Anti/Social

From the curatorial statement: "Social interaction has become an integral part of contemporary art practice. ... In this show we hope to raise questions concerning the social dynamics in artwork and call new attention to the antisocial as both a defining feature of modern life, and a locus for social change."

When I read this statement in the prospectus for Mission 17's juried exhibition, "Anti/Social," I was exceptionally curious to see the resulting show - especially after having taken note of several recent exhibitions of "relational aesthetics" art - current exhibitions at the Wattis Institute and the multifold "Offsite" series at Southern Exposure, which includes the private public space interventions of ReBar and the Radio Cartography project of Neighborhood Public Radio, which wins the prize for deftly combining the art trends of relational aesthetics and mapping. After seeing the Phil Collins compendium of Turkish youth performing karaoke to songs by the Smiths, Dünya Dinlemiyor (Turkish for "the world won’t listen," the British version of the album released in America as "Louder Than Bombs") at SF MoMA, then attending The Lab's presentation of "You Don't Love Me Yet," Swedish artist Johanna Billings' screening and performance event of local musicians covering the titular Roky Erickson song, I was betting with myself whether the Mission 17 show would have a musical component.

I have never been one to deny the art status of work displayed as such, and the social practices genre has promises of interestingness, though often these promises are broken by poor presentation and a significant chasm between the stated intent and goals and the results of the executed project.

I was really impressed by the Mission 17 show in the overall strength of the works on display and the breadth of solid approaches to the theme. Several works addressed the curators' unease with the common tropes of relational aesthetics directly through work in that genre.

Paul Zografakis' "Waiting for a Sign" was an example of a well thought out idea that succeeded in execution and was presented well in the gallery. The photo documentation depicting the artist holding several of the signs written for him by passersby in Union Square first catch the eye. The video - documenting Zografakis shouting through a megaphone and holding signs with the accompanying slogans also show the series of sign makers approaching the table the artist had set up, and the artist switching from being a one man rally to "Free Palestine!" to declaiming "I love you I love you I love you I love you." The signs, themselves, are also on display - one taped over another - which was a good choice as the lighting of the video makes them illegible at times.

I appreciated Zografakis' project in that it confronts the limited ability art has to effect political change in America with a sense of humor and self-awareness, rather than a fey earnestness about the radical potential of "random acts of kindness" and quirky beautification initiatives.

Kathrine Worel's "Exchanging Room" had me clenching my teeth and steeling myself in anticipation of some variant of touchy-feely take-your-shoes-off-and-hang-out-in-a-tent art. Instead, I found myself in a neutral office waiting room environment filling out a survey about why I attend art openings, what I thought of relational art, and what I thought was the role of the artist in society. A dialog between Worel and another artist in the show played at conversational volume on speakers placed on the floor. As I got to the role of the artist question on the survey, writing about how I distrust universal pronouncements about the role of the artist in society, I noticed that the discussion was exploring that exact sentiment. I listened further to artist, Jesse Houlding discussing his prints of plastic shopping bags and the complex relationship we have to them and critiquing their portrayal as "Gee whiz isn't life beautiful" symbols in the film "American Beauty," which returned my thoughts to how that aestheticization of the banal seems so prevalent in relational art. I found the recorded conversation consistently interesting and intelligent and appreciated the fact that it was edited. Another thing that keeps some social practices art from succeeding in my eyes is a lack of editing - whether visual (in terms of displaying a project in a compelling manner) or temporal (how long does one expect a visitor or participant to engage with this).

Joy, Eileen Starr Moderbacher, 2006

There were also a number of strong works that engaged the "anti/social" theme in traditional media, including Houlding's prints of the omnipresent shopping bags, a subject the artist eloquently describes in his statement as "dancing trash that we ignore or aestheticize." Moshe Quinn's silver gel prints of the angles formed by corporate office buildings illustrate the theme quite well - the sense of aggressive interiority of these towers is depicted in their sheer facades, reflecting glass, and high modern grids. Also of note is Eileen Starr Moderbacher's painting of an unpopulated residential street with a tidy home with a topiary "Joy" on the front lawn juxtaposed with a pile of litter on the opposite corner, a sight I've seen quite often in neighborhoods developers and city planners call "transitional." Alan Bamberger documented the show's opening on his site artbusiness.com, effusively praising Edmund Wyss' hyper-realistic paintings of a bullet and camera lens. These oil paintings are indeed gorgeous, though didactic. In an exhibition with so many other works that are both immediately engaging and nuanced, I would disagree with Bamberger's assessment Wyss' paintings are the best things in the show.

"Anti/Social" will be on view at Mission17 through January 6th. The gallery will be closed from December 23rd through January 1st. For more information visit: http://www.mission17.org/

Image on home page: 30mm/50mm, Edmund Wyss, 2006.

Giorgio Morandi

Natura morta, 1955, oil on canvas.

We are fortunate to be enjoying the second exhibition in 3 years of the seldom-seen works of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery. The exhibition comprises less than 10 works, yet the experience it offers is substantial. Those who know Morandi’s art will see again his familiar still life subjects: household containers, jars, teapots, vases, cups, funnels. As always, the objects are presented in modest scale, at the same close distance to the viewer, in a shallow space in front of a wall. Through the alchemy of Morandi’s skill and vision, the paintings in the show, as always, are fresh and moving.

As soon as you enter the gallery, you sense an atmosphere of quiet and even humility. Unlike most still lifes, the objects depicted here are quite alone in their surrounding space; the tone of solitude projects its own quality of time. Morandi rarely painted any object that had not been in his studio for a very long time, literally gathering dust that muted its surface qualities. His deep distrust of false drama or any kind of showiness expresses itself through a deeply harmonious overall palette of earth tones, white and subtle warm and cool hues. Morandi is visually low-key, but a master orchestrator of color relationships. As you get beyond the show's first impression of ochres and siennas, individual paintings reveal affecting use of blue, lavender, orange, rose, yellow, pink and viridian. The works are very sensual and produce an almost physical pleasure. Morandi is an artist's artist; he keeps us aware at every turn that the forms we see are created with fluid strokes of paint. His sure touch is never concerned with precision, but communicates a warm visual caress of the physical objects at hand.

Morandi received much criticism and dismissal for painting descriptively, for “turning his back” on 20th century modernism. But in looking closely at these paintings, anomalies appear; his “realism” is soon seen to raise as many questions as answers. In his mature art, for his starting point, Morandi went back to Cezanne’s experiential approach. Cezanne worshipped perceptual sensation in the moment, and stuck, come hell or high water, to the internal necessities of the artwork he was making. In the reproduction above from the show, the cup has an uneven lip – emphasizing its extension into empty space on the left. The left side of the vase’s neck is chiefly defined by the painting of the “air” beside it, and the grayish band running round the vase is “open” to the wall behind. With the objects in the center of the picture, the subliminal emphasis on space on the left side of the painting balances the weight of the shadow of the objects on the right. The “grounding” of the objects here unexpectedly is tied to the compositional “horizon” behind which runs through them. The painting's visual and emotional center, the point where the two objects touch, is quite a complicated passage of painting. Opposing dark and light forms define each other. The deep shadow of the volumetric, receeding surface of the cup strangely contacts a bright, apparently flat edge of the vase.

The two drawings in the show bring direct attention to visual uncertainties. These masterpieces of economy were quickly made. Morandi indicates selected outlines, edges where forms overlap, and shadows. Though, as with his oils, there is a "handmade," sensuous touch in his graphite lines and shading, the final impression is that of white paper, which can serve as light, form or space, or all three. From minimal clues, his familiar objects come in and out of your mind's eye, as you explore the suggested groups of forms. Beautiful and puzzle-like, the drawings are visually inexhaustible, results of a lifetime of looking that delves into the nature of perception itself. Morandi's focus on visual ambiguity reflects not only on the slippery nature of seeing, but also the idea that reality itself is more fluid than we think.

Morandi is a great example of a “pure painter,” concerned with how pigment can embody abstractions like figure and ground, light and dark, and increasingly in later works, as the objects in his work dematerialized further into translucent skins of sketchy paint, “being” and “nothingness.” Described as “a painter of bottles with souls,” Morandi is also a remarkable narrator, with a keen eye for personality. There are innumerable still life pictures, but how few create complex "characters" from bare indications of mass, gesture, position and shape, as we see in this show. Morandi’s ability to suggest the human condition -with both seriousness and humor- through objects is truly marvelous.

Dignity and vulnerability are the keynotes of Morandi's arrangements at Thiebaud. These poignantly clustered “families,” gathered together for mutual support, are psychologically revealed because like all of us, no matter how they present themselves, they can’t hide what they are. The viewers imagination is always given several paths to follow. In the painting above, the dominant vase is clearly the protector of the cup, which appears to lean on and be supported by it. Or perhaps not. Is the cup smaller but stronger, less formal and thus more flexible, its earthy substance more able to take life’s knocks? Tenderly conceived with such kind regard, these characters, like the others suggested in the paintings on view, seem to exist only in relation with each other.

The show put me in mind of several examples of world art: Mu-Qui’s famous, witty “Persimmons” http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/JHTI/shinto/images/muqi-persimmons.jpg and Stonehenge http://www.sacredsites.com/europe/england/images/stonehenge_H_500.jpg . Both very different works have a remarkable presence of personalities, none of which is precisely fixed. As you consider each piece of fruit or standing stone singly or in relation to the others, like living characters, they change each time you look at them.

The paintings of Gorgio Morandi will be on view though December 16th. More information about Morandi can be found at http://www.museomorandi.it/index_net.htm

Where We Are Is Always Miles Away

Tavares Strachan brought the East Coast—at least a sizeable piece of it—with him on his recent visit to San Francisco. And he left it here, at The Luggage Store on Market at 6th Street. Strachan’s project, Where We Are Is Always Miles Away is, quite literally, art made out of everyday reality—the transformation of a mundane urban fixture into a truly ominous spectacle.

In a nutshell Strachan got approval, and assistance, from the City of New Haven, Connecticut to remove a roughly 20 square foot chunk of sidewalk from Crown Street, near Yale. This included about a half-foot of the earth below, the concrete, bits of urban detritus like cigarette butts and bottle caps, a parking meter, a street sign, and “the accompanying air." At no cost to the artist the City provided a work crew that excavated the site under his direction and then replaced what they removed with new materials, essentially returning the site to its previous condition. The excavated materials were trucked to San Francisco and hoisted with a telescoping forklift into The Luggage Store’s 2nd floor gallery where they will be on view in a hermetically sealed, hexagonal, aluminum and glass container through January 6th. I should also hasten to mention that the climate inside the container—the light level and air temperature—have been calibrated to match those of New Haven at the time of extraction.

It’s tempting to align Strachan with the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Smithson’s Non-Sites both come to mind. He certainly has their audacity, but I think these comparisons are ultimately superficial and do little to help illuminate Where We Are… Surely Strachan’s work has it’s art historical antecedents, the work of Donna Dennis and Glen Seator also come to mind, but Strachan seems far more interested in reality and its displacement than in recreating it or merging with it.

Untitled, 2006. 20" x 30" light box (documentation of Crown Street excavation).

The accompanying documentation, also on display at The Luggage Store, bares this out. It is crucial to Strachan that we understand the chunk of New Haven, now here, used to be there. And this makes me think of photography, or rather some of the rhetoric surrounding photography—that kind of displacement of the real across time and space. Albeit the “photograph” in question is life-scale and three dimensional, it is also severed from it’s original context and sealed off from our touch—available only to our gaze and intellectual consideration. Too, it has, at least temporarily, escaped time. A feeling that is heightened by the fixed temperature (46º F), static internal lighting, and, perhaps most poignantly, by the parking meter which has permanently expired.

Portal, 2006. From the installation, Where We Are Is Always Miles Away.

Where We Are… is nothing less than the halting of life, but it is in this literalizing of photography’s metaphors (cutting, stealing, freezing, displacing) that Strachan’s project breaks with photography. “This is” as opposed to “this was”—the chunk of Crown Street sidewalk is an irreducible fact, indifferent to viewers’ stares, but none-the-less resistant to our tendency to overlook such common things, or even to seeing them as generic signs pointing to the homogenization of American cities. The seemingly abject object at the center of Where We Are… is imbibed with place, highly specific, and contingent because of it—evidence that similar does not mean identical and that, at least for the time being, we are not able to manufacture the World’s double—though this would appear to be the logical outcome (or sinister fantasy) of our seemingly endless preoccupation with reproducing reality. Surrounded by virtual realities even an obstinate segment of sidewalk can fall into doubt as to its authenticity. So despite all its inert matter Where We Are… has an almost ethereal presence in my memory as if it might have been a hologram or specter from a future where the only purpose of the real is to be preserved as historical artifact.

Where We Are Is Always Miles Away will be on view at The Luggage Store through January 6th, 2007. More information can be had at http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/

Post Script: The press release for Where We Are… mentions Strachan’s interest in myth and storytelling and this project seems destined to become just that—art world mythology that lives on through it’s retelling. But isn’t this always the case with successful projects? I have to admit to some skepticism (or was it cynicism) before seeing Strachan’s project. The project narative has some inconsistancies and makes some far-fetched claims. But in person Where We Are… effectively suspends disbelief, or at least calls into question one's questioning. Much credit belongs to Laurie Lazer and Darryl Smith of The Luggage Store for bringing this project to fruition and bringing it to San Francisco. We are lucky to have such a committed and adventurous venue for contemporary art.