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the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts‘ “close to SF MOMA” location means that I end up seeing a lot of their shows, which almost always strike me as lazily curated, and sometimes curiously installed, but somehow contain compelling elements. Last time I was there, they had a R. Crumb show on display, and a William Pope L. Black Factory installation in the “big room” (perhaps some of the YBCA’s curatorial/installation troubles come from the difficulties of the room?). An odd combination, and the highlight of the visit, beyond seeing the Crumb show, was watching a beyond tired, middle aged woman sleep on a couch in the big, dark room. I have a number of “favourite gallery experiences” that revolve around sleeping visitors…

Although I really, really enjoyed seeing Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s Listening Post again, my visit revolved around a long, giggly reading of Trevor Paglen’s Code Names: Classified Military Programs Active Between 2001 and 2007 vinyl wall piece, a comprehensive (to his knowledge) list of “words, phrases and terms that designate active military programs whose existence or purpose is classified.” Michele and I read through the list, again and again, unable to penetrate the meaning of this volume of seemingly random terms. There’s a sort of pseudo-randomness to them, though, as if you only knew what the term “Cobra” meant, then you could know something about the various “Cobra ____” programs. Do they have something in common, or is cobra just a cool sounding word. What is the difference between “Busy Lobster” and “Busy Mudbug?” Then of course there are familiar terms like “Brilliant Pebbles” - is that still out there?

Some of them are downright silly - a whole series of them seem like fabricated junkets for trough dipping CIA agents, with imagination fueling names like “Six Pack”, “Senior Year”, “On Tap” and my favourite “Pirate Sword.” Do you suppose that the guys working on “Athena”, “Praetorian Guard” or “Silent Hammer” look down their noses at the tropical shirt playboys working hard on operation “Senior Year?” Or does “Senior Year” obfuscate one of the darkest corners of America’s secret activities, a 21st Century Room 101 in an former Soviet client state that now courts our affections by letting us play dirty in their backyard?

The best term on the list is the most thought provoking, perhaps due to it’s sublime and intimidating vagueness. “Thing Finder.” What could be more meaningless than that. It’s very simplicity, and the seeming laziness of the name almost invites suspicion. What things are they finding? Lost keys? Your phone records? Misplaced Stinger Missiles? To quote that Tootsie Pop licking owl “The World May Never Know.”

Felix Schramm at SFMOMA

Before I begin - did you know that SFMOMA is currently running two simultaneous Matisse shows? What’s going on there? I’m still visiting to see the changing exhibitions in their photography galleries, which are often the highlight of my visit - I don’t think I really cared about photography until the past year, and the excellent shows at SFMOMA have a lot to do with it.

Collider is really only a single piece of a show containing one other sculptural work, and a series of collages based on images of Schramm’s installations (gotta have something that the dealer can move, I guess), the show is really all about Collider. The piece consists of a large “multi-axis” of drywall walls, inserted about and through the a pair of galleries on the 4th floor. Looking at it with the eye of someone who muds walls for a living, it’s engaging, fun and a success. I’m sure it’s supposed to ask questions about “penetrating the institution”, but it almost comes across more as a special effect, like a movie set following a controlled explosion or car crash.

You can walk under and inside the piece, although any tension of being under the piece was mitigated for me by the sure knowledge that the museum had made a very calculated and professional liability assessment regarding any potential for collapse or accident. The docents were very helpful - urging people to get up close with it - someone made sure they understood that the piece’s ultimate fate is the dumpster, and that there’s no need to chase after exploring visitors. It fits well in it’s confined space, almost like a watermelon growing in a box, it is somehow cozy, despite the pressure it exerts on the walls that it rests against and penetrates through.

Afterthought - SFMOMA has a great gift shop (if you’re into the existence of gift shops, that is).  Totally accessible from the street, it’s completely ignorable for museum patrons and it’s always packed full of people.  I’m sure they’re making a ton of money on it - without the need to feed patrons through a series of internal cash sieves to extract their precious, precious dollars. I even bought one of those pretentious Moleskine notebooks there, since I’m always stuck in a museum, thinking up brilliant stuff, and have nothing to write it down on.  If, due to my new purchase, I start thinking I’m writing the great American novel or get all Hemmingway (running around with a shotgun in my mouth, mumbling about Cuba and fishing, or something), let me know or slap me or something.

Technorati Tags: art, SFMOMA, YBCA, San Francisco, Felix Schramm, Trevor Paglen, installation art

I’m in San Francisco, hanging out with my robotic pal, Astro Boy, at the Tezuka show at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.  The show was cool, especially the covers and colour work from his more adult titles.  Also, the medical, gore-tastic images from Black Jack, a “rogue surgeon” oriented Manga are beyond cool.  I’m going to have to start reading more of his stuff.

The big surprise at the museum was how comprehensive the neigboring Yoshitoshi show was.  I could probably visit that show a dozen times.  The labels were extremely well made, giving all kinds of background on the narrative, the characters, the time in his life when Yoshitoshi made the illustration, etc… Someone really did their job, and I saw viewers just sucked into the labels, as well as the pieces.  Not to mention the planning of having both the Tezuka and the Yoshitoshi shows in view at the same time - that’s smart curatorial planning.  Seeing some of the pieces in the same room, where Yoshitoshi re-visited the same story or scene at a later point in his life, was amazing.

Although Hokusai with his great big wave is the more subtle of the Japanese master printmakers, Yoshitoshi’s work, when viewed up close is packed with detail and motion.  I would have killed to have been able to take pictures of the prints, but these pieces are truly sensitive to light and I’ll have to settle for catalogs of his images instead.  I’m going back to buy the $100 catalog at the museum tomorrow, since I discovered that the cheapest I could find it on the internet is almost twice that price.  So museum gift shops do have a purpose and a place - the shop at the AAMSF somehow manages to be large, prominently placed, and at the same time, completely ignorable and out of the way.  It’s just one of the reasons I keep coming back.

Technorati Tags: Yoshitoshi, AAMSF, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Tezuka, Manga, Yoshitoshi, art, museum, Astro Boy

I made a visit to the De Young last night to check out the Hiroshi Sugimoto show (which is awesome!), and I’d love to have the chance to harp again on how badly laid out (from a viewer’s perspective, anyways) the De Young is.  Both of their “internal gift shops” that serve their special exhibitions are positioned in such a way that one is dumped into them “at the end of the ride.”  As someone who’s not just looking at the art, but looking at the museum as well, it’s crass and off-putting, especially following an experience like the Hiroshi Sugimoto show, where you’ve just had your nervous system taken down a notch through the real experience of sublime works.

I know I’ve harped about this before, but Thursday’s thought session about the Murakami gift shop extravaganza has got my radar attuned to gift shop issues.  What I’m seeing at the De Young is a sort of worst case scenario, especially in their basement galleries where their blockbusters reside.  There are three gift shops at the De Young, and I think their main one is two stories (I could be wrong on this).  Why in a museum so badly in need of floor space, does the merchandising have so much of it?  Are they that desperate for cash?

The end of the Sugimoto exhibition is abrupt, at the end of the darkened, intimate space, after being exposed to works that are simultaneously powerful and quiet, one enters a low ceilinged, badly lit stub of a hallway, and then makes a sharp right hand turn into a lackluster collection of objects and texts.  After so much money and attention was paid to the exhibition, so much of the gallery transformed to suit the needs of the work, why then the abrupt stop?  Why not continue the lighting and just integrate the gift shop?  Why is there no real close to the show, just an ending?  It’s almost like the gift shop removes any sense of exit from the show and is intended to slap the viewer awake while shouting “Buy This!”

A Dead Woman’s Walk-In Closet

The Nan Kemper: American Chic show at the De Young is possibly one of the strangest things I’ve come across in a museum.  First I’m thinking “why her?  why now?  why is this what the museum chooses to support?”, but then I start to get a little unnerved by the semi-morbidity of what seems like the Sotheby’s preview for an estate sale.  Then that feeling is followed by a sense that the exhibition is out of place and time, a focus on glamour and excess while the country is simultaneously in an economic doldrum and fighting a vaguely defined, potentially endless war.

But that’s just first impressions.  But then there’s the good side.  Although I’m not interested in the objects, mainly because I’m not a particular fan of the kind of clothing on display, it’s not aggressive enough, not really a strong reflection of the times (although there is a really excellent collection of Yves St. Laurent women’s suits that really captures the relationship between modernist movements in fashion and architecture), I am always a big proponent for museums exhibiting “objects of use.”  My interests are divided between a desire to see history through objects and a passion for aesthetics, and I think a teapot can be as valuable any “fine art” object.

So there is an opportunity here, but it’s not well articulated by the wall text or by the layout of the exhibition.  This estate sale, has (or had) the potential to be a real window into a societal class that 99% of the museum’s visitors will likely never really have any significant interaction with.  Although it seems to unapologetically celebrate that class division, presenting Kemper’s lifestyle as a natural and normal thing, the viewer is still able to walk through, and palpably feel the economic and mental difference between ourselves and this strange woman.  In addition, there’s a certain blessing of having almost total awareness of the user and producer of the objects on display, a contextual advantage that isn’t very often available to a curator arranging a craft oriented show, but that information is never really brought to bear on the focus of the exhibition, it just hangs there limply, as unused potential.

18th Century Photography

Just outside the special exhibition gallery where the Nan Kemper closet currently resides, in the hallway, where once again, I’m reminded of how badly designed the entire interior of the De Young is, is a really excellent collection of 18th Century photography from the museum’s expanding permanent collection.  While there’s a case full of brutally well kept tintypes and daguerrotypes on display, the real attraction is a series of photographs taken in mid-century across the globe, at familiar sights.  All of these sites and subjects, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, a temple in India, the Parthenon in Athens, are somehow barren and alone, far different from their contemporary existence.  I was taken by surprise that there were images of these things.  I’d kill to see an exhibition focusing on even one of these traveling Europeans that brought back the first real images of things only known through the interpretations of painters and writers.  There’s potential here, run with it!

Why this is in a hallway is beyond me, and why the De Young continues to give the shaft to their excellent photography collection is also beyond me.  Works like these, although less sensational than the closet of a recently deceased fashionista, are what museums are built to house and display.  The potential for learning and perspective in these images, as well as the appreciation of craft and the aesthetics of the images is massive, and it’s confined to a series of nooks off of a hallways, where it’s really difficult to get a look at them.  I’m not sure if this problem stems from the initial failure to design and build the new De Young, or if it’s a failure of the curatorial and managerial staff of the museum to realise the potential of their collection, but it is a failure.  The special exhibition gallery that’s currently doubling as an expansive closet could have made an exceptional home for the museum’s photography exhibitions, either on a permanent or on a rotating basis.

Technorati Tags: merchandising, photography, FAMSF, De Young Museum, De Young, fashion, Nan Kemper, museum, art museum

Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes is decrying the potential (I’m saying potential, because MOCA has given a vague denial about the rumor) of there being both a Marc Jacobs and a Louis Vuitton store attached to the upcoming Takashi Murakami retrospective .

But I’m cool with the prospect of having the exhibition mega-merchandised.  While I’m routinely disgusted by the crass merchandising that’s invading the museum (De Young, Quilts of Gee’s Bend, I’m looking at you), I think that there should be some kind of “pop art exception.”  Murakami has always been heavily merchandised, I routinely see Angelenos wandering about, wearing their now six year old faux-mickey DOB T-shirts.  The Superflat show lit a fire, linking fine art to consumer products, that still hasn’t been put out.  One of the defining features of the exhibition at the Pacific Design Center was the gift shop - everyone walked out of the exhibition owning something new, slightly foreign and kawaii.  To some degree, a large part of the Los Angeles art scene now orbits the tiny vinyl tchockes of what, for whatever it means, has become a legitimate “art movement.”

Murakami’s work has always had one foot in the world of luxury goods and one in the museum.  A 20,000 square foot retrospective where his Louis Vuitton designs weren’t featured would be a poor one, the lack of his commercial work would be a blind spot - and in my opinion an sad attempt to differentiate between the “classes” of “fine art” and “commercial design.”  Frankly, having a store in the museum would be the best and most honest way to present this part of his career and work.  Seeing commercial products, brand new, as if pulled out of the shrink-wrap a moment before has always been a slightly surreal sight in a museum or gallery.  It’s almost like time travel - seeing things as they once were, but devoid of the passage of time, and almost completely outside of context, surrounded by equally puzzling objects.  But you could plop a Louis Vuitton store in the center of the Geffen Contemporary, stock it with Murakami merchandise, have staff, price tags, a register, the works, and it would seem perfectly in context and appropriate to me.

I realise that this is a slippery slope, that there’s the potential for a wide-eyed and cash poor MOCA to have (economic) success with this, and for their exhibition program to be drawn permanently into that orbit, and that would be bad.  I don’t want to imagine a meeting where a group of MOCA decision makers say “We’ve got to have a Shepard Fairey retrospective, because it would have a cool store,” or “name an artist who’s got great T-shirts.”  That’s not the kind of decision making that we need in the museum.  While I’m inclined to see a Murakami retrospective as being “a bit early” and an opportunistic attempt to capitalize on one of MOCA’s real tangible successes in this decade, not having been a fly on the wall when these decisions were made forces me to withhold judgment.  The more I think about it, it might be one of the smarter curatorial decisions to come out of MOCA in a while.