Last night was an aesthetic joyride with Philip. It all began at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with a show of photos and large projected videos by Oliver Boberg. Boberg seems to document banal and empty spaces, but rather than recording real life, he painstakingly crafts his scenes as scale models. There’s no visual cue. Not only are they absolutely convincing, they’re mesmerizing evocations of place and stillness. In the large gallery, there are four enormous screens, arranged in such a way that you only experience one projected film at a time. Each film is of a desolate space at night: one of snow falling on a bridge; another of a warehouse; a street scene in the rain; and a dreamy hazy forest. And isn’t he cute in that Euro-artist kind of way?
 |
 |
After the elegant installation by Robert Kusmirowski, The Museum of the Last Artwork, we made our way upstairs to David Cannon Dashiell’s epic mural, Queer Mysteries. Now you baby gays need to go see this show. I followed David’s work in the late 80’s, up to the first showing of the mural at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993, just a few weeks before he died. It’s a comic tour-de-force queer sci-fi rendering of the murals at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii.
This was a perfect segue to the films of George and Mike Cuchar. George was there and talked a bit before and after. He’s the most entertaining artist around, with a shrill Bronx accent, hunched shoulders, and the affect of a stand-up comic. And one of underground cinema’s masters. His films are homemade mini-melodramas, lurid and comic, and just short enough to keep your attention.