Engineer's Daughter

passageworks

Lunch today consisted of an hour spent in SFMOMA's new Passageworks exhibition, a fantastic collection of contemporary work from the museum's collection that takes the writings of Walter Benjamin as its point of departure.  Benjamin was intensely interested in liminal spaces and wrote that people sadly had "grown very poor in threshold experiences."  That idea of crossing boundaries is introduced right at the entrance of the exhibit, when you have to literally step through Felix Gonzalez-Torres's shimmering curtain of golden beads, pictured at right, to get into the first gallery.  The visitors in front of me seemed uncertain about the idea of touching the art and elected instead to go through the show backward.  I, however, pushed on through and was immediately rewarded with the sight of Tacita Dean's powerful Beauty, a large-scale three-part photograph of a wild tree that she isolates in time by having meticulously whited out the entire background.  I was incredibly moved by what it said to me about how our memories work, what we choose to hold on to and what we choose to obliterate.  It was hard for anything else to measure up to that initial emotional impact, but I was also very happy to see one of Julie Mehretu's beautifully chaotic paintings in the "Displacements" room, as well as a cleverly subversive series of photographs by the always-fabulous Allan Sekula documenting his attempt to invade Bill Gates's mansion by sea.  Vija Celmins's Suspended Plane is a genuine highlight in a later gallery that groups pieces around the theme of reproduction, and I also loved Matt Saunders' tribute in that room to Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder in which he reproduces a scene from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  The whole show ends with Pierre Huyghe's The Third Memory in which the real-life John Wojtowicz reconstructs on film the real-life bank robbery that inspired Dog Day Afternoon, intercut with scenes from the Hollywood movie.  Huyghe plays with reality itself and, like the other artists in the exhibition, invites us to push through the curtain to the other side.

As if that wasn't enough for my brain for one day, tonight I went to go hear Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, speak at City Lights about the new book he just edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture.  The book features essays from the likes of Bruce Sterling, Brian Eno, Vijay Iyer, Jonathan Lethem, Cory Doctorow and Steve Reich, and Spooky read bits and pieces in between handing out free mix CDs (I got awesome Angolan hip-hop) and eloquently holding forth about the art of the remix.  The man is one of my musical heroes, and I especially appreciated tonight when he pointed out that DJs have been doing for decades what new-fangled programs like Pandora and iTunes' Genius have just recently been invented to do, namely trying to hook people up with music that they will like.  Spooky is also clearly a fellow voracious autodidact, jumping topics from Greek and Latin etymology to a William Gibson quote to a reference to the Portuguese influence in West Africa in a few exhilirating short breaths.  Talk about cultural sampling.

the royal alexandra children's hospital

A children's hospital in Brighton has this year beaten out buildings such as the Royal Festival Hall and the Young Vic to take Britain's Prime Minister's Better Public Building Award.  The Royal Alexandra children's hospital, known to its friends as the Alex, first opened in 1881 but used the opportunity offered by a recent move to a new space to brighten its design and take advantage of increased floor area.  The result is a building filled with light and air and where every room has a view of the sea and trundle beds for parents.  The Guardian has some lovely pictures, and also talked to hospital executive Duncan Selbie:

"Now they have the space, facilities and equipment to provide a vast range of clinical and therapeutic services in an environment skillfully designed to accommodate 21st-century healthcare."

No Brighton tack here!  Yeah and not bad for what some people in America would call a socialist health care system.

hauntings

The weather has turned crisp as it always does in the Bay Area just in time for Halloween, so it felt like the perfect atmosphere in the Mission tonight for some San Francisco ghost stories.  Aimee joined me on the couch at antique shop Gypsy Honeymoon as Instant City presented a number of local writers with spooky tales to tell, though I think only one of them involved an actual ghost.  I loved Hiya Swanhuyser's piece about a bygone area of the city that used to be a lively home to artists and radicals back in the day, right where the Transamerica Pyramid sits now.  And Kevin Hobson's poem about a woman with a rat in her handbag he encountered on the 14 Mission one recent morning was also brilliant.  Maybe I'm secretly glad most of the stories weren't that scary, as I'll actually be able to turn out the lights when I go to bed tonight.

early portraits by lucian freud

Anyone who has ever sat (or stood, or lounged) to have their portrait painted knows that it is in no way a passive experience.  Not only is it hard work to hold a pose, there are also the ways both tangible and intangible that the sitter interacts with the artist at work.  It's therefore fascinating to look at the early portraits by Lucian Freud Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert has on display in London right now, painted from 1940 to 1958 when the artist was really developing his style.  The picture of Stephen Spender at right was painted when Freud was just 17, and you can see a direct line to the work he is still creating today.  The show's curator David Dawson relates what it is like for him to see this early work, especially as a frequent model for Freud himself:

There's a real inner life of the sitter in each of these portraits. That's what I've always found fascinating about his paintings. He allows the sitter to be in the painting and to breathe, it's not a portrait about Lucian Freud. You can see it quite clearly in the early portraits and throughout his whole career. The stillness of the painting, the atmosphere it creates, the reverie … it's still there in the paintings he does today of people mulling over their own lives, which is quite often what you do when you're sitting still.

The complexity of what appears on the resulting canvas is striking, and in Freud's case the interplay between artist and subject often feels quite exposed and raw, perhaps most visibly with his female models.  You can see some highlights from the exhibition here, including a beautiful portrait of the artist's first wife (and her flyaway hair).

the revolution continues

I fondly remember my one visit back in 1996 to the original Saatchi gallery on Boundary Road in London, mostly because at the time it was filled with Stephan Balkenhol's wonderful wood sculptures.  I didn't make it to the South Bank venue in the short two years the gallery situated itself in County Hall there, but now Charles Saatchi has opened a show of contemporary Chinese art from his collection called The Revolution Continues in what is reportedly a beautiful new space in an old military barracks in Chelsea.  Mark Brown shed some light on the collector's technique for putting this inaugural show together:

Saatchi has supervised all the hanging. In a Q&A for the Sunday Times, earlier this week, he revealed how he does it. "I just go by what shapes and colours work together in a room," he said. "The poncey way some curators try to demonstrate their 'vision' by highlighting connections gives me the collywobbles."

Bay Area denizens who visited the excellent Half-Life of a Dream exhibition recently at SFMOMA will recognize some of the names featured in the London show like Yue Minjun (pictured above), Zhang Huan and Fang Lijun.  These are the artists from contemporary China who are making a big splash in the art world right now.  Adrian Searle, however, is singularly unimpressed with what he sees in Saatchi's gallery:

Too much here looks secondary, or like a tiresome kind of entertainment. There are few signs of language being stretched and one has the feeling that many works have been manufactured with a market in mind.

Perhaps some genuine curation would not have been such a bad idea after all.  Charlotte Higgins shares Searle's disappointment about the works on display, though she did get a kick out of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Old Persons Home, hyper-realistic sculptures of elderly world leaders rolling about one room of the gallery in motorized wheelchairs:

Well, that was the highlight. Too much of the work here was on one note, or had one shouty visual trick up its sleeve. As often in the company of the work of Charles Saatchi, or at least the stuff that he has collected recently, I found myself being reminded that he is an ad-man. Visual puns are his bread-and-butter. That's why he likes this kind of thing: the miniature city (badly) constructed out of dog chews; the 'history-painting' containing Mao sitting in the back row at a McCarthy hearing; lord help us, the giant turd containing miniature toy soldiers. Hectoring art with little to say.

Again, the work by many of these same artists that I saw in the SFMOMA exhibit was many things, but hectoring or one note?  No.  So I'm liable to turn my eye to the collector in this case, and it's certainly true that much of the work glimpsed in the Guardian online gallery does seem to have been selected for its shock value.  But back to the gallery itself, the one thing no one seems to have any complaints about.  Stephen Bayley lays out a little bit of the background:

Architects AHMM spent three years looking for an appropriate site and, coincidence or not, eventually found one very close to Saatchi's Eaton Square home. It is a fine historic building in a beautiful wooded and grassy setting. AHMM stripped back the innards to reveal the underlying geometry and created 15 spacious new galleries on three floors. They are boldly white, sparely finished and top-lit, designed to create a recessive background for London's reclusive modern Medici. If they are recessive it is not because of a limited budget: none has been declared, but we may be certain Charles Saatchi does not stint himself. Anyway, this sort of recession is surely the right thing because so many art gallery designs - the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao and the National Gallery extensions in London and Washington - fail because the showy architecture overwhelms the subtleties of painting.

Of course it sounds like there was no danger of this first batch of art being overwhelmed by the space in which it was being shown.  As for me, I will remain wistful for the old Boundary Road gallery, but I also can't wait to investigate this new incarnation in all its converted Georgian glory.  Just as long as Saatchi doesn't start charging admission.

continuance

Tarsila do Amaral, E.F.C.B. (Central Railway Station), 1924 (Brazil).  Growing up in southern California I had very little concept that trains could be used for, you know, travel.  It was when I lived in England and saw how cities were planned around the central station, that that the train tracks weren't just dropped somewhere on the edge of town as an afterthought, I just couldn't get over how liberating it felt to be able to walk to a train that could take me anywhere in the country.  Thus my appreciation for good public transportation (not to mention smart urban planning) was firmly cemented.  The London Tube helped a lot too, but that's a story for another day.  Tarsila do Amaral's modernist rendering here similarly places the station smack in the center of the city, walking distance from both homes and church, and she has painted the whole scene with bright, cheerful colors and a satisfying attention to geometry.  If you're unfamiliar with her work and would like to see more I recommend selecting a title at random from the drop-down menus here.

warhol's polaroids

My love of the Polaroid as an art form is well-documented, and Andy Warhol's Polaroids of celebrities and society types that he started taking in the early '70s to be used as the basis for his silkscreened portraits are pretty darn fabulous.  A number of them are currently on display at the Hayward Gallery in London as part of their Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms exhibition, which also includes films, videos and screen-tests.  Fame was of course ever-present in Warhol's work, but Jonathan Jones says the artist's views on the subject are often misinterpreted:

The fact that Warhol liked famous people does not mean - as is usually assumed - that he worshipped celebrity for its own sake. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he gives celebrities this advice: you shouldn't value your fame in itself; you should "always have a product that's not just 'you'". An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, "you always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". This is the opposite of the famous-for-being-famous ethic he often gets the blame for.

Boy oh boy can I think of some present-day individuals who should take Warhol's words to heart too.  Meanwhile it's fun to look back at the images he captured of Evelyn Kuhn (pictured above), Sean Lennon and my personal favorite Joseph Beuys.  You can see those and a few more in the gallery here.

show 101

playlist

I'm so immensely grateful to everyone who let me know they were listening today.  We raised $1200 in three hours, which is just plain awesome.  I have one more fundraiser shift next Sunday, and then I will creep away and die of exhaustion.

sleeping giants

The highly-anticipated Richard Serra show Sculpture is currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery's King's Cross space in London, and I've been actively imagining what it must be like to walk through the artist's vast steel structures as they inhabit those rooms.  Sean O'Hagan talked to Serra about TTI London, pictured right, that is set up in the main gallery:

'Those two pieces are collecting the space in certain ways,' Serra tells me when we meet at the gallery. One suspects he could talk all day about the abstract geometry of spheres, reversed curves and torqued ellipses. 'In one, you sense the volume moving out like a giant flowerpot, or moving in like a giant lampshade. It's all about centralising the space in different ways. How people move in relation to space, that's essentially what I'm up to.'

Me, I'm still trying to figure out how they got everything into the gallery.  You can see more pictures of the sculptures in the show here.

the state i am in

Super-special KALX fundraiser DJ shift tomorrow!
3 - 6pm PST, Sunday, October 25
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
Sidja will be joining me on air as I politely ask for your spare change and play as much awesome music as I possibly can.  I'm so jazzed I'm putting this right at the top of my post instead of burying it at the bottom like I usually do.  If you miss this installment there's always next Sunday, but I recommend pledging early and pledging often.  Now back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

In anticipation of my energy levels plummeting come winter-time, I headed out into the gorgeous weather today to soak up much sunshine.  Eventually I found myself sitting in Dolores Park with a cone of salted caramel ice cream from Bi-Rite in hand, watching hipsters improvise a slip-n-slide on the grassy hill with a hose, feeling absolutely and perfectly content.  While I was there I poked around ART RESPONSE!'s Silent Painting Protest, taking great care to avoid the orbit of the shirtless fellow with a "Free Love" sign taped to his waist.  Overall I couldn't detect much difference from a typical Saturday afternoon in the park, just with some added prayer flags thrown in for artsy measure.

From the Mission I took the bus over the hill to the Haight for Christian Lander's reading at the Booksmith.  If by some slim chance you're not already familiar with his blog Stuff White People Like, go there immediately.  In honor of tonight's appearance Lander read six entries that he felt particularly applied to San Francisco, including #82 (Hating Corporations) and #88 (Having Gay Friends) and of course #91 (San Francisco).  Though Lander insists the success of his blog since it launched in January and his subsequent book deal was mostly just dumb luck, its popularity in a year where discussions of race in the media have at times been less than direct is telling.  I mean, Barack Obama is #8 on the list.  Lander is incredibly insightful in his observations, and I love that he can simultaneously make me laugh and cringe at myself.  Like on the BART ride home when I pulled out my Lonely Planet guide to Bangkok for my upcoming trip and suddenly thought, "#19: Traveling."  There's certainly nothing wrong with having passions, it's just when white people think that as individuals they're so darn unique in said passions that they leave themselves wide open for ridicule.  At least coming from Lander it's wrapped in humor.

That said, let me recommend another something I like a lot: the Fruitvale Dia de los Muertos Festival, which is taking place all day tomorrow right next to the Fruitvale BART stop.  The altars there are guaranteed beautiful and the sugar skulls plentiful.  I can't deal with the costume-making that goes along with American Halloween, but the emphasis during Dia de los Muertos on the remembrance of departed loved ones and the acknowledgement that death is always close by is much more my style.  Especially as I try not to notice the days keep getting shorter.