Just think, you get punched in the head every day. Forget the actual fights!

O’Toole: Not so good for your future prospects.

Biondi: [laughs] No, but you know, boxers were my idols as a kid.

O’Toole: Boxing was really big in those years, too, much bigger than it is now. Winogrand shot a lot of boxing and football, and he made some great photographs of Muhammad Ali later on.

Biondi: Right, I’m aware of that. I followed his career, of course, from a distance. I lost touch when he went to California and Texas. But when he was still in the city, I’d run into him. I’d tell him about my latest love affair and that kind of thing, and we’d commiserate. . . . I ran into him with a girl once, in front of his West Side apartment, and we went up to the apartment. He pulled out a lot of photographs to show me from years back and gave me a bunch of them. I think that was when I asked him, “Garry, what is the most creative thing you’ve ever done in your life?” And without missing a beat, he replied, “Having children.” I never forgot that because it offered the possibility for me to be just as creative as Garry! [laughs]

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1954; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Erin O’Toole is assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA.

Kaye Donachie, <i>The Epiphany,</i> 2002; oil on canvas

24. In Sacramento, one of the girls who stood vigil outside a Los Angeles courtroom waiting for her “father to be released” in 1969 makes headlines again six years later. Charles Manson follower Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a gesture that she claims is in defense of the Redwood Forest.
25. “I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason,” Fromme says. “I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation.”
26. Does Fromme know that in Carbon Canyon Regional Park two hundred Redwood trees have been planted? A Redwood forest right there in Orange County!
27. Orange County is best known throughout the world as the home of the original Disneyland (built over what were once orange groves and, before that, desert). In 1975 the theme park celebrates its twentieth anniversary, and in this year, as in the year before and the one after, miles and miles of Super 8 footage are shot in Disneyland, home movies that will later find a larger retro-hungry audience in future YouTube posts. During this year, the park will see its first gang-related violence when three teens are shot. All escape without serious injury.
28. This is also the year that Mark Frechette, famous for his role in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, dies in a prison yard when a barbell with 150 pounds on it falls on his neck. No foul play is suspected, though friends attest that the former actor was suffering severe depression.
29. At the premiere of Zabriskie Point, Frechette and his costar Daria Halprin expressed their disappointment: “Antonioni missed it completely,” Mark said. “What comes over on the screen is a revolutionary Disneyland. Antonioni has given us a lot of pretty pictures, but otherwise it’s a void—there’s no context, no feeling.” Daria added, “I’m sure Antonioni believed in what he was doing, but he just doesn’t understand people—he didn’t give the characters enough room to be human.”
30. Frechette’s story, especially his connections with the Fort Hill Commune, is one of many that will preoccupy painter Kaye Donachie. Headed by the charismatic Mel Lyman, Fort Hill was perhaps the first of such Manson-style personality cults short on dogma but strong on discipline and introspection. Frechette and two other members of the commune attempted to rob a bank in 1973, which was how he wound up in the prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts, where his life would end.
31. Some of the Manson Girls (Fromme included) will also find their way into Donachie’s paintings, bathed in yellow light and smiles.

Kaye Donachie, <i>EBB,</i> 2010; oil on canvas, 50.5 x 40.8 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Black and enduring separation,</i> 2012; oil on canvas, 41 x 30 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>I am so multiple in nights,</i> 2005;
oil on canvas, 67 x 38.5 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Your untold dreams I love to see,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 59.5 x 41.9 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>And schemes of shadows were drifting by,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 45.7 x 66 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Hobo’s Lament,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Didn’t know what to leave behind,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 66.8 x 76.8 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>But in your eyes I see a sunbeam,</i> 2005; oil on canvas, 50.8 x 58.4 cm

Kaye Donachie, <i>Every mornin’ our love is reborn,</i> 2004; oil on canvas, 62.5 x 90 cm

Michelangelo Antonioni, <i>Zabriskie Point</i> (film still), 1970, with Mark Frechette (l) and Daria Halprin (r)

Detail shot of Sydney Cohen’s studio

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating about the joys and frustrations of teaching high school students and connecting on interesting assignments. One of hers I particularly liked: “Make a dark painting. Now make that painting’s dreams.”

I quickly noticed that while she was generous in talking to (and about) her students, Sydney often shied away from talking about her own work or professional artistic experiences. Researching her work online, I was amazed to find her work to be quite stunning. They were these small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces, each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, they reveled in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes. But she didn’t exhibit them that often.

When I visited her paint-splattered studio, there must have been hundreds of paintings lying around and stacked in various states of finish. Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days, with many young abstract painters leaning toward a forced distance of restraint with barely there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of  bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms.

Why so deflective? It was like she was working in secret. Or perhaps like a great actor fraught with stage fright, she’s just incredibly shy when it came to showing her work. Only a handful of people I know who knew her were aware of her paintings. My programming slot at Right Window Gallery in the Mission was approaching, so I asked Sydney if she would like to do a show. I was afraid she would say no, but she thankfully accepted. It’s up through May. To get to know her and her work better, I asked her some general questions and was delighted by the roundabout airiness of her answers.

Q: How would you describe your work?

A: Pillow forts to have sex in. All-you-can-eat ice cream. A preference for the most indirect path. My friend was telling me the other day about some greyhounds we saw at the dog park. She said their owner told her that they have special neuroses: either they stack dishes and things on top of the refrigerator when they’re left alone, or they take things down off the refrigerator and make stacks around the house. She couldn’t remember which.

Q: Is there an artist or artwork that particularly speaks to you?

A: Oh, so many. Michael Disfarmer, Japanese ceramics, woodcuts from ukiyo-e. We talked a little about Édouard Vuillard. I’m really into the drawings of Emma Strebel; I’ve gotten to see her draw since she was in middle school. She goes to NYU now. My aunt Bonnie makes paper from mushrooms. I really like shapes.

Q: What are some of your favorite color combinations?

A: Sometimes when I’m walking around, I feel like I drop into extra deep color vision, that my eyes are tuned right in to color. So much of the time we are not really seeing color. Our brains make composites of colors, deciding for us to not focus on color, more to just take in general impressions, so as to navigate in the world and not get hit by cars or walk into trees. One doesn’t need to be an artist to experience the sudden awareness of color, as if the world just got turned on or tuned in and that it feels like an altered state. It makes us realize it is not how we usually operate. Yet color is happening around us all the time.

I am loving gray and green at the end of the day, and I’m appreciating unusual combinations—orange and purple together, mixed blue and rust shadows. Some colors that I used to find so ugly can start to be really interesting. Oh my God, purple—I’m sorry I’ve been dissing you all these years.

Q: What might people not know about you?

A: I was an extra in a Bollywood film. I played a drug addict. It was a long time ago.

Q: Does anything else inform your work?

A: I really like the internet. I love being able to look something up and that links to something else I want to know about and that to something else. It is supposed to be rewiring our brains to go only shallow, but wide is another kind of deep.

Q: What advice do you give most to your students?

A: You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.

Sydney’s show “Some Other Need” is viewable through May at 992 Valencia St. in the right window of A.T.A. This Sunday (5/19/13) , there is an opening from 4 to 7 p.m. Go see it!

Image courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives

More on Woods’s student years from Daryl here.

Follow the Lebbeus Woods, Architect series here.

]]> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/missed-connections-spring/feed/ 0 http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/missed-connections-spring/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/u4ebXcaPr3s/ http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/san-francisco-art-invades-new-york/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 15:27:24 +0000 Chris Cobb http://blog.sfmoma.org/?p=51578

Trisha Donnelly, Tauba Auerbach, Alicia McCarthy, Xylor Jane, and others at Alicia McCarthy’s opening in Manhattan

Sometimes in New York this thing happens—you are going out and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by folks you know from San Francisco. After a while you might pause, stare up at the sky, and ask to nobody in particular, “Where are they all coming from?”

Even when you talk to complete strangers—if you talk with them long enough, chances are they know somebody you know from the Bay Area. This town can be an isolating place, so when it happens, it can be strangely reassuring.

Anyway, lately I keep seeing people I know, sort of know, and barely know from San Francisco.

In the booth at NADA with Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im of Et al. Works by Kate Bonner, Chris Hood, Andrew Chapman, and Adrianne Rubenstein

This week, it was at the NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) fair. I saw Aaron Harbour, Jackie Im, and Facundo Argañaraz, the proprietors of Et al., one of San Francisco’s newest galleries (not to be confused with ET AL., ETC., of Tokyo; et al projects, of Brooklyn; or et al. and the rest (of it), from New Zealand). They showed a selection of sculptures and paintings and reportedly got a visit from the famous New York art critic Jerry Saltz.

Nearby I saw the Queen’s Nails booth with Bob Linder and Julio César Morales. Queen’s Nails always seemed less like a commercial gallery to me than a kind of anything-goes project space where artists could do whatever they want. In that sense, then, it was a good surprise to see them representing at the art fair. The translation of risky art into sellable art is a tough one, but if it can be done, it can be done in New York.

Xylor Jane with Tauba Auerbach (Alicia McCarthy in the background) at Alicia McCarthy’s solo show at Jack Hanley’s gallery in Manhattan

At the same time, just a few short blocks away Alicia McCarthy was having a solo show at Jack Hanley’s new gallery on the Lower East Side, which is where all the cool things are happening now in New York.

Her opening drew an impressive crowd. Tauba Auerbach was there, as were Xylor Jane, Trisha Donnelly, Christopher Garrett, Bill Jenkins, Sahar Khoury, Whitney Shaw, Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and many others that live or have lived in the Bay Area. Many were old friends or at least drinking buddies. In many ways it looked like a family reunion.

Bob Linder with Julio Morales at the Queen’s Nails booth. Works by Jonathan Runcio, Jason Kalogiros, and Bessma Khalaf

Anyway, Auerbach and Jane are important practitioners of a kind of geometrical abstraction that is very popular today. But back in San Francisco, they were doing it ten years ago. So was Alicia McCarthy. From that perspective it was interesting to see them all together, because they have followed their own personal and artistic paths and yet have remained friends throughout. The fact that those disparate paths all led to New York is amazing and cool because it turns the trope of the “Old Boys’ Club” on its head.

Matt Heckert, Kal Spelletich and Brian Goggin having a post–art opening meal at a Lower East Side night spot

Speaking of the Old Boys’ Club, just about a month ago another Bay Area artist, Kal Spelletich, was in town for a group show called Weird Science that got reviewed in the New York Times. He was here along with Matt Heckert, Brian Goggin, and Achenbach Foundation curator, author, and all around raconteur Robert Flynn Johnson.

Like this past weekend it was also a Bay Area reunion—but from completely different social circles. At Weird Science, many people knew each other from Survival Research Labs, from RE/Search Publications, and from just around the Bay. At that opening I also ran into Marshall Weber, the founder of Booklyn, as well as Bobby Neel Adams, who photographed most of the images for RE/Search Publications’ most famous book, Modern Primitives.

Stephen Boyer reads from his new book, <i>Parasite,</i> at Williamsburg’s best bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown

But you hardly need to seek out Bay Area folks because they seem to just pop up unexpectedly. For example, the other night I just happened to see  poet Stephen Boyer, formerly of San Francisco, reading at the one of the best bookstores in New York—Spoonbill and Sugartown.

This bookstore, interestingly, is also a place I go specifically because they carry McSweeney’s books, the Believer, Maximumrocknroll, and a variety of zines and catalogs including those about Xylor Jane, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Todd Hido, etc. Also, despite the terrible economy and the vanishing art scene there, it has somehow managed to stay open in the hipster-dominated neighborhood of Williamsburg. It’s definitely the kind of place worth supporting.

still from August and After

Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are the opposite of language, and don’t need it. He talks about poetry, but only because he is talking about what’s ineffable, about what is beheld by the eyes, but also held inside of the body. His camera stares, and when, in the dark of the theater, the slow, silent images are illuminated by light, looking is doubled. What happens to duration in the act of staring, happens here. “Simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in search of precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation,” says Elaine Scarry.

Benjamin Fondane’s ciné-poèmes create this space inside one’s head. These films are made to be read. Here are the first eight parts of the 180-part ciné-poème Paupières mûres, from 1928.

1  a short shadow runs along an ominously lit wall
a sign with a pointing white hand runs alongside it

2  another shadow on the same wall
the hand briefly points in the opposite direction

3  the globe of a streetlamp with two candles, its two flames like human eyes

4  patches of light surrounded by darkness illuminate dull shapes left and right like a moving reflector
shop windows hover above

5  a large patch of sidewalk on which

6  a hat rolls

7  a fist punches

8  a white-gloved hand flails

The movement happens in the disjunction between what is supposed to be there, pictures, and what is really there, words. The experience becomes uncanny, we are tickled by our own participation, which somehow overthrows the authority of the auteur. Even as the pieces deal with representation, they are radically open. That is because the images project onto imaginative space, and the light that shines behind them is the infinitude of language.

ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL

Lawrence Weiner’s work is complicated, glamorized by its rendering in language. “Art is the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to human beings,” while literature is “what human beings feel about other human beings,” the artist said in 1982. Words here do not mean something large and wonderful, or mean anything outside the objects they stand in for. Slate indicates nothing more than a slab of stone, water signifies the element itself.

Weiner’s language describes one-to-one correspondences with things in the world. Language here is a denotation system for the aforementioned relationships. It is interchangeable and usable. Language is physical, marking. “Language was the best carrier, it could go all around the world,” the artist said in a talk during his 2007 Whitney retrospective. “Slate in the U.S. is the same as slate in Norway. This way of using language is democratic.”

Statements was his pivotal bookwork, the first piece to be composed entirely of language. He describes each statement as a receipt of bill (like the gas bill) occurring after the action. If this insistence on the correspondence between a thing and its name seems familiar, charming or naive, this might be because Piaget identifies this view of the world as a primary stage of childhood language development: “The name of the apple is written down inside the apple.”

Despite this use of language, the feeling of communication is in the room. It’s just one paradox among many. Language is used like a currency, a thing of definite and exchangeable value in the service of de-commodifying the art object. The authority of the logos is borrowed to insist on the primacy of physicality, the inscrutability of the object. Words are pure abstraction, yet their material presence hangs there like a fact. The artist intends to use words as mere placeholders, but the artworks produced are radically indeterminate. As with Benjamin Fondane, words have an absolute reference, yet one prismed through the infinitude of language.

A RUBBER BALL THROWN ON THE SEA displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum

As short narratives flash onto the screen in black letters, then off just as quickly, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries simultaneously produces the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of reading. The two could be said to be distinct pleasures. Looking happens all at once. It bears the trace of the original look, the trace of love. Its duration is radically different from the duration of reading, which, in Western alphabets, unfolds in a line through time. Here, language ludically breaks into hallowed gallery space. The letters are geometric and black, usually against a modernist white background. Direct, chatty narrative breaks through those graphic choices. That which is always present in the gallery but not often talked about, the personality of the artwork, is inflated here. Other artworks suddenly seem coy in comparison.

In a recent lecture, Johanna Drucker defended “aesthetics,” or as she put it, “aesthesis as a producer of experience,” without which, we cannot think (as we need experience to do so), à la John Dewey. She posited that all objects and events are “transactional,” a peculiar choice of word defined tertiarily as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.” Her aim was to uncouple art from politics, or at least defend a space in which they could be so. Her reason for this was to avoid closure, since “a positive agenda for an artwork affects closure upon the viewer.”

Even if looking does not exactly stand in for communicating, the viewer and the artwork are in the room as physical presences, affecting one another. The moment is always a social one. Against the backdrop of the way the other artists here use language, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries seem to be making a closing down gesture, one that collapses the infinitude of language. Yet, they redirect that same potential outward from the screen in a seemingly social act. The work feels subversive for the way it’s directly, and subjectively, communicating. That which cannot be resolved into closure, for Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, is its social face.

Two films by Nathaniel Dorsky recently screened at SFMOMA.

Young-Hae Chang‘s Pacific Limn recently closed at Kadist.

Johanna Drucker closed the Graduate Lecture Series at SFAI and has a solo show opening at the Center for the Book on May 24.

Christian Marclay, video still from <em>The Clock</em>, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound; twenty-four hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

SFMOMA closes twenty days from now and the museum is rolling out four days of festivities to mark the event, including performances, free art viewing, and one of several 24-hour viewings of Christian Marclay’s epic masterpiece The Clock—twenty-four hours of collaged film fragments that reference the time of day or night, synchronized with local time—which is serving as something of a countdown to the museum’s (nearly) three-year on-site hiatus. The museum’s progress to the finishing line finds poignant symmetry with The Clock’s hourly rhythms and crescendos. Before the clock strikes the hour in Marclay’s work, heralding deadlines, appointments, and showdowns, there is a flurry of activity: people rush to and from destinations, phones ring, and tension builds (suspenseful music gaining momentum) before dissipating at the climax. At high noon, when cowboys faceoff in Westerns, the clock seems to gong like a death knell, signaling beginnings and ends, and ushering in a new phase of the day.

In its 1440 minutes The Clock captures the frenetic pace of daily life; there are moments of reprieve—ebbs and flows—but one feels all the more attuned to the work’s motion for the lack of a cohesive plot. The momentum accrues and dissipates but reaches no ultimate conclusion, because in The Clock there is no end (or beginning). It manifests the fantasy of a “neverending movie,” as Marclay noted at the SFMOMA press preview. The cyclical nature of the film’s loop can be experienced as escapism (“When my clock stops ticking, I’ll die,” notes a character from The Twilight Zone) or entrapment (Molloy’s weary refrain, “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” though not referenced, continually comes to mind), depending on how you look at it—either way, it corresponds to the existential angst that pervades Marclay’s work.

Christian Marclay, installation view of <em>The Clock</em>, 2010; single-channel video with sound; twenty-four hours; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London; photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay

We are slaves to the clock, both bounded by and endlessly reminded of it. Time is envisioned as a sort of preoccupying madness beneath which lurk reminders of death. Among pepperings of well-worn expressions that center on time—“to stand the test of time,” etc. — Colin Firth laments becoming a washed-up old professor, Glenn Close worries about the wrinkles in her skin, and a boy I didn’t recognize blurts out with abandon, “Don’t you know you’re gonna die?!”

But The Clock is far from being a totally morbid send-off for SFMOMA. Amid currents of anxiety, it also projects an extraordinary celebration of human activity, drama, and labor. Threads of narrative are picked up and fused together with seamless editing, and scenes and characters are occasionally returned to, but we linger on them so briefly that plot becomes subordinate to the overall symphony of human action. This sense of effort and drama is mirrored in Marclay’s own Herculean task of researching, organizing, and editing in order to produce The Clock, the specter of which looms large over the experience of watching it. To watch it is to marvel at the marathon three-year process (coincidentally mirroring the museum’s period of closure) undertaken by the artist to bring the work to fruition.

“Time is the essence of music,” Marclay said at the preview, shortly before or after mentioning John Cage and James Joyce’s own twenty-four-hour epic, references that point to the more life-affirming aspects of The Clock. While Marclay’s work lacks, among other elements, Cage’s preoccupation with chance and the depth, complexity, and originality of Ulysses, it captures the musicality of daily life and some of the richness of human experience that those artists absorbed into their work. The Clock represents and honors the artist’s labor (beyond Marclay’s own work, how many more thousands of hours went into the production of each film referenced?) and, with its gesture toward encompassing a complete day, provides an apt conduit for reflecting on a museum’s work in addressing and enriching human experience through the arts.