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Saturday, July 24, 2004

The Icebox Cometh, part two

 

Libby told you about Valsalva Maneuver at the Ice Box in the Crane Art Center building in her post.

I saw the croquet theme exhibit last week and also liked it. Then, as a bonus, I got a tour of the rest of the huge complex -- the four-story Crane plumbing warehouse on American St. -- which will open in the fall with artists' studios, more gallery space and performance space. (top image is Ice Box with crane painted on it. The four story Crane building is adjoining. I love how the huge warehouse is dwarfed by the much smaller Ice Box in this shot)



Richard Hricko and Nicholas Kripal, two of the three owners and both artists and Tyler professors, took me around (a third owner, David Gleeson wasn't there). They explained their plans for the Crane in a way that suggested they were still pinching themselves to see whether their good luck at finding and getting the American St. complex wasn't all a dream. (image is floor plan for second floor artists' studios).

Apparently they'd been looking for a building for some time and when their third business partner, Gleeson, found Crane, they made an offer, held their breath while a few competing offers came in, and wound up getting the building.

It's hard not to be wildly enthusiastic so I'm not even going to try to contain myself.

The building is amazing. It's the old Crane Plumbing warehouse, a 4-story affair designed by a local inventor/designer named Ballinger who believed in cast concrete.

The place has concrete floors and support pillars that are still in great shape and thus it's structurally sound and as fire rated as the day it was opened. The windows need replacing and that will happen, Hricko said. Right now, they're framing the space for the artists' studios and you can see the potential. The studios, which are spoken for already, rent for 50 cents per square foot with spaces ranging from 290 sq. ft. to 2,280 sq. ft. according to the floor plan I saw.



There are two freight elevators, one in the front and one in the back of the wedge-shaped building. Owners after Crane, who were in the fish business, added on the Ice Box as a fish freezer. The refrigeration units have been removed and what's left is a glorious, 5,000 square foot space with 25 ft. tall ceiling and no support columns.

It's a pristine box and an inspiring project space. I can imagine any of a number of local artists going crazy there and coming out with exciting installations. Hricko and Kripal are accepting proposals for the Ice Box. Email yours to Hricko@temple.edu.



The property also includes another out building, a carriage house which stored carriages downstairs and horses on the second floor. (image above is carriage house seen from the fourth floor of Crane) Hricko said they hope to turn the carriage house into performance space as well.

I'll quit here saying stay tuned for more images and information as we get closer to the Center's opening in the fall sometime around the Fringe Festival. (We may see a Fringe performance in the Crane)

Meanwhile, above right is an installation shot of the Valsalva exhibit in the Ice Box. You can get a sense of the big box space from the shot.


And finally, because I found a direct connection with it, here's an image of the floating landscape piece by Katie McCory, Leslie Mutchler, Samantha Coles, Jennifer McTague and Michael Dur.

Libby and I once fashioned a papier mache floating still life which hung for a month in the Uarts Window on Broad. The piece no longer exists but the concept of floating the world of objects is one I still love.


permanent link  roberta 8:31 AM
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Far afield

 
I didn't particularly want to drive out to Chestnut Hill to look at the work hanging at JMS Gallery, but the image on the postcard and the knowledge that Daniel Heyman had a number of pieces in the show there sold me enough to get me going (top, "Warren" by Heyman). 

The Heymans (are we on a Daniel Heyman kick here or what?) not only did not disappoint. They pleased enormously. And some work by Vladan Gradistanac also piqued my interest.

Heyman made a series of portraits, silhouetted figures printed from linoleum blocks on patterned Japanese papers. The papers were not necessarily modest and subdued.  The paper behind "Shane" was covered with red, pink, green and blue mountains ("Shane" left).  An intense yellow plaid framed "Jonathan," (below, right) which is printed on stripes. In contrast to all this busy pattern, the inky figures or heads and shoulders were flat, defined by the cut of a jaw, a few lines for features, some sparely chosen details (I mean, who would cut into the linoleum block any more than necessary?).

The specificity of these portraits made with such economy was a reminder of how we are so not alike. The layers of pattern peeked through boldly where the cuts remained uninked, creating space or backdrop. They also seeped up through the ink itself, adding texture to the inky areas.  In Heyman's statement he writes that the layers allude to the layers of his subject's personality.

Lately, we've seen a bunch of other Daniel Heyman prints--at Moore College's Levy Gallery, in the "Philadelphia Selections Five" (see Roberta's post), and at the "Several Steps Removed" show of prints and printmaking at Fleisher, (see my post). Heyman, who's has a Fleisher Challenge show coming up in February, recently wrote a post for us about Julie York.

(Prints are not his only medium, and there's a charming painting of his downstairs at the gallery--"Terrace in the 6th," showing a figure having dinner on a terrace in Paris.)

Of Vladan Gradistanac's work, what I took most seriously were some portraits of elderly women. Unlike his more Byzantine icon-like portraits, which seemed rather generic, these portrayed specific people.


 






The surprise here was both the subject matter--elderly ladies are not a popular subject for portraiture, unless they have a million bucks, in which case they are draped in jewels and flattery--and the forthright image-making.

I especially liked "Face #1" (left above) but there was a woman with pink eyes (right) who also caught my attention.  The Yugoslavia-born Gradistanac has something a little old-fashioned in his work--maybe his colors, his paint handling, that seemed to come out of the '50s.

The artist on the postcard, Eleanor Day, makes colorful paintings of nude look-alike goddesses of nature in primitive sylvan scenes. The colors were super, but the subject matter was expected. The postcard image, "The Second Queen," achieved a pleasing quirkiness (left).

Others showing at JMS included Pegalina and Ruslan Khais.

JMS Gallery is at 8236 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill,  (215) 248-4649.





permanent link  libby 8:30 AM
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Reflections and the watery cosmos

 
When Stella and I ran over to Uarts we, too, were stopped in our tracks by Shannon Bowser's untitled wiggly concrete in the window. Libby's right (see post immediately below), it's absolutely cosmic and lovely. Maybe even underwater cosmic? (pictured at top is jellyfish from the Monterey Aquarium.)

I'm always for having a little fun with my art, so when I realized that the one rock seemingly not hurtling through space would line up with Stella's body approximately where her heart was I snapped away.



The floating, wiggling rock, like a heart aflame out of old religious iconography, brings one more reading to an openly evocative work. I am the cosmos, and the cosmos is me.

Bowser, a former Vox Popper, Pew finalist and Independence Foundation fellow, has been merging cast rocks and springs for many years. See her nice website for more images and information. She must have made an entire village of concrete houses on springs by now, and at least one wiggly car that was like a honeymooner's dream -- and nightmare.

The work's combination of simple means and metaphorical meaning about life's fragility never ceases to please.
permanent link  roberta 7:43 AM
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Friday, July 23, 2004

Ecstacy of existence

 
The Window on Broad, the little showcase of installation art outside the University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, has always been a challenge. The reflections, the way the light hits the window, are fierce.

So any time an artist succeeds with the space, succeeds with making a piece that still works in spite of the reflections, I'm in awe.

Shannon Bowser has made something fairly simple.  It's a bunch of rocks with tales hurtling through window space in front of a blue background.  The tales on the rock headed straight down quiver in an endearing manner, at once tender and comical. And a little machine labors and labors on the far right enhanced by  a spring with an undefinable function.

The rock comets are touching, in their little blue cosmos; they are each of us traveling through space, our tales flaring behind us, wiggling with optimism and pleasure, ecstatic to exist. These rocks are ordinary looking, the crude matter of the universe. And over to the right, the laboring mechanism is God or the laws of nature or some sort of force playing out its power(lessness).

It's a piece  you can get in a basic sort of way very quickly as you walk down the street. But, like the night sky, it keeps calling you back.



permanent link  libby 10:27 PM
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Thursday, July 22, 2004

They're coming to get you

 
Minna Dubin told you about "Scarab" in her great post and I just want to jump in here with some pictures and a few thoughts.

My sketch at PW on July 28 will have more. (top image is detail of speakers hovering like a flying saucer invasion in Robert Chaney's "Green Hell" in the bathroom. Next is Drew Elliott's "Untitled" pen and ink devil)



Where I want to start is with a brief chat I had with Dario Robleto yesterday before he gave his "Food for Thought" talk at Uarts. (Libby tells you more about that in her post right below).

Robleto, 31, featured in this year's Whitney Biennial, is influenced by music, and his work uses a kind of visual sampling (dj'ing), he says.

We were talking about the preponderance of the "goth" aesthetic in art today (dark, nihilistic work -- there was a bunch in the Biennial...there's been a bunch out there in general). (below is Scott Cassidy's "Shoe")



Robleto says he's against that kind of dark glam work, and he says his new project is fighting against it. He mentioned that in one of the Biennial panel discussions he took this oppositional position.

I found that most interesting because to my mind Robleto's Biennial work was some of the darkest, most difficult work to view -- mostly having to do with his use of transgressive materials (human bones) and the forlorn, thrift shop affect his objects take on. If the spirit of that work is meant to be anti-goth, I'm not sure the hermetically-sealed work captures it.



Work exploring the dark side has always been a stream in art -- Hieronymus Bosch, Dante, Warhol's electric chairs, etc. It's a reflection of dark times. To a certain extent people have to wallow in the cellar in order to finally reject it and move on and up. Right now we seem to be wallowing. We'll move on. (right is Chris Bors' "Slayer...Slayer...Slayer" video)



Scarab, meanwhile, sets about wallowing in style. The artists, all of whom were influenced by metal music -- high goth -- make work that while worshipful is also a little contrary.

(Left is Paul Swenbeck's polychromed resin,"My Only Son, A Demon," and right is a detail from Justin Matherly's black on black spray paint piece "A Blaze in the Northern Sky")



Black is the signature color for goth work, and here it shows up in Matherly, Swenbeck, and Elliott's works.

Red is the other signature color and it's there too, in Cassidy's iconic boot and two other paintings (a severed hand and a still life with skull). It's also there is Chris Bors' wonderful oral history video in which red lips tell the story of a teen's first Slayer concert. This endearing work focusses on big red lips (Rocky Horror Picture Show comes to mind). But what you hear is the kid's tale (full of kid language -- "I'm like this ... My dad's was like...and my mom's like ..."). I found myself rooting for the kid in his trippy journey that was -- at bottom -- about getting home to mom and dad.



Thom Lessner's signature portrait paintings (detail shown) of metal bands and two miniature painted guitars add a note of straight-forward fan worship.

I saved my favorites for last -- Clint Takeda's "Iommi Digits (the Birth of Heavy Metal)" (below) and A. Ho's "Satan, sitting there, he's smiling" (bottom).

Takeda's plastic and leather finger thimbles in a glass vitrine re-create the faux fingertips guitarist Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath invented for himself in order to continue playing guitar after losing two fingertips in some accident or other.



I found this work, which would fit perfectly in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in the U. S. patent office collection of prostheses invented for disabled guitarists, took the show to another level altogether.

By dwelling on the disability of Iommi, Takeda takes the metal guitar god down a notch -- and at the same time raises him up to a level of inventor, a la Ben Franklin. In either case, he's made him less satanic and more human.



Finally, A. Ho's desk in the corner (left) is a perfect piece -- a reminder of the teen torture chamber, high school, where goth is a term of definition. Like most of the work in the show, Ho's installation is an adoring artifact to the church of metal and part question mark. For carrying on that double-edged conversation I loved the piece.

Scarab closes with a panel discussion Friday, Aug, 13 at 7 p.m. I hope the discussion turns to the issue of goth imagery in today's art world and whether it feels to the artists like cathartic wallowing. (I bet it does.)

I also want to know what the artists think is goth art's second act.
permanent link  roberta 10:38 AM
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Shaman samplings

 

Dario Robleto, he of the mysterious sculptures made from ground up vinyl records and pulverized bones--from humans and dinosaurs-- came to the University of the Arts to explain himself and his art work today.

His talk was part five of the UArts six-session Food for Thought  summer lunchtime series.

Robleto (right), who at 31 has made marks in New York (including at this year's Whitney Biennial), Los Angeles, and Paris, hails from San Antonio. He's been showing pieces from his trilogy project that's been four years in the making, and apparently he's  still hard at it.

The trilogy is nothing if not ambitious, with a back story about a fictional soldier on various American battlefields in the course of 200 years. Our hero, a Robleto stand-in, dies, is maimed, is hurt, but ultimately, in parts 2 and 3 of the trilogy, will regenerate, Robleto  said.  (Left, a kaleidoscope made from trinitite, the material created by an atomic explosion melting the desert--a product of war, and marbles made from clay or bullets by soldiers.)

The thing about Robleto's sculptures is they are so layered in content, material and meaning but not all those layers are visible.   "Our Sin Was in Our Hips" is a sculpture of a male and a female pelvis,  the male on top. That's what you see.  What you don't see is that the pelvises were cast using old records, the male pelvis from Robleto's father's 12" rock 'n' roll records, the female pelvis from his mother's old 45 rpms.

Robleto is a kind of art novelist.  He imagines how people would have responded to things that really happened.  So for this piece, he imagined how his parents and their generation would have learned their sexuality via rock 'n' roll, and "how a generation was made to feel so dirty and sinful in their musical decisions." But it's thanks to the inspiration of sexy rock 'n' roll that Robleto is alive, and he showed a charming delight with this concept.

The sculptures are Robleto's own form of regeneration.  He comes from a dj background, using music and the concept of sampling to take something that's just gathering dust, or something that's old, and recreating from it something new.  And music is everywhere in his pieces, whether resurrected as vinyl or as sound samples or even as song titles.

"At War with Entropy of Nature" (back side, "Ghosts don't always want to come back") is a casette tape case created from bone dust from every bone in the body, he said (should I take this literally?). He created a sound track from samples of voices of the dead. (I don't know where the fact begins and the fiction ends in his description of his materials, but clearly, here we have jumped off into his imagination.) For the samples, he imagined everyone on the same battlefield at once.  "If you remove the politics of the moment, no one knows what they're doing. They're just shooting and fighting." So the soundtrack is chaotic.  And the tape itself comes tumbling out of the cassette in a jumble and tangle-- the "voices leaving the shell of the body," he said. (Tape shown)

If you don't know the thoughts and the materials that went into the piece, I don't know that you would take the trouble to understand, because in general, Robleto's pieces are more conceptual than visual. So I found it interesting that he thought he would be slowing gallery-goers down for longer than their standard 3 minutes per art work. But the content is too deeply buried to succeed at that unless, perhaps, it was a large enough selection of things to make the pattern of thinking accessible. 

The sculptures feel creepy and Victorian--bones in vitrines, mad science and snake oil.

The work is also ritualistic. Words incorporated in the pieces and in the descriptions of the materials are incantatory; the materials are there for their magical and curative properties; the stories, available to initiates willing to undertake a study of them,  are part of a belief system for raising the dead (left, "Vatican Radio" dedicated to Pope Pius XII, the metal from melted shrapnel, bone and bullets, the audio from a soundtrack calling draft lottery numbers, a woman's gasp manified and echoed).

And there's also a touch of boyish romance--a love of the old music; a love of the '60s. Robleto uses  vinyl dust from Bob Dyland and Jimi Hendrix, for example, cast with prehistoric whalebone dust in "Hippies on a Ouija Board--Everybody Has to Cling to Something" (right)

The piece is a hand-carved old-fashioned valise, stuffed with a cast Ouija board (for talking to the dead) and old-fashioned homemade nostrums in bottles carved from bone. What's he thinking about? "Hippy problems--arthritic joints, loss of hope." Dario, you're such a sweetie, but please don't write me off yet. I'm not quite ready to succumb to depression and skeletal failure.

By the way, the snake-oil salesman who owns this sample case of remedies works for Lomax and Cleaver (named after black power leader Eldridge Cleaver and music collector and archivist Alan Lomax). He's talking about my generation. (See, we writers have our own version of sampling.)

Robleto has a lot of stories to tell of people from the past. And he's got a lot of really rich thoughts about the meaning of life on this earth.  Furthermore, I find him less obscure and more humanitarian and humanistic than that darling of nouveau cosmologies and imagined worlds, Matthew Ritchie. 

I wonder how he's going to pull of the trick of creating parts two and three of his trilogy--"Southern Bacteria" and "Diary of a Resurrectionist." I can't imagine how someone who makes this odd but powerful melancholy work that channels the past will somehow move his work's affect into a more upbeat theme.

As for the secret meanings, unspoken samplings and hidden pasts embedded in the work, the more you know, the more you like the work. But only the shaman has the knowledge to decode it all.

 




permanent link  libby 7:57 PM
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We have a story to tell you ...

 
Pepon Osorio and Ed Levine put up two of the best new public art projects in the country.  Americans for the Arts Public Art Network selected Osorio's "I have a story to tell you..." and Levine's "Embodying Thoreau: dwelling, sitting, watching" for the 2004 Year in Review, a guide to the country's best new public art.


 

Both projects were commissioned by the Fairmount Park Art Association.  For more on Osorio's piece, go here and here, and for more on Levine's, go here.  Congratulations to both of you from artblog.


permanent link  libby 7:31 PM
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Busy, busy

 

Hey, sorry about all the silence here. Between Libby's pc bug and my PW deadlines we're out of the cyberloop. (check out the new PW art page online by the way -- it's a nice update)

Libby and I are going to hear the talk by Dario Robleto today at Uarts (CBS Auditorium, Broad and Pine, noon). Will have more on that and other stuff this afternoon. Ciao.
permanent link  roberta 11:00 AM
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Mighty virus threatens

 
I'm in the grips of a mighty virus on my computer and am stunned that I even got on here. But I'm afraid to process pix, etc., just in case it makes things worse or somehow transmits, so I'm off for a day or two. (Because I don't know how anything works, I may be overly cautious, but better safe than sorry.)  But Roberta of the power keyboard will keep on typing.

permanent link  libby 1:51 PM
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Monday, July 19, 2004

Rist's Big Stir and Kentridge's Tide Tables at SF MOMA

 

Catching up on my online reading I noticed Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes talking about SF MOMA's re-installation of its collection -- done recently and done in the thematic way Tate Modern reinstalled its collection.

Read Green here. SF artist and blogger Anna Conti also wrote a comprehensive reflection on the museum here. (image is the museum's stripe-happy lobby, the only place you're allowed to take photographs)



I didn't dip into the collection much when we visited. Mostly I was on a hunt for the new William Kentridge and Pipilotti Rist pieces which Conti had clued me in about.

And I was hoping to see again a piece I'd seen in my last visit, Sarah Sze's "Things Fall Apart," an installation made from parts of an SUV that threaded itself in and out of the balcony walls overlooking the atrium. Like all Sze installations, this benevolent infestation made use of an army of tiny, breakable materials like toothpicks and packing peanuts that seemed to adorn the auto parts and imbue them with spooky, spacey energy. (image is detail)

I loved the fragile ecosystem within the cut open industrial behemoth but sadly it was gone. The piece, commissioned by the museum, was in storage, according to a helpful admissions desk person.

Read more here and see more pictures here.

Tide Table


Upstairs on two, we wound our way through the museum's current design exhibit and into the permanent collection where we found the Kentridge piece, "Tide Table" (2003) (image is detail) enthroned in a gallery with works by two artists that made a perfect complement -- Phillip Guston and the late great California ceramic sculptor Robert Arneson.




Kentridge's piece is a new acquisition that includes an animation and six drawings from which it was made. The piece, like other Kentridge works, intertwines the character Soho Eckstein, a white industrialist who is the stand-in for the artist, with the lives of black South Africans.

Here, Soho vacations at the beach and quickly the beach scene dissolves into one of hospital-dormitories with people dying of AIDS. The tide comes in, the tide goes out like the lives ebbing and flowing in this alternate universe that swims underneath the seemingly oblivious Soho. (image is another detail)

The piece's soundtrack is mournful, intersplicing quiet waves with sad songs sung acapella.



The piece had an affect of resignation I don't remember from other works which seemed to have more anger and hope woven into their fabric. This work is like a Shroud of Turin -- an artifact of something inevitable.

Kentridge's drawings, which are surprisingly large, are themselves beautiful artifacts of the artist's working method which includes building up and erasing down image after image to create the animation. (image is Kentridge working)

But the drawings stand on their own, too, and, fit in beautifully with the full-bodied works of Arneson and Guston.

Stir Heart, Rinse Heart

Pipilotti Rist's new commissioned work is a video installation with themes of body played out against scenes of fussy interiors and mountain scenery. There's an eating thing going on with rist devouring an orange then taking you on a kind of fantastic voyage inside her mouth and other interior parts. (image is detail)

A hypno-music video ambiance pervades, and my favorite part was not the part trippy, part gross interiors but the scene with the artist in bright yellow dress with bright red (menstrual?) blood spot on the rear meets some young men who bow down before her. She pats their heads and moves on. The blood goddess theme was kind of interesting, especially coming from a Swiss artist whose country is known for its Red Cross (first aid and blood donations) as well as its pristine, Alpine uptightness.

I remember Rist's work at the Fabric Workshop in 1999, a sexy underwater romp. This work was harder to sit through but was in some ways more evocative.



The anteroom you enter before seeing the new work includes another Rist piece, this one a kind of stealth presence. It's a video installed in the floorboards. Tiny, no more than 2 inches square, the work, "Selfless in the Bath of Lava" (image) shows Rist as a nude blonde harpie sitting above the fires of hell haranguing the viewer in several languages. I loved this work for its Fellini-esque heroine and its surreality.

Pippi's got the goods.
permanent link  roberta 8:59 AM
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Sunday, July 18, 2004

New York final

 
I've been thinking about one of the shows I saw in New York by Karel Funk, trying to figure out what it was that interested me in the photorealist portraits of guys against white backgrounds, acrylic on panel, averaging 15" x 18".
 
Roberta and I had seen some work about a year ago of tiny, tiny little self-portraits, maybe 3" x 3" on thick panels with white backgrounds that these brought to mind (I went through my records but couldn't figure out the guy's name--if anyone knows who I'm talking about, I'll add his name to this post).  But those had an intensity and probing not relevant to Funk's images. 
   
The most obvious reason these were riveting was one of the reasons I should have rejected them--the total finickiness of the realistic illusion. Each hair looked like a delicate brushstroke, and the brushstrokes were smoothed down to give a photo finish. 

Followers of fashion
 
But the portraits were not really portraits, and that's the crux of the matter. They are fashion shoots. The hoods of the jackets, in wonderful colors, are at least as much of a subject as the faces and the hair.  At the beginning, I thought they might all be the same person, just like when you look in a catalog and you can't tell if the models are all the same person with slightly different hair styles.
 
In one portrait, the hair is all you see, the face so unimportant it's facing away. What you get instead are the swirls of the hair pattern, the slightly greasy part near the scalp, the ends blown by some fan perhaps(top).  
 
The jackets might make you think the white background is sky and these are bold men going forth into elements. But that's not what's happening here.  Instead, the jackets make me think the white background is a photo backdrop. The wind in the hair made me think fan, not nature.
 
And speaking of not nature, one of these young men had vaguely blue eyelids, his forelock flipped up to perfection with goop (above right). Whether he's metrosexual or homosexual, the point is, he's clothing sexual, the hormones all focused on his outfit, and who he is, is not part of the picture. His face is also partly hidden--of course by the jacket hood. What I am saying is that his portrait is fashion-plate handsome with some youthful idea of sexuality in denial of the body that has nothing to do with the human condition and everything to do with Ralph Lauren.
 
Hollow men
These portraits lack the personal features, emotions and accoutrements that make a portrait sing. Is there pride here of the urban burgher? Is there a sassy confidence or a rough sexuality?Is there shyness, a sense of humor, a twinkle? Nothing. All there is, is an image that sells a stylish coolness.
 
I would put this work in the same genre as Elizabeth Peyton, although the materials and approach are so different (right, Peyton's "Marc"). We're talking here about a lot of immature posturing aimed at not giving too much away.
 
Miscellaneous other artists 
 
I saw just three small pieces in a group show at Jeffrey Coploff by Kathleen Kucka that piqued my interest, their layers of undulating stripes creating topographic, biological and botanical spaces that made me want to see more (left, "Petite Black and White #1," acrylic on alumninum).
 
 
 
 
 
 


I also admired "Beast" and "Mirror My Mirror,"  a couple of embroidered silk and crystals pieces from Angelo Filomeno at Gorney Bravin + Lee.  Besides the obvious excess pattern and decoration thread, the stitchery brought to mind the mix of Goth sensibility and Asian-inspired drawing technique of Ernesto Caivano, but the wild back-story was missing ("Beast" detail right).
 
 
 
 
The hold of decoding black on black made "Beast" and "Mirror" work better than the blue and red "Vulture," (left) plus the black added a darkness that helped further the dark thoughts.
 
 
 
 


I also went to a show of Israeli art at Lehmann Maupin. Rona Yefman's photographs of young people would have fit nicely into the clown show over at Cheim & Read (see post), especially her bare-breasted "Girls with Groucho Marx Masks" hanging out in the backyard, and "Smiley," (right) a girl walking down a dark street, her head covered by a huge smiley face, in her hand a huge knife. These forlorn photos, and her portraits of "Gil with Flower" and "Sigalit on the Beach" get to the internal places that Funk's portraits try to hide.
 
 

Also part of that show was a video installation, "Lullaby," by Doron Solomons, with a rat-a-tat explosive soundtrack and a grid of repeating images of violence from the TV. The video was hard to see due to excess light in the gallery, but it still made its point. It was somewhat obvious, as is most political art, yet I couldn't stop watching. I thought I'd mention it because he showed his "I Clean Richard's House and He Cleans Mine" at the Borowsky Gallery back in December (see post). 
 

 






permanent link  libby 2:45 PM
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Romanian folk art and Coit Tower murals

 

I'm always looking for treasures for my thrift art collection so Stella and I hunted a little while we had some down time in Pacific Grove. For some reason, PG -- population 2.2 residents and 2,000 tourists -- has four thrift shops and they're all pretty good. I found the hand-painted Romanian plate (image above) at the PG Episcopal thrift shop. The plate is made of wood and dated 1979. And if Fodor's rated thrift stores, this one would be right up there.



Meanwhile in San Francisco my day of art looking down-shifted to an hour at SF MOMA and a brief encounter with Coit Tower's wonderful indoor murals -- on a sparkling day too beautiful to stay indoors.

Outdoors, by the way, the fiberglass mascots du jour -- we've seen them everywhere (dogs of the Main Line, donkeys and elephants in DC, cows in Chicago) -- have made it to the Bay city. We passed the first painted fiberglass heart without realizing what it was. When the second, identical except for the paint, came along, I knew what I was dealing with. (image is Stella with heart)

I am not a fan of these objects which add up to just more visual clutter.

Coit's lovelies

Lillie Hitchcock Coit's tower up Telegraph Hill is a memorial to San Francisco firefighters made possible by Coit's loving bequest in 1933. (image is nicely gothic but unattributed drawing from website referenced below. Needless to say, it's a little more built up around the tower nowadays.)

Coit was a kind of mascot, speaking of mascots, for Fire Company 5 which she befriended as a kid and kept on helping even after she married. Something of a character, Coit apparently had the number 5 embroidered on all her clothes.



Read more about the tower and Coit here.

The 210-ft. high tower provides spectacular views of the Bay, its bridges and Alcatraz island from right outside.

Inside, the first floor is decorated wall to wall and ceiling to floor with social-realist murals painted in 1934.

The murals depict a melange of images all focussed on workers and working class people.



There are street scenes, factory scenes, scenes inside the public library, anthemic images of workers, all done with Diego Rivera-seriousness.

26 artists and 19 helpers worked on the murals, which have a hand-drawn, fresco-like affect and an amazing, non-stop flow and integration from one scene to the next.



With all that working class uplift, I'm not sure what to make of the street scene depicting an armed robbery. I imagine robbery was a part of life back then and this was one artist's way of capturing the good as well as the bad.
permanent link  roberta 11:26 AM
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