More Mind Altering Sculpture on the Roof

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

Upon entering the sculpture gallery, the first piece visible at the end of a long wide, glass lined corridor is Juan Munoz’s Conversation Piece N.Y. (1, 2, and 3), 1992. Three large round orange terra cotta pots sprout the bronze heads, necks, and arms of three men. The heads with their conventional haircuts are like buds, their suit jacketed arms flattened against the tops of the pots are like leaves. The first reaction is how whimsical, how charming, the buds of ideas are sprouting. But then as you walk closer you see the half scale of the figures and their ambiguous expressions. How anchored each figure is becomes more apparent. Each head is trapped in its own pot, the already hardened organic, from which it is struggling to emerge. The three heads are trapped apart, permanently separated. They can never reach each other. never speak to or inspire each other. Why this is titled as three conversations rather than just one then becomes clear. These heads are not full sized. They are stunted. At least in this frozen moment of perception, the observer suspects that their full potential will not be reached.

Looming in the near distance, a perceptual effect caused by Munoz’ work and abetted by skillful curation, are some of the giant human sized bronze spiders of Louise Bourgeois. In The Nest a large spider hovers over a group of smaller spiders, each smaller spider a head shorter than the one above it, suggesting a mother and children, a family group both frightening and endearing, fierce and sweet, suggesting a mother protecting her children, but also a mother prepared to eat her children.

In the space between is Ranjani Shettar’s Me, no, not me, buy me, eat me, wear me, have me, me, no, not me a series of large, open mouthed, irregularly shaped, woven bronzes suggesting crushed baskets or women’s torsos. Do they represent the souls of all manufactured things, particularly those made for the market? Or the misshapen state of the souls of humans in a world of utility, of commodities and interchangeability? Or, more specifically, the alienation of the artist who makes art objects, using the most personal private parts of the self, to be sold? Or all of these?

To the far left under open sky with a wall of grey cut lava stone behind stands Joel Shapiro’s brilliant Untitled, 1983-1987. Two unequally long square rectangles reminiscent of four by fours (one is patterned with a wood grain) make a deceptively simple twist in space. Every individual line and angle has grace. No line or angle is predictable until seen. And then every line and angle is inevitable and perfect. the perfect revelation of the, until that moment of transcendence, unimagined object.

It currently shares the smaller northern open air space with Robert Arneson’s No Pain another ironic self portrait in his long running series. In this very late work produced in contemplation of death, his head, now many times life size, sits on the floor of the gallery without the body once beautiful, then used, now soon to be gone. Even with the body gone, his expression does not appear to be without pain.

Kiki Smith’s Virgin Mary celebrates the beauty, the strength and the frailty of the human female body and the human. Her Virgin Mary is very naked, very beautiful, but completely unidealized. Nor does some shapeless white robe conceal the organic, the biologic. In fact she is so naked she is skinless except on her breasts and hands, every muscle carefully made visible. Then how do you know it is the virgin mary except by the title? By her stance. She is standing looking forward with her arms open, one of the traditional positions of Virgin Mary images. She confounds expectations because her femaleness, the reality of her body, is celebrated rather than minimized and concealed as it is with most images of the Virgin Mary without child. She is both more human and more a goddess than she is usually allowed to be.