Kristine Brown Reviews

Deck the Walls/Skate This Art at Gallery 28

2010-04-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

A heterogeneous and fascinating show of skate art runs through April 30th at Gallery 28. This show benefits North Beach Citizens, an organization that assists the homeless. The show includes artists at all levels of skill, of technical ambition and of career trajectory. Some decks feature layers of semitransparent graphics. On others the paint is thick.The use of the decks, their repeated shapes, unifies the show.

The stand out pieces among the decks done by established skate artists include a darkly whimsical piece by Jeremy Fish continuing his growing interest in frames and framing devices. Ed Hardy’s piece, one of his signature tigers, exemplifies his mastery of fitting images to contours whether the human body, a ming vase, or a deck.

Many of the artists in the show did not begin their careers nor make their reputations as skate artists. Not every artist represented makes the transition work, but almost all are surprisingly successful. Most seem to have considered the shape, the texture, or the many cultural and experiential associations of boards. Among the excellent adaptations is the deck of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the layout of which skillfully emphasizes/ plays with the deck’s shape.

A small room dedicated to the boards of children drives home the importance of designing with a deck in mind. Yes, most of the children do this. Through what combination of skillful tutoring, original insight, or curatorial selection is not easily ascertainable by the viewer.

On April 17th a reception, silent auction, and raffle, will feature videos by Patrick O’Neil, Geo Epsilanty, and Caleb Irie. Patrick O’Neil’s videos will include “The YAA Girlz and the Deadly Sparks,” a documentary dealing with women’s struggles to be allowed to skate, with a great soundtrack including the music of local punk bands including Fang, Afflicted, Bad Posture, and Speed Racer.

Gallery 28 is at 1228 Grant Avenue in North Beach. Through April 30.

Divine Fun: Matthew Barney at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

2010-01-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

In Drawing Restraint 14, 2006, Matthew Barney hilariously parodies all pomposity and arrogance and particularly that of certain tendencies of the current art scene. From the moment you see ‘self lubricating plastic’ as one of the components of the piece, the joke deepens. (It begins with ‘climbing equipment’ as the second component.) The artist’s use of various sorts of lubricants as stated ingredients in his pieces suggesting not only the masturbatory aspects of art creation, but the predatory aspects of art marketing, continues to be surprisingly light and to amuse.

As with many of the best parodies this work succeeds by being the apotheosis of what it parodies. At least three different unfortunate tendencies in the arts now are epitomized. This is of course in addition to the broad parody of the artist as hero and god or at least channeler of the divine. (The General Douglas MacArthur impression and pseudo documentary are the meat and the heart of the work.) These tendencies, all sent up simultaneously, are the tendency of the concept of a conceptual work to be far more interesting than the completed work, of the performance of the creation of the work more interesting than the finished work, and of a sculpture or installation to be far less interesting then where it is installed. The artist hero, complete in MacArthurian uniform and sun shades filmed as the real Douglas MacArthur would have appreciated/loved, produces, after substantial dangerous contortions high above the museum’s atrium, some graphite or pencil squiggles, neither looping nor biting, intentionally lacking shape or form without being empty or minimal, carefully eschewing accidental elegance. To produce something so lacking in inherent interest could not have been easy.

This work raises the question: if the concept is interesting enough in the work process it creates does the viewer really care about the ostensible final permanent product? Several people are often watching the film component of Drawing Restraint14. Even with the climbing bolts, ropes and hand holds left. most visitors barely glance into the part of the spectacular atrium occupied by the ostensible finished work. Instead the people looking into the atrium focus on views from the skybridge and curving stairways, on the cut outs/windows and resulting bold light and shadows, as the architect intended. The artist as arrogant hero artist is parodied by this epitomization of the artist who insists on putting his craftless work in the middle of someone else’s structure, a structure admitted to be a masterwork by almost everyone and which the majority of appreciators/users want to keep that way. These palatially (usually metaphorically but sometimes actually) sited works, in traditional terms add little, if any interest. Almost all interest is generated not from the interaction between the architecture and the work, but from the architecture, the presence of the building itself. Notice that most of Climbing Restraint 14 occupies a gallery not the atrium.

All together the pieces selected do not fully represent the range of his protean work, a probably impossible task without taking over more of the museum, but all are fun and provoke thought.

Kaboom!

2009-12-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

Looking Forward for 75 Years:the 75th anniversary Show

at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Looking Forward for 75 Years: the 75th Anniversary Show, 12/19/09 through 1/16/11, and accompanying exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are superlative. More masterworks from the permanent collection are better displayed than they have ever been. The practicality and elegance with which the low key addition serves the purpose of providing more gallery space to actually see artwork at its best provides a welcome contrast to the generally dark, generally cramped galleries of some of the new or renovated museums in the city. In many of the new exhibit spaces in the city most of the natural light is reserved for the big donor party space, the museum shop and the restaurant. While great party spaces are to be celebrated, spacious well lit galleries that display art are even more delightful as this 75th Anniversary Show exemplifies.

The square white room dedicated to the square white minimalist paintings of Robert Ryman continues in its perfection, curatorial and artistic. Its wooden floor and fittings contrast with the walls as do the various framing devices inherent to, included within, the work’s original conception. For the pursuer of the experience of reified transcendence each work is a masterwork. for the connoisseur and scholar each work illustrates a progression in the artist’s vision.

More masterworks from the permanent collection at once than are normally displayed are present. The curators have not been afraid to show many of the masterworks of the collection at once. The viewer who has visited SFMOMA on an ongoing basis will recognize many of these works. Others may be pleasantly shocked by the strength of the permanent collections. The new extension allows generous spaces for the display of recent acquisitions of new work, for new, current, ongoing San Francisco/Northern California work, and for site specific installations.

Wallpaper and the Artist’s Hand, Urs Fischer at the New Museum

2009-11-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

Urs Fischer at the New Museum, Tucker Nichols at Gallery 16

Sol LeWitt archived digitally and physically at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Two current shows prominently feature wallpaper, specifically, wallpaper applied to the walls of the exhibition space. On the walls of the third floor of the retrospective of the work of Urs Fischer at the New Museum is an exact photographed inch by inch copy of what was already there including plug outlets and security guards. This comment on the role of white walls as the given background of the modern fine arts and of the meaning of replication as creation is surreal, unexpected, and refreshes the mind making possible more, freer thoughts as the experience of the true unexpected can.

The other use of wallpaper is by Tucker Nichols at Gallery 16 where he uses his wallpaper to comment on the interplay between execution and intention, craft and concept. His wallpaper refers to the blown up line drawings of Sol LeWitt, examples of which long dominated the vestibule of the SFMOMA. The SFMOMA pieces, bright and geometric like the work here, were, unlike the work here, carefully meticulously produced by assistants from small, precise color pencil studies to gigantic panels. The pieces include careful instructions for creation, installation, and deinstallation. Nothing is left to chance, to the interaction between concept and completed object. By intention the process is completely controlled, leaving no place for spontaneity, or for surprise, not even of process generated surprise.

In contrast, Nichol’s wallpaper celebrates the vagaries and chances of the planned, but spontaneous stroke. The wallpaper is delightfully drippy and messy, but its design was clearly planned before work began. Like all the work here the wallpaper comments on the dialectic between execution and intention. To emphasize the presence of an initial concept, of the initial concept, he often replicates or pays homage to the work of others in simplified renditions using modest, if not homely, materials. The images may sometimes be lumpen and intentionally not carefully formed: Their process of formation is often apparent. But they have presence and are likable. Like the work of early Giacometti and of Brancusi for whom the artist has created an homage of “The Kiss” made from a picnic table and two boxy shapes, these images charm. They lack the militant grey intentional strident ugliness of a Beuys or a Bacon. There is no loathing or self loathing here. As with the work of Richard Tuttle, the intellect at play is what is on display on the walls and in the constructions..

Gardens of Unearthly Delight?Rex Ray at Gallery 16

2009-10-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Rex Ray at Gallery 16

The new works of Rex Ray at the Gallery 16 continue to delight. A few pieces reminiscent of his earlier gardens of unearthly delight are included, but most of the work takes the strengths of that work in two seemingly different directions.

In the larger pieces, over 6' by 7,' his gardens continue to grow. Candy colors, neon pastels, the colors associated with the advent of psychedelia, contrast with strong jewel tones. The color is strong and varied, but complex and nuanced using ranges of related color. Shades of chartreuse, lime green, and aqua contrast with powder blue and harmonize with shades of red and burgundy and ivory, gold, and yellow. The subtle earth tones, browns, chocolate, sepia, mauves, and rusts remain in the smaller resin panels, but in the largest pieces have become brighter purer reds, yellows, oranges, purples. Never before seen plant and tree shapes, webs and strings of light suggest the mystery tableaus of Rousseau, his luxuriant leafy jungle scenes if Rousseau had never looked at a botany book and had lived in SF since 1967. (Yes, Rex Ray lives in San Francisco, but not since 1967.)

These gardens contain no obvious animals, no predators, no prey. Complex traceries, festoons of light, suggest the rays of the radiating sun, suggest ripples reflections and shimmers, webs and canopies, become mandalas, circular radiating heavens no longer as bound by gravity, less brown, designed more as though grown or generated in the air. Ruth Asawa like swelling shapes, a signature of late fifties and early sixties design, suggest growing seeds, pods, leaves, fruit within the controlled rhythmic patterned harmony.

His smaller pieces, the resin panels, keep the faux wood and veneer patterns present in his earlier work. Both contrasting shapes and colors are more minimal more stark than in the recent past. The roots of these pieces in twentieth century modernism and russian constructivism are apparent. These pieces simultaneously suggest the living inert of Arp and the bimorphic and the architectural of Moore while maintaining a lava lamp like fluidity. The color is strong and dark, simultaneously higher in contrast and more subdued than in his other recent work. Rounded ovoid squares and other biomorphic shapes suggest living beings persisting in complex challenging situations/environments. Alternatively, these shapes, neither round nor square, orchestrated and varied suggest the spots of the skin of some strange giraffe. Fewer, stronger, more isolated colors and more grey cream and white distinguish these works. The contrast color is often bright red assisted by black, but aqua, lavender, emerald, tangerine, and other bright colors are also used.

These pieces are complex assemblages using paper cutouts fabricated, printed and cut, for the purpose of being assembled. The less glossy larger pieces on linen more clearly reveal the process of creation than do the resin panels.

All of these pieces both the large and the smaller, those on linen and the resin panels, blend the mineral and the vegetable, the inorganic and the organic, and the earth and heaven. Even the modernist abstractions contain rounded ovoid squares, each shape suggesting a life, a being.

In all of these pieces the earth becomes heaven, the never born lives. the oneness of the universe is manifest and the viewer is invited to recognize the cosmic nature of reality, the harmony visible beneath the apparent disharmony/chaos.

Lightning Strikes/Sugimoto at the Fraenkel Gallery

2009-09-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

Lightning Fields

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Fraenkel Gallery, Sept 10-Oct 31

The new photographs are stark black and white, no shades of grey. Both strong and delicate, all white on black, they arouse both reverence and delight.

These huge silver gelatin prints magnify and celebrate the challenges infamously inherent in the large format photography of lightning. He celebrates, he blows up, the scars on the negatives. He shoots on 10” by 14”plates and selects a portion of that image to magnify. The finished prints come in a relatively modest 18” by 23”and the giant 6’ by 5’.

All these images are titled Lightning Fields and a number. This uniformity of title underlines what is repeated in the images and what is varied. What is repeated is the branching capillary like action of lightning, textures that resemble trees and branches, fur and feathers, sand and water, veins and ridges. Cut like, branchlike, feeler like, shapes leak white light and round luminescent, transparent globes, float, suggest eyes or spherical bodies. These images are powerful, elegant, and beautiful as abstractions, but the strong suggestions of the organic and representational are magical and delightful, containing even more fully the power of the truly unexpected.

Each image combines these textures in unique ways. Lightning Fields 119, 2009, is reminiscent of trees beneath moons flying by night. Lightning Fields 145, 2009, is a benevolent seascape, the lower image suggesting a giant sea millipede, the upper image a blowfish. In Lightning Fields 128, 2009, a white torrent sprouts what could be capillaries, or root filaments, or even long scruffy hairs.

These images are confections of scale. Interstellar space and the microscopic are simultaneously evoked. Images sometimes suggest a giant organic spacecraft, a creature, capable of traveling through empty space vast distances of black, sometimes sea creatures of the heavy gravity/pressure, the super deep, with transparent luminescent bodies and giant shining eyes. Sometimes the creatures evoke dragons or centipedes with long spotted tails and sharp tentacles of branchlike cracks. Sometimes the images resemble a many armed furry being dancing in the sky, each furry arm with a small claw of burst branching lightning. Smaller, more leaf like, or plant like, electrical forms also occur.

Two large leaf images from 2007 from his ongoing series of reprints of the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive negative process, are also included in the show. These images emphasize his continuing examination of the organic, of repetitions of structure, and of issues of expectation and illusion and of scale, of what size an original may be compared to its image.

The resemblance of the structure of lightning to the substances and minerals of nature and to the living, the organic, is strongly made present in every print. This similarity of structure among all of us whose systems make and use electricity emphasizes the work’s spiritual component, reminds us of the underlying harmony of the universe, of the repetition and variation of the universe, of unmediated revelation.

More Mind Altering Sculpture on the Roof

2009-06-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Mind Altering Sculpture on the Roof

2009-05-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

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.