John Waters "Reckless Eyeballs"

Melissa, 2006, C-print, 23.5" x 30.5"

On his recent visit to attend the Midnight Mass organized by Peaches Christ, John Waters looked as graceful and entertained as he usually does on public appearances. Seeing him around a truckload of ardent fans, hard-core enthusiasts dressed up as characters from his movies and too many glamorous drag queens, one could not help but wonder for the umpteenth time: Who is this guy?

If his movies are any indication he is godfather supreme to all things Porkyesque and Jackassy before there was ever a mainstream version of his outlandish antics. Although he hasn’t matched the glorious immensity of his first features, it is always a wicked pleasure to submerge in the Buñuelian freak show he puts in each of his filmic concoctions.

A unique commodity in his own right, but probably not for his own good, Mr. Waters has made it quite difficult for his followers to keep up with his artistic practice: he ventured into music compilation, awards ceremony hosting, book publishing and also art making.

His most recent escapade into the snooty terrain of visual arts is currently on display and what a naughty indulgence it is to be able to appreciate the aesthetic output of the most famous Baltimoreian amidst the pristine walls of an art gallery instead of the cushiony comfort of a dusky movie theater.

You inevitably and immediately feel “better” yet the experience of smirking and giggling at his unhygienic humor is still “rewarding” even in broad daylight. His freakishly elegant photographic equations are the haven of a very peculiar film history, one that was certainly nurtured on endless sittings during the wee hours of many mornings, hunting for an apparently hidden value in campy, serious, arty, mainstream and whatever movies happened to come before the eyes of Mr. Waters

We know him as writer and director—and sometime actor—but seeing his exhibition we are reminded of his early editorial skills: his choppy and blunt cinematic ellipses are present and at the heart of these small framed narratives. Mr. Waters turns a simple exercise in cut and paste into a nirvana of hilarious eloquence, squeezing his stash of beloved movies until he manages to make new, twisted versions out of them using his favorite frozen images.

Spiriting us away from the world of the jittery jump cut and the endless one-take, Mr. Waters leads us into a welcoming environment for contemplation: either with single pictures, doubles, or various permutations of a polyptych, from the same or from different movies, He creates comic strips where the punchline springs out of collision, succession or accumulation. And this time around, the declared media junkie has also ventured further into his spatial experimentations adding a kind of trompe l’oeil et l’oreille installations to his sculptural works making him a full rounded contemporary artist.

Just like the new version of his worshipped “Hairspray” is a movie about a musical based on a movie, “Reckless Eyeballs” could be described as an exhibition about photographs from films taken from a TV screen. For anyone interested in purging the mainstreamization of the Pope of Trash, a dive into the pool of Mr. Waters is what’s called for. That might even give you a chance to use the towel he has on display at Rena Bransten Gallery.

John Waters: Reckless Eyeballs will be on view at Rena Bransten Gallery through August 18th.

Bonzai/Godzilla: Then and Now

The show Bonzai/Godzilla at the Artists Gallery of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcases the work of some 17 American and Japanese artists. In this ambitious show Curator Bob Hanamura compares pre-war Japan art with its postwar counterpart.

Bob Hanamura’s interests range from jazz, architecture, design, art, and dance. A ubiquitous figure with his trademark cap and grey ponytail, he belongs to the beat generation and has been following the cultural scene in San Francisco for a long time. Hanamura applies his wide ranging curiosity to Japanese art, which is unique in its ability to absorb old and new, east and west, Shinto, Zen, and Buddhist philosophies, American culture, high and low art, and the media. In addition, he looks to the current wave of Japanese culture hitting American shores in the form of Anime and Manga and traces the affect of this culture on both Japanese and American artists.

“Bonzai” can be viewed as a pre World War II greeting to the emperor and Hanamura uses the term to refer to traditional Japanese art’s concern with nature, as expressed in the notion of color, volume, and depth. The “Godzilla” section of the show refers to the post World War II Japan that created the comic books called Manga, and the animated films called Anime. Of course, Godzilla was the gigantic irradiated dinosaur, transformed from the fallout of an H-Bomb test and the most widely recognized symbol of Japanese pop art. Contemporary Japanese Artist Murakami Takashi compares the current cultural trends in Japanese art to that of Japan’s Edo period (1600’s-1800’s) where flatness and multiple perspectives share equal value.

In the spirit of Bonzai, the show begins with traditional Zen and Shinto motifs depicting the fragility and transitory nature of existence. For example, Kimetha Vanderveen’s prints are structures of delicate marks, while Tom Marioni, a conceptual artist uses a sweeping brush stroke for his enzo, or Zen circle, painted directly on the wall (which will be painted over when the show ends next month). In the same vein, Theordora Varnay Jones meditative piece consists of a series of grids on separate wood panels covered with paper, which appear to be delicately burned. In contrast, artists Seiko Tachibaba, Kim Anno, Laura Dufort, and Peggy Gyulai explore the idea of volume and color.

Fortunately for his followers, Osamu Tezuka, one of the leading exponents of manga, currently has a show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Though trained as a doctor, Tezuka became an artist and hoped to reach the younger generation of Japanese through comics. Influenced by Walt Disney after World War II, Tezuka is the creator of the atomic powered. Astro Boy—known as "Tetsuwan Atom," or "Iron-Arm Atom" in Japan. Astro Boy is ultimately not human and like so much in postwar Japan, an import from the West. Tezuka widely influenced the following generation of Japanese artists including Yoshitomo Nara, and Murakami Takashi, which in turn have greatly influenced the next wave of Japanese and American artists.

Artist Scott Tsuchitani uses Dorthea Lang’s photos of Japanese internment camps and mixes them with pop images of Astro Boy, Hello Kitty, and the Milky boy whose innocent face appears on boxes of Japanese rice candy. Tsuchitani even provides a fluffy Hello Kitty purse filled with the candy for the viewer’s delectation. Combining pop and historical images decontextualizes them both, and the viewer’s mind bounces back and forth between the historical accuracy of the photos and the call to innocence and pleasure of the pop images. Artist Kathy Aoki, influenced by Manga and Anime, extends this metaphor in her work. She uses cutout wood images of “cute” sheep, deploying the Japanese concept of Kawai or cute to treat serious subjects. John Casey’s scary masks refer both to the demons typical of the spirit world of the Shinto religion and Manga.

In conclusion, while many of the “Godzilla” artists’ work expresses a sense of isolation and dissociation with their own bodies and existence, they have found a visual language, alternately hopeful and pessimistic, that allows them to comment on the post-apocalyptic world that they live in. The “Bonzai” artists find refuge in beauty, tradition, nature, and the sublime. These are very different impulsesto be sure; but in Bonzai/Godzilla:Then and Now Hannamura magically makes it all come together.

Bonzai/Godzilla: Japanese Influences in American Culture Then and Now
Curated by Bob Hanamura
Building A, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, CA
June 27-July 27, 2007

Featuring works by Kim Anno, Kathy Aoki, Lucy Arai, John Casey, Ishan Clemenco, Laura Dufort, Yukako Ezoe, Peggy Gyulai, Theodora Varnay Jones, Tom Marioni, Howard Munson, Tomoko Nakazato, Seiko Tachibana, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Ayu Tomikawa, Scott Tsuchitani, and Kimetha Vanderveen.

Nothing But Space: Nathan Haenlein, Eric Hongisto, Jeanne Lorenz

Nothing But Space is both the mind-tickling title and the uniting concept of this diverting exhibition of the work of three painters. Its statement/manifesto starts out talking about hyperspace, but concludes with a succinct summation of what these artists truly have in common: a focus on pattern and especially on space as a concept, as it’s addressed in (contemporary) painting. Three person shows can sometimes be a disconcerting experience. Visitors might find themselves wishing for more or less of one of the artist’s work, or find that the fit between one aesthetic and another is less than perfect. This show succeeds in avoiding such pitfalls, offering a varied yet remarkably harmonious viewing experience. This may be due to the somewhat similar palette all three use—or, perhaps, to the fact that Lorenz chose the other two artists with the aforementioned conceptual focus in mind.

Bucheon’s deep, high-ceilinged storefront can comfortably accommodate work of varying scales. Eric Hongisto—who sometimes works directly on walls—painted a brilliant skein of crossing curved lines, varying from thick to thin, across most of the gallery’s rear wall. This interwoven lattice suggests a number of things, from proteins seen under a microscope to an interchange of intergalactic highways seen from far away. Hongisto punctuates the ends of some lines with actual balls of yarn and string, wound in dazzling combinations of color, texture and weight. Attached to the wall invisibly, these spheres seem to float, as if poised for some kind of imaginative action. Even though such palpable physicality seemingly contradicts the invented, two-dimensional space of the painting, these objects are what make the whole composition work. This is demonstrated by Hongisto’s other paintings in the show—smaller works on canvas, sans balls, which are attractive but nowhere near as compelling as the mural-sized wall work. This is partly a matter of scale, I imagine; like most installations, Hongisto’s is large enough for us to immerse ourselves in it. Images of other such works that can be found on the gallery's website support this idea.

Nathan Haenlein’s meticulous gel-pen drawings create a world in which scale is impossible to determine. Each work presents a single form suggestive of architecture, suspended on a field of white. These objects/buildings could be any size—from child’s block to massive monument. To define and describe these mysterious forms, Haenlein uses candy-bright colors, arranged in dizzyingly complicated surface patterns. These pixellated stripes and chevrons slow down the eventual impact of the complicated geometrical shapes they cover. Seen as a group, these begin to look like nightmarish apartment blocks or prisons (or, maybe, space stations in Hongisto’s congested outer space). The solidity of Haenlein’s persuasive forms is deeply convincing, and his use of color and pattern invokes associations ranging from diagrams to computer-generated hallucinations to the work of printmaker Victor Vasarely.

Jeanne Lorenz, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 2007. Acyriic pigment on canvas, 40"x48"

Jeanne Lorenz gets her images from Ebay. (I have been waiting to write that sentence since I first thought of it while looking at her hypnotizing paintings and prints.) For the works in this show, Lorenz downloaded pictures of kitschy owl sculptures photographed by their sellers perched on dining room tables or shag rugs. These pictures serve as a point of departure for Lorenz, who often dematerializes the owls into patterns reminiscent of the sixties (in the period’s domestic palette of harvest gold, mocha, orange, aqua and avocado), leaving them embedded in their weird domestic backgrounds. Sometimes the owl’s silhouettes become windows into another reality, in which there are more owls… and so on. In many of Lorenz’ works, remnants of the original Ebay image function as evidence of the world from which these images have escaped, but they also push up against the flat space of the patterns in unexpectedly felicitous ways. A smorgasbord of printmaking techniques have been used in a suite of works hung salon-style in the back of the gallery. These pieces’ modest scale allows us to look at them together instead of serially, and think about the nonexistent space of the internet—were these owls ever real?—and about the process of hopeful projection on which Ebay has been able to build its incredible success.

In the end, as the statement for the show puts it, it may be that “there is nothing but space; matter is space curled up into miniscule patterns.” The work of these artists is both a reminder of the intangibility of the things around us and a three-way conversation about the insistent physicality of images of objects and buildings; of balls of yarn, or of canvases covered with painted marks.

Alice Shaw: A Group Exhibition

There is one moment that affected what I choose to point my camera at today. It was when I was in my early 20’s and living in Oakland, California. I was shopping at a department store and I looked around me and noticed that all the African American women in the store had had their naturally curly hair straightened and all the Caucasian women, including myself, had had their naturally straight hair permanently curled. I wondered why this was. Was this out of curiosity or dissatisfaction? Do we have the urge to know what life would be like if we were different from who we really are? Are we looking for different reactions or do we think that the grass will be greener on the other side of the fence? —Alice Shaw

The announcement for Alice Shaw’s current exhibition, wryly titled A Group Show, has some visual qualities familiar to those who have seen her work: a kind of snap-shot immediacy, portraying subject matter that reflects on the incongruities/disjunctions of urban life, printed in color and pinned to the wall. This picture, though, is yet another example of the artist’s dry sense of humor, in that it is the only one of its kind in a show which otherwise consists of two bodies of work seemingly as different from each other as they are from the aforementioned color print. In terms of content, the works on view at Gallery 16 have a clear relationship to Shaw’s previous explorations with aspects of autobiography/self-portraiture. But in terms of how these questions about the self are being asked, she throws our expectations into diverging directions so thoroughly that a kind of (pleasurable) visual whiplash ensues.

To make the ten pairs of images titled “Opposites,” Shaw sought a physical counterpart to her own attributes as “a small white middle-aged woman who often feels that I have more male traits than female traits.” This reverse-doppelganger turns out to be a tall teenaged African American transsexual who lives in Richmond. Each diptych shows Shaw and her “double” striking similar poses, in similar states of undress or nudity, in various rooms of a high-ceilinged Victorian-era interior. Brilliant sunlight pours in the window, framing her figure or his in underwear and heels, crouched, contrapposto, or just reclining.

These relatively small, straightforward black and white images—endearing, haunting, disturbing and funny in turns—ask so many questions that it’s hard to know where to begin. In this curious contest of identity, what do such poses mean? And what’s the effect of gender, race, sexuality and socio-cultural context on that meaning? The First Question of photography even comes to mind here: What do we see, and what do we think we see? Looking at Shaw, I found myself wondering who my own Other might be.

The other series presented in this show follows a different thread of Shaw’s previous explorations, in a way—of her identity as Alice, the famous heroine of books about a little girl who went through the looking glass by Charles Dodgeson, aka. Lewis Carroll. Shaw noted a distinct similarity between Dodgeson’s photographs of little girls and E.J. Bellocq’s portrais of prostitutes in New Orleans, and has essentially brought together rhyming pairs of these images, combining them into lenticular photographs. (For those not familiar with this term, which included me, it’s the name for those pictures most commonly seen on toys or novelties that display one image from one angle and a second from a slightly different view.) As Shaw rightly intuited, it wouldn’t work to just put these pictures side by side. By essentially making them into two views of the same image, Shaw extends her interrogation to questions about what we really know about the past through such pictures, since we project our own social and cultural mores on them, or about the relationship between photographer and subject. As in the diptychs of Shaw and her Opposite across the room, Bellocq’s women and Dodgeson’s little girls sit or stand in similar poses. For whatever it’s worth,
the girls’ gestures or settings are sometimes more sexually charged than those of the women, who seem cheerful and far more relaxed than their little counterparts.

Each lenticular pair of images begins to create a narrative, whether of time passing— Dodgeson’s pictures date from the late 1800’s; Bellocq’s from the 1920s -- or of hidden memories, revealed by the slightest backwards shift of the observer’s position. The tumult and change characteristic of that turbulent period, as one century shifted to another, is familiar to us today. Thinking about Shaw’s work, I remembered another fin de siecle artist: Paul Gauguin, who yearned to find his Other Self through the mirror of so-called primitive culture. The title of his masterwork of 1897 is in the form of three questions that seem as appropriate now as they did then, especially in the context of Shaw’s thoughtful pictures: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

William Wolff: The Invisible City

The late William Wolff was an artist and man of great integrity, wisdom and good humor. It was a privilege to meet him by accident in the mid 1970s and to admire his work and know him (though not intimately—we were both too shy for that) until his death in 2004. Although he was never well known in the San Francisco art world, his woodcuts and other prints stand the test of time when much of the highly touted work of the postwar period retains appeal now only to the historian and specialist. Due to the efforts of a number of artists who work to keep his work before the public, Wolff’s prints have been acquired by several eminent museums.

The current show features work by six of Wolff’s printmaker friends and colleagues, John Connelly, Gordon Cook, Richard Correll, Art Hazelwood, Stanley Koppel, and Anthony Ryan, most of them associated with San Francisco’s Graphic Arts Workshop, and it affords the new viewer a good sampling of Wolff’s themes in woodcut, etching and serigraph. The title of the show comes from Wolff’s poetic and inspiring notion that artistic people of all cultures and epochs are the citizens of an invisible and eternal polity. It is typical of Woolf to place such emphasis, in an intensely competitive field, on the collegial adventure of creativity. The following article was written on the occasion of Wolff’s retrospective at St. Mary’s College in Orinda in 2002, “Masquerade and Revelation: A William Wolff Retrospective.” I hope that it can serve to introduce this wonderful artist whose deep humanity radiates from everything he made to new admirers.

Masquerade and Revelation

Sometimes the way is beautiful. (Title from Rouault’s print series Miserere)

Those in the Bay Area fortunate enough to know printmaker William Wolff through his artwork or his teaching over the last sixty years cannot but be delighted with this retrospective. The Hearst Gallery at Saint Mary’s College featured several Wolff woodcuts in last year’s The Artist And The Bible: Twentieth Century Works on Paper, and has recognized in him a rarity, anomaly, even, in today’s art world: a contemporary artist who, like Blake and Rouault before him, finds continuing relevance in religion and literature, and has forged powerful imagery from his investigations. On view here are over 100 works: woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, drawings and paintings, dating from the 1940’s to the present. Art lovers just now discovering William Wolff can join us older fans already clapping our hands for joy. Thanks to Art Hazlewood, editor of the California Society of Printmakers, author of the illuminating catalogue essay, and friend of the artist; and Julie Armistead, Hearst Art Gallery Registrar. Besides creating this show, they have added to the gallery’s permanent collection a trove of fifty prints donated by the artist, dedicated to the memory of his late beloved daughter Maria.

A San Francisco native, Wolff has spent his entire career in the Bay Area, studying at the California School of Fine Arts (later SFAI) before World War II, and at Mills and UC Berkeley after his return. He shared a studio with James Weeks and painted from the figure with Charles Griffin Farr’s circle; he showed paintings at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in the Fifties and woodcuts at City Lights Books in the early Sixties. Although he studied etching with Gordon Cook and lithography from Richard Graf in the late Sixties, and pastel with Rupert Garcia in the late Eighties, Wolff’s best-known works remain his color woodcuts, with their rough-hewn simple shapes and boldly stylized imagery belying their emotional complexity.

The Man who never in his Mind & Thoughts traveld to Heaven Is No Artist.—William Blake

It is the emotional complexity, based on Wolff’s literary and philosophical sensibility, that separates him from most of the Bay Area figurative painters who are his contemporaries. While their painterly work is fundamentally esthetic, aiming at visual delight, Wolff’s work, despite his appropriation of modernist devices (abstraction, simplification, bright flat color, and collage-based composition), has quite a different goal, older, and perhaps impossibly ambitions: the investigation of man’s place in the cosmos. Modest enough and bibliophile enough to revere the canons of western drama, mythology and religion, he is also ambitious enough to use them for personal ends – to engage in a dialogue with them. G.K. Chesterton once described the authentic conservative (as opposed to our current media blowhards) as a man who takes equality so seriously that he does not limit his interlocutors to the living: even his own [artistic] fathers may, after all, be right. In a stylistic/historic sense Wolff’s work is conservative, its formal ideas derived from the innovations of the early 20th century. But, like other art that endures, where invention transcends and transforms sources, and creativity sparks matter into life, it is of two natures: partaking of its time (and a window into that time) and timeless. One religious writer (Leon Bloy?) influential when Rouault created his Miserere series ninety years ago opined that the crucifixion and other religious mysteries took place eternally in a perpetual transtemporal present. Good art likewise stays good: why else frequent museums?.

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.—William Blake

Yet Woolf’s art, pervaded by the big questions, never becomes sentimental or dogmatic; it never sinks to the mystagogic kitsch of an Odd Nerdrum Wolff’s mutely expressive figures, often reduced almost to head and hands (indicative of his enthusiasm for puppetry and theater), enact dramas of transfiguration and transcendence. Although we clearly are viewing an allegorical or metaphoric world –the figures belong to no particular period or country, and the buildings and cities are not quite real– the effects and emotions are felt, and the viewer responds, almost without knowing why. The images strike a chord in us rarely struck these days. They are religious but not religiose, and contemporary viewers haven’t learned to tell the difference; or they’re uncomfortable with such unfashionable notions in art made after, say, 1800.

Since the early 19th century, artists have, like much of secular society, struggled with the religious urge and the question of where to direct it* (and aren’t religious and artistic impulses both efforts to correct life, to paper over the fissures of reality?). According to Art Hazelwood’s catalogue essay, “the question of where his [Wolff’s] beliefs might fit in his art is not easy to answer. To this question the artist has always remained silent.” Here’s the theory, for what it’s worth, of a sympathetic artist. Wolff, like many artists, dislikes orthodoxy and fixed hierarchies, and he refuses to put himself and his work into categories defined by others. That he is interested in religion as an artistic concern, that he has religious feelings in the broadest sense, of that there can be no doubt: his generosity, modesty and lack of egotism are bywords. No doubt he would consider it presumptuous and discourteous to impose his beliefs (or doubts) on others. Jorge Luis Borges described one of the friends of his youth, aptly named or nicknamed Almafuerte (Strong Soul) as “a mystic without faith.” Wolff would balk at such dramatic terminology, but I believe that mysticism is there in the work. Trends come and go, ebb and flow in the art world, with the Next Big Thing our perfect wave. Bill Wolff has kept at his work, with pencil, paper, graver, ink, and, for burnishing prints, a worn wooden spoon. But the work he has created over sixty years has deep roots, sustains itself in adverse conditions, and is evergreen.

*Robert Rosenblum’s Friedrich, Rothko and the Northern Romantic Tradition details the displacement of religious feelings into the painted landscape and eventually into abstraction.

William Wolff, Oranges, 1966, Color woodcut, 13x18"

William Wolff: The Invisible City will be on view at Warnock Fine Arts from July 1-July 29, 2007.

New Work: Felix Schramm

A ghostly presence by German artist Felix Schramm appears to have been propelled through the walls of SF MOMA and lodged tightly within its 4th floor galleries. Titled Collider 2007, the installation is monumental in scale, and brings to mind the New Jersey house that Gordon Matta-Clark carved in two (Splitting, 1974). Imagine if Matta-Clark’s house was further split apart, and if bisecting sections of its torn, peeling walls were catapulted through the modern museum’s pristine white box by something approximating the force and speed of a tornado, or better yet, Hurricane Katrina. This may give you a sense of the magnitude of Schram’s work. I make this comparison between Schram’s work and Matta-Clark’s infamous piece because I believe that sections of Splitting (the corners of the house, to be exact) are housed in SF MOMA’s collection (and, if memory serves correct, have been placed on view on the fifth floor galleries).

When we encounter sculpture of such scale and magnitude, and especially when we encounter it indoors, its relationship to human scale usually elicits feelings of awe from the onlooker. In addition to inspiring awe, Collider also communicates a significant sense of aggression and violence through the ragged edges of its torn walls, its imposing mass, and the precarious angle at which it’s positioned within the museum’s rooms (plopped diagonally between two gallery bays, it threatens to potentially collapse on the viewer). The necessary aggression, force and violence exerted in order to tear a house apart is beautifully documented in a film by Matta-Clark, in which he and another construction worker are seen laboring day after day to bisect the New Jersey house with a chainsaw. The entropic force that may have destroyed Collider and brought it to its current state, however, are merely simulated by Schramm. And the potential violence of his piece is merely implied, not real, more like a Hollywood stage set than an artifact from the lived world.

The curatorial text by Apsara DiQuinzio states that Schramm spent three weeks working with several assistants to painstakingly build this structure out of Sheetrock, plaster, plywood, hardware, and other materials found on site (including leftover wall paint from past SFMOMA exhibitions). So the artist has created a simulacra of an indistinct architectural ruin, and in painstakingly reconstructing something that is so banal and decrepit, yet by making it look so beautiful (parts of the walls, with their various patches of paint, look like AbEx paintings), he has created a fantastical parallel universe for the viewer—a universe that’s off kilter so as to offer us a skewed viewpoint and to thereby contain many alternate realities.

If you read site-specificity into Schramm’s alternate realities, it could act as mnemonic trigger for contextual histories. For San Franciscans who have lived here for more than 15 years, Collider may represent a ghostly parallel universe that reminds us of what stood on the museum’s grounds before it was built—all of those pawnshops and SROs that were destroyed in the 80s and 90s to make room for shiny new buildings such as SF MOMA, the Yerba Buena Complex and Moscone Center. Better yet, for those who lived through the last earthquake, the piece can serve as a chilling reminder of the shaky ground that we stand upon. If you lend the work a psychological read, Collider could be seen as a jagged thought bubble containing the more troubling thoughts of our psyche. If the perfect white gallery walls that wrap around and contain Schramm’s installation represent our outward appearance, the cheerful, public face that we turn towards to the world, Collider, with its formidable mass and its raw texture, may represent all of the heavy, emotional baggage that looms overhead and threatens to come crashing down in the most inopportune social situations.

When contrasted to Matta-Clark’s work, Schramm's work appears to grapple with similar concerns about the mobility of a site or place. Matta-Clark's work can be seen as a comment on how a site itself is rendered obsolete by the uprooting of structures and populations, often put into effect by notions of urban renewal and progress. Yet earlier concepts of site-specificity and authenticity debated by Matta-Clark and his contemporaries have been replaced by Schramm’s full-blown investment and belief in the power and pervasiveness of simulacra and the multiplicity of reads and meanings ushered in by something that can serve as a beautifully engineered copy.

New Work: Felix Schramm will be on view at SF MOMA until September 30, 2007

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno

Have you ever wondered what kind of artwork a rock star would make if someone gave them the use of a gallery? Well, it seems that Brian Eno, the rock star in question, does not make objects; he makes installations that take ten thousand years to watch. Recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts he set up his newest art show titled77 Million Paintings.

Eno appeared at the opening to speak about his work. To me he seemed like a very ordinary middle aged-man. He was dressed rather unremarkably and did not project the aura I thought he would. However, his presence was a promise to us that he was really engaged and really connected to this work. Why else would he be there?

Admittedly I was apprehensive about the exhibition's title—it seemed to claim that he had made more paintings than any painter in the history of art, and perhaps in all of human history. It sounded a little odd especially because these 77 Million Paintings were to have been created in just a year or so.

By way of comparison, one might consider that in his lifetime, the painter Vincent Van Gogh, it is generally agreed, produced only about 2,000 works. Those include around 900 paintings and 1100 drawings. From a mathematical standpoint, Brian Eno clearly out-produced Van Gogh. And probably even Andy Warhol too, who made silk-screened “paintings” and bragged about their mass production in his Manhattan studio. Yet despite his aspiration to be an art producing machine, Warhol made only about 400 print editions and his sculptures, paintings and other works all together don’t total anywhere close to a million—let alone 77 Million. So it begs the question, how did Brian Eno do it?

To begin with, Eno explained to us that he did not produce any actual, physical paintings. Instead, his are a collection of hand-colored slides that he had scanned and then mixed together randomly. He said that by using custom-made software there are 77 Million possible combinations of the images, not 77 Million paintings. The show’s title, it appeared, was just a hyperbolic expression. There were no paintings. Instead what viewers saw was a big, abstract and colorful projection of three rectangular shapes that slowly, very slowly, faded into one another. He even claimed that to view all of the combinations it would take a human being ten thousand years of sitting and staring.

While it was a big let-down, I could see how people might not go to a show called “77 Million Possible Random Combinations of a Collection of Abstract Hand-Colored Slides Originally Intended to be Viewed on a PC.” It just doesn’t have the same ring to it, you know? After all, the group he was addressing was the membership of the Long Now Foundation, not an art audience with an expectation that the art had to make sense. Artists ask pesky questions like: “Who cares?” or “Why did you make it?” or “Was it necessary to make that?” or even worse, “Is the software really an art expression or just another ego-driven exercise like the paintings of Sylvester Stallone?”

I had to admit though, his semantic reframing (77 Million Paintings) played much better to the audience. The crowd seemed ready to accept that they were really paintings, but he could have just as easily called them “77 Million Ham Sandwiches” and they would have thought it was just another stroke of his great genius. That’s how it felt anyway. I was disappointed.

He went on to say he was really excited by the idea of software randomly combining images. He called his work a “site-based” installation, which seemed to confuse several concepts such as site-specific, site-adjusted and the word “installation” itself. If he meant site-specific then the work had to have a reason to be put in that space specifically. If he meant site-adjusted then he would be indicating that it is a portable installation that would change depending on the location it’s shown in. He also said that the project was originally intended to be viewed on a personal computer, not as an installation. I sensed from his attitude that this was really just an experiment and that he was just preaching to his fans.

Eno lamented several times that people don’t slow down anymore to just enjoy things, which I agree with. So he encouraged everyone to sit and stay in the space and experience his installation. He said that he personally had witnessed people walking into the space, looking around for 30 seconds and then leaving. Both amused and annoyed by this behavior, he said that it took a lot longer to absorb the experience of his art and to reach the state of mind he is trying to access. Unfortunately he didn't quite say what state he was talking about and he seemed to expect we would all just "get it."

Now, I'm not trying to make Eno out to be a fraud, but there is a well-known California artist named Glen McKay who pioneered the use of hand-painted slides with moving lights to create psychedelic light shows for concerts. He would actually use various liquids and pigments, mix them live and project them behind live bands. Among the acts he worked with were the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. He is solidly placed as an art & music icon, not some fringe, minor character. McKay also makes works of hand-painted, abstract slides that slowly fade into one another which he calls “Millennium Paintings.” Whereas McKay has a context for his work, which was connected to hippie phenomenological experience (music, drugs, light shows), Eno’s installation seems to come more from a place of cold intellect, disconnected from any audience.

Perhaps the best way to interpret Eno is as a part of the grand tradition of celebrity art. Since the aura surrounding the art itself is its own reason to exist—not quality or content—what a famous person says about what they make may or may not matter at all. But I had been hopeful it wouldn't be the case here. Was I being starstruck and naive? Sometimes the art that a celebrity creates can be interesting despite all of the forces that conspire against that possibility—but for me this time it wasn’t.

Allison Smith: Notion Nanny

Along country lanes and urban crossroads, an itinerant apprentice offers ideas and articles of all sorts traditional and revolutionary, abundantly crafted in exchange for skillful demonstrations and sociable company.—Allison Smith, the Notion Nanny Cry

At the back of the Matrix Gallery’s long narrow space, a life-sized china doll dressed in a quaint bonnet and cape proffers a basket full of hand-crafted goods. Additional objects surround her on a simple platform, suggesting that she brings an abundance of useful things to share or sell. A table nearby displays other crafts, as do watercolors on the walls. Many of the things presented or pictured are beautifully made-- examples of traditional skills like lace-making, blacksmithing, slip-trailed pottery, horn-carving and tin-piercing, to name just a few. But these aren’t luxury goods. These plates, jugs, spoons and scarves are meant for everyday use.

Notion Nanny, 2005–07, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo courtesy Qube gallery, Oswestry, England. 

Or are they? What, exactly, is our relationship with handmade things, in an age of astonishingly cheap stuff that’s produced in factories in vast quantities and shipped around the globe? What does it mean to buy (or trade) an object that took time and skill to put together, decorate or form? And who is the “notion nanny,” anyway?

Last things first: during the Victorian era, regular-sized dolls similar to the one in the gallery were popular collectibles. Already, in the mid-nineteenth century, these little figures embodied a nostalgic memory of female peddlers who had once traveled around the English countryside, selling and trading goods as well as carrying news, stories and aesthetic ideas to isolated areas. Artist Allison Smith began her Notion Nanny project by initiating an itinerant apprenticeship in the English countryside, learning various traditional skills from blacksmiths, potters, wood turners, etc. The life-sized figure in the gallery is the result of these studies and collaborations—from its china face and hands, modeled in Smith’s likeness, to its clothes and wares. In addition, the exhibition includes a group of exquisite watercolors of some of the many variants of the “Notion Nanny” dolls that were made and collected. These ethereal paintings are based on images Smith found in museums and archives in England.

Notion Nanny Linens, 2007, printed linen and ironware. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

A series of banners hang on the wall as well, each containing orderly arrangements of watercolor images of various artisan-made goods—baskets, dolls, girl’s dresses, tinware, etc. Taken as a whole they suggest a kind of festive manifesto on anti-capitalism: on what Matrix curator Elizabeth Thomas eloquently describes as “the desire to connect in more personal ways with the objects and the experiences that comprise our worlds.” Thomas ascribes the current resurgence of interest in “all things grassroots, handmade, bottom up, local and collective” as having to do with a number of forces in our turbulent. fragmented era—from a need for the comfort of the handmade in troubled times to the environmental consequences of reckless consumption. She also reminds us that the kind of social practice that Smith’s project represents has become an increasingly important presence in contemporary art over the last decade: the idea that audience participation is part of the work, and that the work itself is a collaborative activity. This sense of our personal/political connection with Smith’s undertaking is supported by Smith’s embroideries of the phrase “what are you fighting for?” as well as her choice of various incendiary motifs, from the hammer and sickle to the Phrygian caps worn by French revolutionaries.

Since the Notion Nanny’s debut, Smith has continued to add to the goods in the figure’s basket. She has worked with craftspeople in communities on the east coast of the US—in locations as diverse as Old Sturbridge Village and the Rhode Island School of Design—as well as with makers in the Bay Area while she was in residence here. A public open house on May 20th involved demonstrations and discussions by and with a whole community of local artists and artisans (Smith’s website, http://www.notionnanny.net which serves as a record of the project as a whole, has detailed accounts of some of the people she met and the projects she engaged in while in California, which included, stained glass, letterpress, and ceramic tiles.)

Considered as a whole, all of these parts create a narrative so complex and rich that it can’t be easily summed up as art, craft, radical political statement, social practice, or community-building, but as a potent mix of all of the above. The Notion Nanny is a generous, intelligent and wickedly witty project, serving as a reminder that making things by hand didn’t lose its meaning with the advent of industrialization. Periodic revivals, such as the Arts and Crafts Movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the American Craft Movement that was part of the social revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies; and the DIY movement today, all demonstrate that craft is neither an anachronism nor an isolated phenomenon. We make things as part of how we make meaning, and we always will. At present, the relationship between traditional craft materials and techniques and contemporary art practice has become tempestuous, complicated, and utterly straightforward, all at the same time, as materials like glass enter into the fine art arena (eg., Josiah MacElheney) and many younger artists feel free to use whatever material seems appropriate for their idea—whether or not such a material is associated with street fairs or bearded men in Birkenstocks. As George Kubler suggested nearly forty years ago, “…(t)he idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art.”

I left the Notion Nanny feeling optimistic—a pleasant and all too rare sensation, in an era beset by illegal wars and environmental degradation. As Smith reminds us, We make our world, and every act counts.

So, what are you fighting for?

The Book of Shadows

The Fraenkel Gallery is a treasure for Bay Area arts audiences, a commercial gallery that serves the community as well as most museums in the quality of its exhibitions and the erudition of its programs and publications. One of its current exhibitions is The Book of Shadows, an exhibition and book based on Jeffrey Fraenkel’s eccentric personal collection.

For several years, as the field of vernacular and anonymous photography has gained wide interest, Fraenkel has been accumulating a snapshot collection whose common theme has been inclusion of the picture taker’s shadow within the frame. At the surface level the viewer is amused (often hilariously) and reassured of his superior sophistication as one inept and inapt image after another is seen. This soon passes as one realizes that there is much more to enjoy and to learn from these works.

In theater we must all agree to ignore that the fourth wall of any interior has been removed, allowing us, the audience, access to the scene. One thing these pictures do is to break through photography’s version of the theatrical fourth wall. That is, the illusion that we are observing through our own eyes, unmediated by the lens, is undercut when we see the actual photographer’s presence so apparent in the frame. Along those same lines our consciousness of the photographic dynamic is also heightened. Ordinarily we have a triangular psychological relation among ourselves as viewers, the image in the photograph, and the unseen photographer. In these snapshots, there is a revelation of the subject, the viewer, and the grounded physical reality of the photographer. To push that idea a bit further, one senses the intensity of the cameraman’s relation to his subjects more when one sees his presence, and the voyeuristic feelings of intrusion are often heightened, even on scenes of those long dead.

I am frequently amazed at how we are hard-wired to be hypersensitive to the human form. I often have the experience of seeing, at considerable distance and with their back turned, people I’ve only met once or twice who I recognize immediately through their bodily mannerisms. The ability to read the shadows for information is like that—we find we can learn a great deal about these people just from the way they are captured in silhouette.

Finally then these works do what only the best art does—they demand that we bring to bear our utmost skill at looking, at decoding, at finding the ironies, the odd juxtapositions, the beautiful accidents, that make life and culture so much fun, and affect how we perceive the world for days.

The Book of Shadows will be on view at Fraenkel Gallery from May 31st through August 11th, 2007.

If you consider…

This past Memorial Day I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park. Unusual because I don’t often get to Golden Gate Park, more so because this particular walk was guided by a pre-recorded narrator and soundtrack: a quirky audio tour entitled If you consider…created by musician and sound artist Jeremy Dalmas. I had agreed to meet Dalmas at the corner of Stanyan and Fulton (the tour’s departure point) to borrow his Discman and set of headphones and was surprised to learn he lived directly across the street. “How convenient,” I thought, and imagined people all over the city creating audio tours that began immediately outside their front doors. Who better to deliver the lay of the land?

The corner of Stanyan and Fulton where If you consider… begins.

I had been curious to take Dalmas’ tour ever since he emailed me about the project. Part of the appeal of If you consider… is its unauthorized—almost surreptitious existence. It’s far more common to encounter audio tours as institutionally sanctioned narratives designed to tutor museumgoers on the significance of an exhibition or an object. But practically since its inception the audio tour form has been appropriated, with varying degrees of success, as art. Early on the work of local group Antenna Theater (from which Antenna Audio, a leading producer of museum audio tours, grew), and more recently Janet Cardiff, has exploded ideas of what an audio tour can be. Too, the advent of compact, inexpensive recording equipment and desktop editing software paired with an ease of distribution via the web have allowed a dramatic increase in the number and diversity of audio tours available as podcasts. From homegrown “hacking” like Art Mobs’ unofficial audio guides for MoMA to commercial enterprises like Soundwalk, the audio tour is becoming an increasingly popular mode for both presenting and experiencing the world around us. Composed, performed and recorded by Dalmas with little outside assistance, and now distributed as an MP3 from Lulu.com, If you consider… falls at the homegrown, artsy end of the spectrum. More novel to me however is the outdoor setting—the park as both subject and context.

As the sky cleared on my way to meet Dalmas I found myself thinking again about the implications of an electronically mediated experience of Golden Gate Park, or of anywhere for that matter. In this age of pocket-sized portable media it is possible to always be plugged-in: making calls, checking messages, watching a stranger’s home movies, listening to a friend’s band’s most recent recording. Constantly distracted from one’s immediate surroundings, it would seem that we are never to be alone with our own thoughts—never allowed to be bored. To me this is both a blessing and a curse, but I tend to view technological innovations with a certain degree of relativism and ambivalence. In many ways Golden Gate Park is itself a highly mediated experience—a late nineteenth century version of altering reality. The transformation of the park’s land from shifting sand and ocean dunes to the verdant cornucopia of horticultural specimens and painterly vistas one sees today is surely a remarkable feat of human intervention and ingenuity. I don’t mean to suggest that a park is the same as an iPod, only that they are points along a spectrum of artificiality.

If you consider… is a place where these points converge—where William Hammond Hall and John McLaren’s (the park’s primary designers) romantic vision of a civilized and picturesque nature meets new media and Dalmas’ interest in the park’s backside—its abject, mundane or otherwise overlooked spaces. The tour begins conventionally enough, with all the practiced cadence and self-effacing tone of an Ira Glass introduction: car traffic and a funky, bouncing bass note in the background; thoughtful pauses punctuating deference to the listener in the fore.

You have just begun a walking tour of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. This tour will give you directions that you may follow at a leisurely pace through the park and will offer you suggestions on things to observe, experience, and consider. Feel free to stop the audio portion of this tour at any point and continue the tour on your own. There are many paths that can be taken and the route suggested here is merely one option…

It fast becomes apparent that the content of If you consider… is more meandering thought than any kind of traditional storytelling. The tour skips from a neighbor who tends the flowerbed at the entrance of the park, to anthropomorphizing caged water pipes, to identifying some of the park’s edible plants. Soon you’re gazing at a decrepit horseshoe pit and being asked to abandon your social mores and “give-in to the driving forces behind your nature.” Only the route and cinematic, seemingly responsive, soundtrack provide a narrative structure for If you consider… And it works. I mean I was absolutely willing to put my own impulses aside and follow Dalmas’ string of associations through what were to me lesser-known—often unknown—sites in the park. Admittedly, I find Dalmas’ do-it-yourself approach charming. I was even willing to go along with his evocation of gnomes and spirits, poetic ramblings, and habit of forcing mystery onto the most banal of objects—affectations I might otherwise find silly. In the end it’s Dalmas’ eccentricities—his eschewing of authority and narrative continuity in favor of a personally inflected, patch-work construction of place that gives If you consider… it’s power.

I remember one of my undergrad professors quipping that visiting parks was akin to visiting natural history museums. With their well-worn or paved paths, interpretive signage, points of interest, and rules of conduct both explicit and implicit it’s an apt analogy, but far too reductive for me. Such an analogy does not account for the vastness of space that parks can connect us to or the sense of calm and humility inspired by the ceaseless ebb and flow of natural phenomena. It’s not surprising that a technology designed for museums would remind me of this. What is surprising, ironic even, is that same technology resisting the process of naturalization. That is to say that human adaptability allows us to quickly assimilate new technologies, integrating them so thoroughly into our lives that they become invisible to us. We no longer see the frame but fully occupy the image. If you consider… interferes with this tendency, never concealing its fictional and constructed quality—never completely suspending disbelief. In so doing Dalmas manages to bring the fictional and constructed quality of the park into view, underscoring, for instance, the surreality of a banana plant within 50 feet of redwood trees or the disquieting feeling upon encountering a homeless encampment.

By accident or by design, the fragmentary quality of If you consider… was tempered by a few truly synergistic moments when music, text, and site blended seamlessly to form a unified experience of place. As when the live didjeridoo and bongo player began playing on cue to the narrator in my headphones, or in the joint imagining of a tree whose limbs once passed through a chain link fence and now only survive in small fragments still lodged in the fence, or in the shared reverence for the abject but majestic outdoor handball courts. In these moments Dalmas disappeared and the artificial no longer seemed primary but quite subsumed by a greater natural order of transformation and change—one in which multiple realities exist simultaneously.

One of the outdoor handball courts near the end of the tour.

If you consider… will be available indefinitely on Lulu.com. You may also purchase a CD of If you consider…and learn more about this and other projects by Jeremy Dalmas at www.theabsurdists.com

Christian Maychack

Pulling down the bricks from the ceiling at SoEx's old exhibition space or appearing as a parasitic echo of the stairway at YBCA, Christian Maychack's site-specific sculptures have regularly appeared at the periphery of group shows. It is in the overlooked infrastructure of gallery spaces that Maychack's work is best situated to rupture the expectations of the viewer. By engaging in a conversation with the site and its materials, the content of his work is pushed beyond abstraction and into the situational.

As a result, isolating the work in the frame of a solo exhibition and presenting it without the counter-point of a more traditional display, poses some challenges. The recent solo exhibition at Gregory Lind encapsulates a collection of responses to this challenge, each with varying degrees of success. These attempts at self-containment range from sculptures on a pedestal to semi-integrated installations. And instead of existing in conversation with a third-party exhibition, the objects in this exhibition tend to speak to one other.

Over the past 5 years Maychack has developed a visual and physical language within his sculptural practice. It is a language that has a material logic (oozing liquid forms or expanding and contracting fragments of geometry) but has never been reduced to the redundancy of repeated forms. The subtle introduction of color particles, meteorite-like capsules, framed folds, and raw wood expand the existing language rather than defy it. Also consistent within this language: each sculpture implies a supernatural movement, as if frozen in a state of transformation between the material real and the amorphous unknown.

In the exhibition at Gregory Lind gallery, Maychack continues to test the limits of this language. His experimentation is particularly successful in works like "All Together Now or The Inherent Capacity of a Woodpile," which defy the site dependence of his past work and imply a new kind of narrative. The smoke-like fingers that animate these materials, turn a pile of forgotten junk into the genesis of an otherworldly presence. Other works however, like the "Untitled" sculpture, where a Sol Lewitt box seems to have crash-landed in a landscape, speak more of miniature representation than a coming-into-being.

The boldest work in the show, "A Thinnest of Betweens," is a three dimensional rorschach, that turns the formal austerity of a symmetrical form into gushing bodily surrogate. Abstraction typically leads viewers to free-associate or project their ideas onto its surface, and the interpretive mechanism of the rorschach seems to reinforce this subjective reading. Yet, the grotesque blubbery form reaching out from the wall, toward the viewer, may be hoping for something more, something felt in the physical realm, yet left undefined and meant to stay that way.