Another Go at SFMoMA

Maybe I was just too wrapped up in the Matthew Barney hubbub, but after going to SFMoMA last week, I found out that there was a site-specific piece by Janet Cardiff that I totally missed, so I went back today to check it out. Let me first say: I’m soooo glad that I did. SFMoMA, from the shows I’ve seen and read about, is a near-perfect museum– the building is beautiful; their permanent collection is interesting and important; and their temporary exhibitions are always unique and worth seeing. But one of its only flaws, so far as I can tell, is that they sometimes don’t publicize things very well, which I think is tragically the case with Janet Cardiff’s “audio/video walk”, as sfmoma.org calls it. Even on their own website, I really had to hunt to find any information about it. The piece is mentioned at the end of a blurb about the ongoing show, “Between Art and Life”, the installation of modern and contemporary art in the museum’s permanent collection. The website does mention that the Cardiff piece is on view until September 4 but it doesn’t even give a title… I have trouble believing that it has no title… Whack.

OK, now that I’ve moved past that rant– The audio/video guide is located at the same desk as the regular audio guides. Visitors take a hand-held video camera with headphones attached and sit facing a certain direction on a certain bench in the museum’s lobby. You press play and watch the video through the viewfinder, in which Cardiff directs you to walk through the museum on a certain path as she walks through in the video, so that your movement is synchronized. You hear and see all the things she experienced on the day she made the video while also seeing the museum as it actually is around you, so in effect, you get two visual experiences of the museum set to only Cardiff’s soundtrack. At various points during the 16 minute walk, Cardiff cuts to disparate memories and scenes, which are very fragmented and dreamlike and vaguely David Lynchian. The walk through the museum includes looking over the museum’s balconies down to the lobby at people, to whom Cardiff attributes imagined dialogue from afar. Her voice feels like it’s just in your head, and the whole experience makes you feel like you’re not her exactly, but as if you’ve left your own body and gone into hers, while also floating through the museum as it actually is on the day you are visiting. There is also a point where you go through a “Staff Only” door (which the guy at the audio guide desk warned me about), which is exciting but only leads to an ugly, echo-ie staircase where you hear the sounds of this creepy guy following Janet Cardiff and running up and down the stairs around you, which is pretty surreal. One of my favorite moments was walking up one of the grand staircases in the museum to a balcony to the soundtrack of this very religious organ music, reminding me of the idea of the museum as the “modern cathedral”. The moment is placed in the perfect location in the museum which really does feel like a religious space. There’s also an awesome moment where you look through one of the huge circular windows up at the bridge, where this woman is singing a gospel-ish song that resonates and fills the entire museum, but all of this is just in your ears and in your tiny viewfinder. I loved experiencing all of this privately but with all of these oblivious strangers all around me. What an awesome experience. I really wished it were longer.

The piece was the perfect homage to the SFMoMA building, which was designed by Mario Botta and opened in 1995, which really is beautiful and very iconic, and to the experience of an individual moving through any museum. Cardiff meditates on conceptions of space, time and memory and how all three become fragmented in our minds. At the end of the tour, she talks about how we create narratives to piece our memories and experiences together so that they tell a story. It was interesting to use the museum space, which we move through in specific ways, as a mini version of the world in which we move. One of my favorite things to do, after I walk through an exhibition to see the art, is to walk through and just watch how people move through the space. There’s something so graceful and beautiful about how people move, almost always in slow motion, through museums and galleries and how they really look at things and consider them, which we rarely do for very long in “real life”. Exhibition spaces are really the only places where we are free (even invited) to linger as long as we like. Cardiff’s piece gives you the experience of being inside someone else’s head as they walk through the museum, and you get to join them when their minds wander. I would love to bring a pad of paper along the next time I’m in a museum and note every time my mind starts to wander– what I'm thinking about at a given moment and exactly where I am and what I am looking at when my thoughts drift.

I also revisited “New Work: Tim Gardner, Marcelino Goncalves and Zak Smith” (which I saw last week too but forgot to write about), located in that back room behind the permanent modern and contemporary show. The wall texts discuss the themes of representations of masculinity and playing with traditional ideas of manhood as the thread between the three artists, which was really interesting and a great comparison between them, but I found the ideas much more interesting than the actual work. Tim Gardner I’d seen before and really like; he does these paintings after every-day snapshots that look very photographic until you get very close to them. His painting is very realistic, but more than that, he captures the very particular aesthetic language of snapshots that allows us to recognize them instantly as such. For example, snapshots are usually exemplified by amateur cropping and lighting and a combination of posed, smiling people and scenery that’s typical of tourist photos. There is one large-scale family portrait that’s especially impressive; it really looks like a blown-up photo until you really study it, and the family in the portrait is so stuck in time (the 1970s or ’80s). It reminded me of old fashioned commissioned family portraits that only the very rich would have had done, for which families would have to sit for hours (Las Maninas, anyone?). It’s interesting how commissioning a family portrait used to be a sign of luxury and wealth, whereas now it is considered one of the most normal ways an American middle class family documents their collective moments. It would be so fun to do a show of Christmas card family photos collected from many average American families… I’ll have to keep that in mind.

Zak Smith’s work is very rough, sketchy comic strip-esque and pretty interesting to look at, but it didn’t really get my brain going the first or second time I saw it. Marcelino Goncalves does these small paintings of men and boys doing various every-day things together in mostly pastels and in a very painterly, simple style. Again, the ideas were really interesting and totally there, but the work didn’t particularly strike me. I really hope a major museum does a solo Tim Gardner show soon, though, because clearly there’s a lot of there there.

CCA: First Impressions

I'm still biding my time until orientation next week and the beginning of classes the week after, but I've now met a few of my classmates at an evite-organized bar thing and seen the Oakland campus as well. I'll admit right now that I don't have anything too inspired to say about this (so please excuse the fact that my observations will be littered with adjectives like "cool" and "nice"), but I thought I should mark the monumentality of my first CCA-related experiences with a post...

I met about half of my classmates (OK, exactly half-- there are only 10 of us total, after all) at the bar thing last Saturday and about half of the second-year class, as well. Everyone seems...really nice, friendly, normal... which was unexpected. Not that I didn't expect people to be normal, but I guess I was letting my imagination of the sullen, artsy, inaccessible personality stereotype run away with me. Which really has nothing to do with what I expected of other people and far more with what I expected of myself, in relation to the group. As a 23 year-old, I expected to feel young in comparison to everyone else and, as a consequence, to kind of take on the role of the boisterous runt of the group who's always running circles around everyone else to prove that I should be here. Strangely enough, this is a role that I actually idealized... in reality, of course, this would have its drawbacks. Granted, I haven't met everyone yet or gotten any sort of sense of what the group dynamic will be like (much less how any of us will interact in an academic setting), but so far everyone seems to be on similar wavelengths.

This afternoon, I drove to the Oakland campus with Danny, a fellow first-year and new friend, to check out the Oakland CCA scene and drop off my work-study applications (for a couple of gallery positions). The campus was really beautiful and far more traditional than the SF campus (which is a small cluster of converted, industrial buildings situated on a convergence of side streets), plus it was all abuzz with undergrads and their parental figures, so it felt very cute and collegy. Danny and I both marveled at the fact that we were "the new kids" again, which we'd already experienced freshman year of college, only this time without the requisite angst and cynicism that any self-respecting high schooler achieves. All in all, the campus was... nice. It's also situated next to a high school that's housed in portables covered in really beautiful graffiti idolizing hip-hop superstars, which was cool.

One thing that the visit to Oakland did make me think about was the question of whether undergrads, namely freshmen in college, are ready to go to "Art School". My instinct is, no: the best thing about my undergrad education was having the freedom to change my mind and dabble in many things before finding a focus or declaring a major. Going to a school like CCA as an undergrad seems very limiting. This won't really affect my own academic experience at CCA, but it will be interesting to think more about this question if and when I become a TA, which I'm hoping to do. For now, just something to ponder.

“Beth Cook: It’s Not You, It’s Me”

Last night, I went to my first gallery opening in San Francisco. The show was at Triple Base Gallery, a very cute, small exhibition space on 19th Street in the Mission—from what I can tell, the perfect introduction to the SF gallery scene. The artist, Beth Cook recently graduated with an MA from CCA (as a studio art student). The show is guest curated by Zoe Taleporos, who I believe is in her second year of the curatorial program. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Beth does these amazing, large-scale pencil drawings which literally chart, diagram, graph and model aspects of her past relationships. She calls herself a “relationship anthropologist”, which I think is hilarious. Some of the charts are extremely complex, and they reminded me of scientific charts that you stare at in the doctor’s office while wearing that horrible paper robe that’s totally open in the back, waiting for the doctor to come in. Anyway, her work was really amazing. It’s the kind that you want to describe and explain every detail—which is a great sign. It’s really memorable, accessible, and gets you excited….

For various reasons, I was feeling really emotional the whole time I was at the gallery, which struck me as an odd response to the work. I mean, some of it was sad, but it was mostly just really biting and funny. I think, for me, it was a combo of all the relationship stuff reminding me of missing my own far-away bf (particularly this really great piece: 2 letters, one written by Beth and the other by her current boyfriend, Tom, to each other, describing their first “experience” together as each remembers it with revisions and comments written on the letters by both of them; it became this very sweet, but not cheesy, conversation on paper). So, I was getting emotional because of the emotional content of the work in combination with feeling social anxiety about being at the first gathering of a lot of people from my program… I’m sure the majority of twenty-somethings at the opening were curatorial students (and studio art students, as well), and I probably could have struck up a conversation with any one of them, but… I didn’t. I’m terrible about that when I don’t know people yet. I kind of hate meeting people because I hate how I come off at first. Kind of a harsh self-review, actually, but it’s one of my only real social anxieties. Anyway, I’ll actually be meeting everyone tomorrow night at this bar thing, so it’s not a big deal.

Half-way through the opening, Beth made a little speech (I guess you could call it a “performance”) where she gave her rules and tips on dating, which was very funny. She, of course, was as awesome as her work and was really great to listen to. Following, there was a short Dating Q&A, for which she brought her extremely cute current boyfriend up to give “the guy’s perspective” alongside her own. It struck me during the Q&A that one of the most impressive things about Beth’s work is how accessible it is and how true it is to her as a person—she’s 25 years old, so the trials of dating is a very real, immediate subject for her (and most everyone at the opening). Having such a rich subject on the table sort of took away the pressure of this scenario being in the context of “art”. It was a very unique feeling, for a gallery opening. I think it helped that most of the people there were CCA students, so the opening had a friendly feel to it… and yet I still didn’t talk to anyone. Ugh. The show is only up through August 30, so get to it, San Franciscans!

www.basebasebase.com

Drawing Restraint, take 2: The Politics of Appropriation

I noticed a letter yesterday in the current issue of the SF Bay Guardian from a reader who took issue with “Drawing Restraint”, suggesting that audiences consider the implications of a white, American (not to mention male) artist using Japanese culture as a focal point of his art and pointing out that Matthew Barney is appropriating Japanese culture in doing so. I wanted to bring this up, firstly, to applaud this person for making such an observation; this series of Barney’s work can and should be considered from this viewpoint. But, after thinking about it, I also want to play devil’s advocate and point out a few problems with this accusation (and not just to play devil’s advocate, which I find annoying, but because I actually disagree with the point).

My first thought was, Shouldn’t we, in turn, applaud Barney for taking an interest in Japanese culture and customs and making them a part of his artistic subject matter, rather than simply ignoring the non-Western world, as so many stereotypical Americans tend to do? Also, the way in which he uses Japanese symbols and cultural elements is in the context of himself (and Bjork) as the Occidental Guests; there is a pretty large amount of humility attached to Barney’s “appropriation” of Japanese culture. I think this is one of the wisest choices he makes in this series: He places himself within the narrative, it seems, precisely so that he is not just appropriating a culture and pulling the omniscient strings from offstage. Instead, he places himself within the action, as with the Cremaster series, sothat we consider both Barney himself and the character he plays within the context of the world he has created in combination with the world he is appropriating.

I think “appropriating” is precisely the right word for what’s going on here. What Matthew Barney does is create mini-universes, which resemble ours in various ways, some obvious and some obscure, but are at the same time unquestionably unique. He creates and crafts these worlds down to the smallest minutiae, meticulously constructing every last detail. He’s a genius and a control freak. In the case of Drawing Restraint, he’s appropriated aspects of Japanese culture (which is rife with complex symbolism and ritual, Barney’s favorite meat) and weaved them into his own mythology.

I’m going to put myself right up on the chopping block and say that appropriation in art is not always a bad thing. Kara Walker appropriates and quotes Victorian silhouettes in her very popular cut-outs and no one takes issue with that. The difference, of course, is that in Walker’s case, she is a female, African American artist (typically marginalized) drawing from a part of Western, white culture, in part, to subvert it. Barney, on the other hand, is a white, Western artist working within the hegemonic sphere, drawing from a non-Western culture that has long been marginalized in the Western artistic cannon. And I think this is an important point to make about Barney’s work. However, I think it’s also valid to reiterate that it can also be seen as positive and productive that Barney, as a very popular, successful Western artist, is bringing aspects of Japanese culture into American sight lines. I think it’s also worth mentioning that the exhibition began in Japan (Tokyo?), and Barney spent a lot of time in Japan before and during the making of Drawing Restraint 9. It will be interesting to see how Barney writes about all of this in whatever catalogue accompanies the show.

I also had a response on a personal level, getting away from Matthew Barney. One of my major interests as a curator is creating exhibitions that focus on artistic practices in Asia and Latin America. But what does it mean for me, a white, privileged, American curator to “appropriate” Asian and Latin American art in exhibitions? Obviously, I could write a few novels on this, but I thought I should throw it out there. I’m actually reading an excellent essay on this exact topic right now, as part of my preliminary reading for grad school, so I’ll have to add to this discussion once I’ve waded through more of it.

Drawing Restraint

On Saturday, I went to SFMoMA to see Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint show. I went with a friend and my dad, which was fun, because it gave me the opportunity to try to explain Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series and how all the disparate parts of the show fit together, which is a huge challenge. But I always find that seeing art alone versus with other people are vastly different experiences-- either way, I get excited about the work (either because the show is wonderful or because it sucks), and I talk a lot. Adding the fact that Barney's work is so infinitely complicated and manic, I felt like I never shut up. So the result is the opposite of one of my favorite Modest Mouse lyrics: "My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth". When I go to a museum with friends, I talk so much that I forget to think, or rather I'm thinking but don't actually hear the thoughts. So I can say that I enjoyed the show, especially having seen the movie, Drawing Restraint 9, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to go through it again to actually have a nuanced opinion... I can say that I reeeeaaally want to do a show on symbolism, juxtaposing contemporary artists (Barney being an obvious example) with Northern Renaissance painters. This body of Barney's work is perfect, because it includes so much maritime imagery. All of the photos and sculptures that include sea life remind me so much of vaintas paintings, often still lifes of seafood and fruit, food that looks beautiful at first and then rots quickly, which were (and continue to be) symbols of the fleeting nature of life. Barney's Drawing Restraint series adds to that ideas about the contrasts between East and West, man and nature, guest and host, particularly emphasizing the fact that people are merely guests in the house of nature. This work shows how Barney has matured as an artist; issues of sex and gender are still present but take a backseat to issues that are far less explored in contemporary art, so Barney is able to pull away from being "just" a body artist. I also thought the film was really beautiful, and I definitely recommend it. I have to admit, I never saw any of the Cremaster movies from start to finish, but I'm pretty sure that Drawing Restraint 9 is much less frenetic. It has a very hypnotic rhythm to it, largely thanks to Bjork's amazing musical score. So, I'll be visiting SFMoMA again before the show closes. I have more to say about other temporary shows there, but that will have to be for another post.

Me With Some Art: Palais de Tokyo, Spring 2004

Summer in NYC: Brief Rundown

Before I totally leave New York mentally, I thought I'd give some mini-reviews of the shows I saw in NYC in July/August before I left. I hope people will feel free to comment, especially if you've seen these shows...

MoMA
Dada

This show began in France, I believe, and then traveled to D.C.'s National Gallery before coming to MoMA. It's the most comprehensive survey of the Dada movement I've ever seen, organized geographically rather than chronologically or thematically. The exhibition design is very whimsical and fun; there are two entrances (New York and Zurich, if I'm remembering right), so that the audience chooses their route through the show like a notorious Dada game of chance. Dada is one of my favorite art movements, so I loved the show, and one thing that struck me was the inclusion of a few artists who I wouldn't normally think of as Dadaists, like Otto Dix. My favorite blogger, Tyler Green (who writes Modern Art Notes-- artsjournal.com/man ) pointed out in his review of the show that the interesting paradox of Dada is how humor is juxtaposed with and used to mask the incredible violence and trauma of WWI, in which many Dadaists fought. I think the show hilights this well. Closes September 11.

Also at MoMA is the amazing Artist's Choice: Herzog and de Meuron, Perception Restrained, a single room surveying the MoMA's permanent collection curated by Herzog and de Meuron and organized by Terrence Riley, MoMA's Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. The idea behind the show is the utter impossibility, as H & M explains, of finding the "gems" within a vast collection of gems. The resulting show is a room of small windows to various parts of the MoMA's collection that restrict the audience's view and suggest all of the thousands of works not included, which bleed off, out of view, in every direction. Herzog & de Meuron also hilight the museum's video collection with flat screen TVs lined up in rows along the ceiling. The idea of restricted perception is so smart that the physical exhibition doesn't have to be vast in scope to mask any kind of conceptual shortcoming. The result is an incredibly succinct, controlled, precise environment that really fits with the ideas at hand. I was really impressed by this show. Closes September 25.


The Jewish Museum
Eva Hesse: Sculpture

This small show spans Eva Hesse's short but amazing career, partially recreating her only other solo sculpture show at Fischbach Gallery in 1968. One thing that struck me when looking at her work was what an obvious precursor she is to Matthew Barney-- it's weird to think of them together, but they work with such similar materials, and it's kind of astonishing how different their subject matter is. On the other hand, I think what makes Eva Hesse's work so interesting, besides being so experimental with materials and how they react to one another in a very scientific way, is that its minimalism gives it a distinctly serene feeling. Similarly, while Barney's work as a whole is complicated and detailed and overwhelming, the frames, vitrines and sculptures he makes out of petroleum and similar materials provide a sort of neutralizing force-- part of that is the monochromatic nature of the substance. Petroleum is kind of the Matthew Barney Universe equivalent to soil on planet Earth. Anyway, the Hesse show reminded me of how amazing she is. She's not someone who I think of often without prompting, so it was great to see her work in a solo exhibition to put her back in the front of my brain. The Jewish Museum often likes to incorporate a biographical element to their shows and, I think, does it better than any other museum I've seen. The last room of the Hesse show is filled with artifacts from her life: photos, scrapbook pages, a couple of videos and letters which provided a brief chronology of her life. Often, I think rooms like this turn out looking kind of cheesy, but in this case it really worked. It was especially powerful to see video footage and snapshots of her in her studio alongside certain sculptures-- she was so young when she made her most influential, inspired work, and actually seeing that moment captured visually was very cool. This exhibition was mounted concurrent with a show of Hesse's drawings at the Drawing Center, which I missed, sadly. The show at the Jewish Museum closes September 17.


The Asia Society
Projected Realities: Video Art from East Asia

This show closed in early August, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because all of the six or seven artists showcased were really unique, and a lot of the work was very funny. It seems that there's a tendency among American video artists in particular to take themselves too seriously, maybe because new media had to fight its way into the realm of fine art more recently than other mediums. But most of these East Asian artists' work had an element of surreal humor about them, which was really refreshing. There seemed to be an interesting common thread between several of the artists around the idea of mechanizing humanity and, inversely, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The exhibition was conceived in memory of Nam June Paik, who passed away in January of 2006.


The Guggenheim
Zaha Hadid

My first reaction to the show overall was one of satisfaction; I think architecture exhibitions typically tend to require a lot of explanation supplementary to drawings and models on display. Hadid's work, however, actually lends itself to exhibition-- much of what was on display included paintings and multi-media artworks portraying a concept for a building or study of an urban area. Hadid's renderings and models are also so much more conceptual and less precise and nit-picky than the average architectural rendering, you can sort of trick yourself into forgetting that it's architecture you're looking at. I really appreciate how conscious her designs are of urban planning and how buildings relate to each other; she never designs one structure in a vacuum. But, as a non-architect, I found it frustrating not to be able to get any sort of idea how it feels to be inside a Hadid structure, because none of her renderings are on a human scale. Everything is shown from a bird's-eye, panned out perspective, so we never know how this architecture is actually experienced. I find it interesting that the only really famous female architect is from Iraq-- there might be a lot of implications there, but it's something I'll have to mull over.

I also have to say that this was one of the more poorly installed shows I've ever seen-- I don't know whether hadid's firm or the Guggenheim were responsible for framing, but there were several framed drawings and paintings which were puckering and bubbling under the plexi glass, a wood frame that had one corner splitting, and there was one frame in which one corner of the plexi was actually coming out of the frame, jutting right off the wall. It was astonishing to see these very obvious, sloppy mistakes; if they're that obvious to me, who knows a little about framing but not a ton, I can't imagine a professional framer getting away with that... sigh. A good show nonetheless. Closes October 25.


The Met
On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

This tiny but very touching tribute to Susan Sontag, drawing from the Met's permanent photography collection, really reminded me of what an amazing and unique writer she was; Susan Sontag completely invented a language with which to describe art and singlehandedly shaped photography criticism. We really have to give Sontag partial credit for legitimizing photography as a fine art in the eyes of the rest of the art world. Photography would never have evolved as it did, as an art form, without the vocabulary that Sontag created for it. The show pairs individual works and groups of works with Sontag quotes (and even provided titles of essays in which the quotes can be found, encouraging audiences to revisit her texts or read them for the first time), which act as the wall texts for the whole show. The most touching and striking piece, for me, was Robert Mapplethorpe's early portrait of Patti Smith in which she's squatting in a profile fetal position, naked, in an empty hardwood floored studio, looking up at the camera. The quote was something to do with how Mapplethorpe always had to make people look perfect, like the most perfect version of themselves. It was so powerful to have the relationship between Patti and Robert as well as the relationship between Robert and Susan Sontag both intertwined and displayed so purely. Closes September 4.

The New

For those who don't know me, I'm going to do a bit of exposition. My name is Jessica Brier, and I'm 23 years old. The prompting for this blog is my eminent dive into the California College of Art's master's program in curating contemporary art. I grew up in Austin, TX, where I had an art history teacher (Marsha Russell) who completely changed my life and opened my eyes to the possibilities of studying and immersing myself in art, as she does. She's one of those teachers who completely molds you as a person; two of my best friends from high school are also in the art/architecture fields, and all three of us doubt we'd be doing what we're doing today without Marsha. I earned my bachelor's degree at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a small gem of a program that allows students to design their own curricula. Mine focused on art history (and curatorial issues toward the latter half of my undergrad carreer) and American race studies. Living in New York during my college years meant that the art-minded part of myself was more or less weaned on the New York museum and gallery scene. During my time at NYU, I also spent a semester in Paris, which provided another unique perspective on the contemporary art world. For the fourteen months after I graduated, I moved to Brooklyn and worked as an assistant/novice everything at the Robert Mapplethorpe Fouundation. I've just moved to San Francisco for the CCA curatorial program a few days ago.

I've done a lot of observation of the art world over the past five years, and I'm hoping that this will be a place where I can organize and gel these observations. I'm in a unique position, coming from the New York art world to that of San Francisco and California, on a greater scale, which has a completely different feel to it. I'm studying to be a curator, but I'm also a critic and a designer and a reader and a writer and observer, and this blog is meant to combine all of these things.

Also-- a note about the title... while I was thinking about starting a blog, my friend and former boss Joree suggested a blog where I review french fries at various food establishment, as fries are one of my favortire foods... I couldn't imagine having enough to say about fries for a whole blog (though I do have an idea for a fries and milk shakes-only restaurant, with nuanced condiment choices, but that will have to be a special bonus post for another day). However, I wanted to start an art blog and the fry thing got me thinking: I love art and fries, and the "art fry" combo kind of invokes my relative novice status in the art world. It borders on cutesy, but I'm willing to risk it... Hence: The Art Fry. Thanks, Joree!