Mind Altering Sculpture on the Roof

Sculpture Exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (ongoing)

The thrill of altered perception is delivered by the first sculpture exhibit of the new roof garden of SFMOMA. The exhibit as a whole and the pieces themselves play with expectations, particularly expectations of scale and of meaning. Carefully observed the exhibit gives the gift of heightened perception, of sharpened awareness.

The five sculptures in the larger area of the roof garden could all easily be a different size. The huge glass window they are visible through from the gallery could be the glass wall of a display case. Walking among them a person could be action figure/doll sized.

When the scale is changed Big Crinkly is transformed from a late period Calder to one of the magical fragile whimsies of his beginnings, Barnett Newman’s Zim Zum I suddenly becomes a very early Giacometti, one of the plump Brancusi like, surreal ones, the Henry Moore is a study for itself, The Lens of Rotterdam becomes a brilliant child’s construction of found stone, glass, pipe, and one magnifying glass, and Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I has pride of place in the zen garden of a temple, its gravel ready for raking, or in the tokonoma/stroll alcove of a superlative tea room. None of these pieces would be less powerful, would be diminished, if it were smaller. Or far larger.

Other pieces share the space, but Ellsworth Kelly’s simple, huge, magnificent Stele I dominates. A  rectangular rusting iron slab with subtly rounded corners standing on end in a square of bright (yellow white by sunlight, bright white by moonlight) gravel held by a thin wooden border, it is an object of elemental nonhuman strength and power. But its relative proportions and its base give it the human presence, the warmth and dignity, of a great portrait. Not the intentionally overbearing presence that monumental portraits often have had since the Middle Kingdom. But the celebration of the sacred human, of all humans, epitomized by Michangleo’s David, the monumental ceramic sculpture of Viola Frey, and some of the oversized statues of the Buddha. Stele I not only dominates its powerful fellow sculptures, but the many tall buildings around it including Timothy Pflueger’s Pacific Telephone Building behind it on the skyline.