Barry McGee, Untitled, 1996

A few weeks later, when I return to take a better look at the works of Leslie Shows, Simon Evans, Barry McGee, etc., my feelings are mixed. It’s great that the museum is supporting younger local artists, but does this art with its found materials (a.k.a. garbage), skateboard images and graffiti, want to be there, all gussied up and crowning the walls of gallery 204B? I remember openings for these artists at Jack Hanley’s gallery on Valencia, Adobe Books on 16th Street, and Rick Jacobsen’s short-lived Kiki Gallery (1993-95) on 14th Street—musician friends or the artists themselves tormenting electric guitars, art lovers spilling out onto the sidewalk, swilling canned beer, smoking and talking a mile a minute, the crowd so dense that passersby had to walk in the street to get around them, neighbors calling the police. I remember the wooden fort-type structure Chris Johanson filled Jack Hanley’s with, how we had to climb on it and bend our bodies and peek through crevices to view the pictures he’d affixed to it. I remember the stench of cat urine at Adobe, the dust, the labyrinth of scenesters sipping red wine from plastic glasses amidst book-laden tables that prevented anyone but the most devoted from making it to the tiny back room to view the art. I remember the art serving as a backdrop to plays, poetry readings, and acoustical music sets—and Jerome Caja taking a bubble bath in a claw-footed tub during his opening at Kiki. I turn around and around in gallery 204B and no matter how hard I try, I can’t feel the aura of those raucous nights clinging to this work. This art, I think, has lost the battle. It is now one with the impenetrable cleanliness of the institution.

Chris Johanson, Untitled (Figures with black presence), 2002

When I walk through an art museum, I sometimes experience a rush of the living community that created the objects—this other place and era that was invariably filled with light, because aren’t all artists supposed to be obsessed with light, like they feed off vast amounts of brightness and they work in studios with huge plate glass windows and skylights. When I stand in front of an Impressionist painting, it’s not just any old light bouncing off the canvas, it’s the blinding sunlight of 19th century absinthe-fumed Paris reaching through time and shining on me. That’s a great museum day. On a bad museum day, all I see are objects ripped from context, denatured. The moisture-controlled air grows colder, more tomblike, and the art seems to be waiting, like crypted vampires in a Hammer horror film, waiting for a few drops of blood, a clueless archeologist’s bloody nose or a devotee’s dramatically cut finger, waiting so that they can reanimate and wreak bohemian madness.

Jorge Fick oil painting, hanging in my kitchen

In my kitchen above a prep counter hangs a square canvas from the early 50s, by the Detroit-born painter Jorge Fick (1936-2004), who worked at Black Mountain College with John Chamberlain and Franz Kline. The oil painting originally belonged to the late Donald Allen, who published many of Fick’s contemporaries in the Evergreen Review and the seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. I don’t know the name of the painting nor its exact year. Don Allen told Kevin that Fick’s painting, comprised of gray, pale blue, and black rectangles, is of a window at Black Mountain. It’s soothing to stand at my cutting board and stare at this window with its opaque black panes. The painting is spattered with grease and tomato bits, it feels the changing atmosphere of my kitchen, the chill of winter, the flames under my tea kettle, the dampness of yesterday’s hail storm. Allen took better care of it, but I like to think the Fick is happy living with us. Like my mother’s cat, it’s been moved from a much cushier environment to my disgraceful funkiness, but it continues to thrive, to intersect with a living, breathing world.

Leslie Shows, Two Ways to Organize, 2006

You want to hold on to a scene, to make it last forever, but art communities are transitory, neighborhoods are transitory The Mission scene is over. No longer is it a cheap place to hang out and make art. Condos have replaced garrets, and outsiders take cabs to $$$ restaurants. When I lived there in the mid-80s it was nearly impossible to get a cab there because cabs didn’t bother going to such a shit hole. Some artists have moved to downtown galleries, others have left town. I hear Jack Hanley is closing his San Francisco gallery. The urinating cat at Adobe passed away. When I see artists I know displayed in a museum it’s a bit tragic, for that entry into the museum comes with whiffs of loss, of vibrant worlds that are no longer. Maybe it is my Mission scene, the one I remember, that is over; Kevin reminds me that, somehow, even in these inflationary times, a whole new crowd of young artists is working hard and doing beautiful things in the Mission; and that in fact many of the Mission School artists are still with us, Colter included. During the anniversary weekend “75 Reasons” show, we heard designer Jennifer Sonderby explain that she chose Leslie Shows’ Two Ways to Organize for the cover of SFMOMA’s 75 Years of Looking Forward catalogue because of the painting’s layering. Sonderby likened the history of art to geological strata, with each artist adding to the strata. What I see as the “real” San Francisco may be disappearing, but I realize that when I moved here in 1979, one month before Harvey Milk was assassinated, I was already stepping into an onrushing stream of hope and regret. Art museums. We love them, we hate them, with their canonized objects so far removed from their roots. The art museum taps into our fear of death, imbuing these fragile materials with immortality. When I reconsider Barry McGee’s bulging assemblage I realize, it’s not pregnant, it’s bulging with something from another dimension, trying to break through.

My answer was that he was confusing buildings with artists. Art scenes are complex amalgams of strengths and weaknesses, but in large part they are a factor of artists producing work worthy of attention. I felt that San Francisco had been doing that job just fine for as long as I’d been around (since the mid-70s), and that that activity seemed to move right along without any meaningful impact from the edifices going up all over town. My point being that buildings take on meaning when we see what human impact they have and what is put in them. The attention that local artists get is what goes up and down, but the production is steady. Not to say that that steady production doesn’t have stronger moments than others.

More than a decade later, things have improved along these lines. SF MOMA is much more friendly to the region than in the past, not only as evidenced by the increasingly rigorous SECA awards but by the highly inclusive recent 75th anniversary events, and the ongoing education department engagement, such as this blog. Even the De Young now has a contemporary series that has shown such local stalwarts as John Bankston and Michael Arcega. Berkeley and Oakland have both been historically strong regional presenters. (I did my best at Yerba Buena to establish a tradition of primary commitment to support of local artists; what direction the current leadership takes remains to be seen.)

The notion of world class is the McGuffin in all this. I know world class is  just a phrase, but it’s one that sets my teeth on edge. It’s the kind of language choice I associate with celebrity gossip on television. Can’t you just see the folks interviewing the movie stars on the red carpet Sunday night at the Oscars pushing a microphone into Tom Cruise’s face and chirping, “Isn’t this just a world class event?” Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless. World class is a term that I believe leaked over from the sports world. In ranking how fast the fastest sprinters can cover 100 meters, it has objectivity and meaning. Slopped over to a realm such as the arts, it only pretends to some kind of verifiable truth. So while it feigns being about the best of the best, it really means, “talked about and caught up in the international hullaballoo that we all hear so much media talk about,” with a dash of “appreciated by we who are at top of the heap.” Both meanings reveal values that imply that our worth as people and arts professionals is determined by a competitive pecking order. Juxtapose this with the values of someone like local hero Ted Purves, who is an artist who worked for almost three years in his East Bay neighborhood through an organization he and his wife Susanne Cockrell started called Temescal Amity Works. Are their modest, yet deeply, profoundly moving community-based projects world class?

So, a long and long-winded way to say, we need and love gorgeous, progressive, thriving art presenters, the more the merrier. But let’s not equate these facilities with the health of our art scenes. These buildings are only one of a couple of dozen factors that make us all rich in our arts surroundings, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I wanted to conclude by mentioning another miraculous art building’s upcoming arrival. I went on a tour of the new Crocker Museum in Sacramento on Thursday the 4th. It won’t be opening for several months but the building is essentially done, and it’s quite wonderful. It’s a one-hundred million dollar investment overseen by tireless director Lial Jones. In particular, there are several spectacular galleries on the third floor that will be the envy of most museum professionals. You can see the sawtooth clerestory-style skylights here:

Kathryn Bigelow

…on your first time to be used in the photography of  an Academy Award recipient for Best Picture and Direction:  Bay Area native Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Let’s hear it for small-gauge filmmaking!!  ¡Viva celluloide!

I used to pride myself on being really “with it,” going to shows, roaming the streets in an artistic manner and just generally being on the city’s creative pulse, rah rah rah. Ha! I know now that I am truly out of it because I have missed seeing these awesome stickers plastered in the Mission district along the same time as SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary shenanigans, but found them on one Steve Rhodes’ flickr site (thank you!). Someone had gotten their hands on a bunch of permanent collection labels and went ahead and added their own DIY sensibility to things. The collection, it seems, has grown to encompass a lot of municipal objects, along with a Judaica sensibility. Total LOL! Lurv it.

Anyone know the backstory? Or maybe some things are better left unattributed…

Kathryn Bigelow presented the Oscar for Best Director by Barbra Streisand at the 82nd Academy Awards

…0n the first of your graduates to take home Best Director and Picture Oscars.  The history of film instruction at SFAI includes the participation of such luminaries as Sidney Peterson, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and George Kuchar. Kathryn Bigelow continues SFAI’s currently challenged legacy of small-gauge celluloid filmmaking:  The Hurt Locker was photographed in Super 16mm.

Photo by Rebar

Certain bits of a museum are there for practicality and comfort – track lighting, plugs, elevators, thermostats, water fountains. Unlike the museum building or the work it houses, these niche spaces are designed to fade away into relative invisibility, to support the museum-going experience, and certainly aren’t meant to inspire or represent our cultural values. (Objectively one could read the presence of exit signs and wheelchair ramps as a culture’s endorsement of safety and accessibility, but that might be reading too much into things.)

On the other hand, our behavior is certainly, if subtly, shaped by these things we’ve been trained through repetition and exposure to ignore. No one stops in front of the unmarked door painted the same color as the wall in the corner of the gallery; one politely steps past it, and on to the next piece. A visual language composed of neutral paint and the most utilitarian of door knobs signals that this is not part of the show.

Photo by Rebar

If there’s one ubiquitous invisible fixture of the museum who invariably shapes behavior, it’s the museum guard. As fixtures, guards carry a host of responsibilities – they’re protectors, explainers, and wayfinders; their presence implies that artwork is worthy of protection, and we act accordingly.

Because they’re perceived as such a part of the institution, it’s not often that we give much thought to a guard’s experiences in the museum space, which must be unique, being both a part of the social code and exposed to it at the same time. So it’s exciting that a group of museum guards at the NY Met, many of whom are artists themselves, have decided to launch an art journal called Sw!pe, in which to showcase their own creative endeavors. According to 25CPW, the gallery where the launch party and opening was held on Thursday, “through this publication, the journal and its editors, hope to provide a platform and inspiration for other cultural institutions to showcase their own creative workforce.”

photo by Rebar

More than just talking about being museum guards, these artists are taking their position and leveraging it, processing it, activating a part of the museum infrastructure that simply wasn’t obvious before in a creative, engaging way. Out of the niche and into the spotlight.

While this intervention isn’t happening in the museum space itself, it has the potential to change the scripted social code of the museum nonetheless. Imagine engaging in a conversation with your helpful museum guard, not about the nearest bathroom or photography policies, but about their latest work or favorite masterpiece. It never really crossed our minds before, but now we wonder – why so invisible? When is the next employee show?

unattended. Photo by Scott DuBose

SFMOMA visitors have the best taste.  Just take a look at the color and variety of their umbrellas!  Thanks to Scott DuBose who caught the very well accessorized unattended umbrella rack on a rainy day.

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA”. You tag too!

75 Reasons to Live green room. Photo by Suzanne Stein.

Kidding!  There were actually tons of events happening for SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary Weekend.  You can view the whole suite of photographs here.

75 Reasons to Live. Pamela Z, composer/sound artist on Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (formerly Untitled). Photo by James Williams

75 Reasons to Live: Stephen Hartman, psychoanalyst on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Golden). Photo by Winni Wintermeyer

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Above, Pamela Z and Stephen Hartman giving their 7.5 minute talks as part of 75 Reasons to Live.  What,  your analyst doesn’t wear a wet suit?

Allison Smith: SMITHS. Photo by James Williams

This tin wall sconce is reflecting a huge American Fancy quilt—both part of Allison Smith’s installation.

SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary Weekend Celebration: Evening Festivities. Photo by James Williams

More pictures at Flickr.

Recently having read Mani by Patrick Fermor, the genius British travel writer, I was impressed by his descriptions of clan warfare in the wild and isolated parts of Greece in the past. Families would build outrageously high towers, and in times of warfare, would rain down ruin on competing clans from their heights. Kind of a village version of the old (and less violent) competitions among Italian towns to have the most and biggest towers. Most notably surviving is San Gimignano, which once had 58 towers:

San Gimignano, Italy

With Yerba Buena and SFMOMA opening in the early 90s, and the remodelled Palace of the Legion of Honor opening shortly after that, San Francisco dominated the local museum edifice boom of almost 20 years ago. Then the opening of the new De Young a couple of years ago, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, not to mention the new Academy of Science, really brought a great sense of Gimignanismo to the City’s major museum world. The East Bay is now bracing for its own star turn, with the Oakland Museum’s new configuration this year, and the Berkeley Art Museum’s decision to remodel an existing building just off campus in the years to come.

Using a budget of some 58 million dollars, raised from bonds as well as private philanthropy, the museum has been closed since last year to remodel and rethink the way it fulfills its mission: documenting the art of California. The intention was in large part to update the tripartite art, nature, history structure of the museum to get more integration. With consultation by longtime designer Ted Cohen, who was the first exhibition designer at the museum, circa 1960-75,  who is working on color, design and placement of the works, the galleries have been expanded, including incorporating formerly outdoor spaces into the museum as new galleries, to great advantage.  The collection has been rehung, bringing much work never seen before by the public, as well as many new acquisitions. The crypt-like concrete walls of the art brut period have largely been replaced with brightly colored sheetrock walls. Vistas of the History galleries downstairs, that had been blocked for decades, are reopened. The strictly chronological displays have been replaced with the kind of thematic groupings that the Tate Modern in London initiated a decade ago. There are rooms for craft, for outsider art, Bay Area figurative abstraction, contemporary work, and much more. There are reading and media rooms. The stairway from the entrance to the galleries is now covered. Most striking of all are two new galleries that total 4500 square feet, especially the new gallery in the rear right that is a light-filled, terrazzo-floored gem for changing exhibitions. Pictured below is how (about half of the space) looked during initial install last month.

New Gallery Oakland Museum

A highlight of the upcoming opening celebration will be a 31-hour series of non-stop conversations between noted figures in the community (May 1 and 2). Upcoming in the first year after opening will be such exhibitions as a retrospective of the East Bay’s PIXAR studio, and major new work by noted artist and naturalist Mark Dion. I came away from my tour feeling that my neighborhood museum (I live in Jack London Square) had awoken from a long slumber and I very much looked forward to getting reacquainted.