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.