Category: Art

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The Stuff That Dreams are Made of & Cute Puppy Paintings

This weekend Big Chris, Nemr, Dean and I went downtown to the Old Mint for an exhibition of miscellanea related to the subject of San Francisco in film. The show is called “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of,” after Humphrey Bogart’s description of the Maltese Falcon. There are several installations, including a reproduction of said falcon, encased in a plexiglass vitrine. Another room contains a reproduction of the great portrait of Carlotta Valedez that once hung in the Legion of Honor of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In front of the portrait is the bench that Madeline sat on during her daily visits to contemplate the portrait, her bouquet resting on the bench, as if she had just left.

And speaking of Madeline, Kim Novak’s paintings are also on display, luridly colorful pastels of cute little animals, dreamy verdant forest- and river-scapes rendered in a soft almost psychedelic palette. In one room, there are portraits of various celebutante visitors to the SF Film Festival, where you could also get your picture taken next to a wax effigy of Clint Eastwood on the Red Carpet. The show delves into the early years of silent film in the city, where Charlie Chaplin actually got his start, but film noir clearly dominates the show. One could look out the window and imagine Nick and Nora pulled tipsily down 5th Street by Asta.

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Dean & Emily Shows

Dean Smith and Emily Wilson are two of my closest friends, and two of my favorite artists. They have concurrent shows on view now, across the street from each other, on Geary. Dean spends months making these meticulously hand drawn markings and squiggles on paper that eventually become something visually transcendent, topographies and landscapes beyond reference to anything specific. The expressive quality of his work is defined by an almost mechanical interaction with surface.

Dean’s show at Gallery Paule Anglim consists of three pieces, titled “three manifestations of anaglyphic space.” I know… but that’s Dean, be serious, he always has titles like this, he always makes us work. Each piece is reproduced from an original drawing that has been manipulated digitally to produce a three dimensional image when viewed with 3-D glasses, on hand in the gallery. One piece acts almost like a mirror, another zooms out in a rounded mound towards you, like a giant coconut but with a big “t” cut into it. You see fantastic geometric and biomorphic forms that seem convincingly of some other dimension, a dimension not only of sight, but of imagination… and at times even orifices.

Just seeing this work exhausted and disoriented me. All great work should make you sick like that. But get this, after Dean’s show, Big Chrissy and I made our way across the street to see the Adam Fuss show at Fraenkel, photograms made from animal intestines. And then a giant daguerreotype close-up of female gentle-talia! Ahhhh! Enough with the viscera! Get me to Emily’s soothing randomness!

So Emily’s markings are as expressive and seemingly random as Dean’s are calculated. She also creates abstractions, but with big sloppy dripping gestures. She finds inspiration in the cinematic expressions of Antonioni and Nicholas Roeg, and I think most apparently Godard, creating wordless narratives of emotional punch. But these guys rarely crack a smile, and Emily’s obviously having fun, with color, form, paper and canvas. Visiting her studio, you experience this work as it should be viewed, stapled to the wall or crumpled on the floor, stepped on, smushed, glued to the ceiling. Thankfully, Sweetow has resisted trying to contain this work in frames. Like following Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau around Milan in La Notte as their marriage crumbles, the viewer of her work stumbles through a sort of tapestry of graphic encounters, culminating in that final confrontation when Moreau reads Mastroianni the tender love letter he wrote to her before they got married. “Who wrote that?” he asks, not remembering. With Emily, though, we don’t forget who wrote it, or the sincerity behind the expression.

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The Dating Game: Herb Ritts & The Cult of Celebrity

On Sunday, Señor Grant took me to the Getty to lunch with his cute girl buddies, Liza and Kim. They’re sisters, almost identical, smartly dressed with glowing white teeth. They finish each other’s sentences, refer to each other as “my sister” and are just a delight to observe. We walked through the Herb Ritts show, which left me with nothing. Unless you call emptiness something. He was a great technician, or the people who printed his pictures were, who masterfully appropriated the visions of countless other photographers—Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Edward Weston—to create beautiful images of beautiful people that are completely without depth, all about surface. But oh those surfaces. Black skin in particular is rendered as a sumptuous textile.

Luckily, there was another teeny little show nearby, Portraits of Renown, consisting of celebrity portraits from nearly the dawn of photography to contemporary times. Each portrait conveyed an essence of the individual, the spark responsible for their fame. A portrait of John Barrymore as Hamlet by Edward Steichen had Barrymore in profile, slightly blurred, but his body sharp and in focus, the fiery energy in his head not to be contained. Lewis Morley’s iconic portrait of Profumo Affair strumpet Christine Keeler was shot in 1963—but printed around the time that the film Scandal was released—a publicity shot for a proposed film project, of her naked, confident, straddling a chair, her nudity hidden by her arms and the back of the chair. The show lusciously demonstrates how the photographic image has shaped our perception and experience of celebrity.

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The Look of Love

The Look of Love currently at the Birmingham Museum of Art is an utterly charming exhibition of exquisite and daintily hand-painted “lovers’ eyes,” miniatures of human eyes set in jewelry and given as tokens of affection or remembrance. The tradition dates back to the end of the 18th century, when the Prince of Wales sent his reluctant lover a miniature portrait of his eye, along with a proposal of marriage. His act inspired other aristocratic types to exchange their own eye portraits.

One piece has an inscription on it, il ne voit et ne verra que toi: it (my eye) sees and will see only you.

Only about 1,000 of these portraits are know to exist. This collection of some 100 objects was pieced together by Dr. and Mrs. David A. Skier of Birmingham, and is the largest collection of its type in the world. If you need only one excuse to visit the Magic City this spring, this is it.

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A Goodwill Bargain: $6.99 Each

This morning, I received an email from someone who purchased one of my photographs at the Goodwill store on South Van Ness. She wanted to let me know that there were three more, in case I wanted to buy them.

Flash back to 1997. After seeing my solo show The Night of the Hunter, my first body of work based on the theme of the voluptuous bear body, a big downtown gallery dealer offered me a solo show. She took four pieces from the Hunter show, after it came down, to have in the gallery’s back room prior to my solo show with her, and promptly sold them the next day. My first big sale. And to an important photo collector in Marin! I thought I was finally on the way.

Fast forward a decade. Perusing the personal ads on Bear411, I came across some scantily clad fellow in clumsy contrapposto with the same four photos in the background!

“They were from my first show, my passion for the hirsute rendered as both a quest for beauty and a place to live: I the artist/hunter, and the hairy bear my subject/trophy!” I frantically messaged to the bear, exclamation points and all.

How they got from Big Photo Collector in Marin to Scantily Clad Bear Guy in San Francisco is anybody’s guess. He didn’t seem interested in conversing about the aesthetic context of his pictures, so I said bye-bye and that was that.

Until this morning’s email. Those same photos had somehow made their way to Goodwill. I thought about leaving them there, hoping that someone would buy them because they actually liked them, like the sender of the email, but I was suddenly seized by a fear that they wouldn’t sell at Goodwill, or worse, someone would buy them for the frames and trash my photos. Maybe I could at least give them away. I also happened to be working in the neighborhood and couldn’t resist. $6.99 each. With tax, $20.97.

Just last week I decided to move away from work engaged with beauty to art culled from real life, photos about our time, my time, my experience. How completely wonderful to have those images come back to me at this time, at the end of this cycle that began with them. We’ll see where they end up next.

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But I am Napoléon!

I spent my entire Sunday on my little butt in the glorious Paramount Theater in Oakland, watching the 6-1/2 hour Napoléon, by Abel Gance. Made in 1927, it’s a grand silent epic about Napoléon’s early years, from but a wee snowball-hurling laddy, to his triumphant campaign in Italy. The first two hours and the last hour were the most thrilling moments that I’ve ever spent in a theater. Gance employs hand-held camera shots, enormous close-ups, point-of-view shots, an underwater sequence, superimposition, split screen, double exposures, film tints, mosaic shots, lightning fast cutting… The middle three hours or so tested my theater knee, but with just enough moments of dazzling brilliance and ibuprofen to get me through. And Artaud plays Marat, his death staged after the David painting!

The first sequence opens with Napoléon as a child, a very serious child, playing in the snow with his school chums. They’re engaged in a very serious snow ball fight, Napoléon and his little friends outnumbered 10 to 40 by the rival hurlers. It’s one of the great battle scenes on film. The camera is constantly moving—you’re in the middle of the snowball battle!—kids frantically flailing about, snowballs and kids crashing into the camera, but the camera settling down only on Little Napoléon’s steadfast seriousness, his visage filling the frame. The cutting is frantic, rapid, at times images flooding past too quickly to grasp, just emotion-inducing impressions.

There’s one scene around the middle of the film, when Napoléon’s a little older. He’s on his home turf, Corsica, the French Revolution is going on, chaos. He’s in a tavern, and all of the various factions seeking control of Corsica are getting all activated, “Corsica belongs to the British! Death to Napoléon!” “Corsica belongs to Italy! Death to Napoléon!” and on and on. Napoléon stares them down, “Our fatherland is France! …with me!” The camera goes back and forth from Napoléon’s big face, illuminated gorgeously from behind by the setting sun, to the yelling factions, shielding their eyes, blinded and seduced by him.

There are so many many scenes like this, some calm, framed almost like tableaux, others visceral, the camera probing and roving. For the final hour-long sequence, presented in “Polyvision,” curtains on either side of the screen slide back, revealing two more screens, tripling the size of the viewing plane. He uses this space in probably as many ways as you could imagine, ways that were not utilized until Cinemascope in the 50s and only recently in artists’ video installations. There are scenes where the images on all three screens come together in a nearly seamless panorama, the foreground and background utilized dynamically, with horses and soldiers traversing diagonally across the screens. Other sequences are presented with a single image of Napoléon in the center, his advancing troops marching towards the camera on the adjacent screens. Sometimes the flanking images are flipped, sometimes there are three different sequences playing at once, one close up, the other a landscape, yet another an eagle, a zealous admirer. It builds and builds, the cutting getting faster and faster, until in the final few moments the left screen is tinted blue, the center white, the right, red, as in the French flag, with an explosion of such amazingly beautiful imagery that flies past, eventually settling on Napoléon’s face, so heroic and magnificent. The images flood past so quickly, the effect is like an enormous waving flag. I started crying, I was so overwhelmed by the emotional and visual weight. And this was supposed to have been the first of six films! Even I can’t imagine that much stimulation.

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A Show Like Alice

Alice Shaw has a sly sense of humor and it permeates every one of the photo-based objects in her solo show currently on view at Gallery 16. A “spray-paint-o-graph” looks like an early experiment from the dawn of Photography, those barely-discernable fern fronds we had to sit through in Art School, but hers is exactly what it’s called, leaves laid on paper, the paper spray painted, the shadowy outlines of the leaves left behind, instantly recognizable as being from both another time and our own. Her show is the wittiest, most delightful exploration of the many modes of photographic expression in town. And it’s all about death: of photography, of the environment, of the object. A must-see!

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Avant-Garde, Then and Now

Weary of being out in the rain, Big Chrissy and I stopped into the de Young to see the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit. The de Young has comfortably settled into its funhouse policy, and pulled no stops in making this show a sure crowd-pleaser. Upon entering, you hear Gaultier’s booming voice, and then see his chattering face projected on the head of a life-sized mannequin. It’s a magical motif, used throughout the show, with different mannequins blabbering away, some just blinking. His cone bras are given a special little sort of padded fetishy glassed-in cell, in the center of one gallery. They’re actually stunning, as with all of the designs in the show, exquisitely tailored and exquisitely perverse. Since his designs no longer shock, one is able to fully appreciate the doors he opened with his gender-bending styles, embrace of immigrants and multiculturalism, and his obvious enjoyment of the full spectrum of human experience and interaction.

Still raining, we made our way to the Legion to see the Victorian Avant-Garde show. The show presents a wide range of handsomely fabricated objects from the British Aesthetic movement, covering the movement’s influence on painting, architecture, fashion and design. Velvet knee breeches, Christopher Dresser teapots, Whistler’s Nocturnes, William Morris wallpaper, and all those wispy red-haired beauties…

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Christmas in March

Señor Grant came up from LA for the weekend, the whole weekend. It was like Christmas, my handsome package delivered via Virgin Airlines Friday night. We saw Beach Blanket Babylon at Club Fugazzi, Double Indemnity and La Casa de mi Padre, the Rineke Dijkstra retrospective and Mexican photography show at SFMoMA, and soaked in the baths at the Kabuki Hot Springs.

I enjoyed Beach Blanket Babylon a bit less this time around, feeling like only one number connected with current pop culture, or, rather, the not-too-distant pop culture of my own youth, but that number was a doozy, with Snow White stripping off her familiar outfit to reveal a Madonna cone bra ensemble, then flying out over the audience as she sang about “surviving gravity,” perfectly over the top. The show outside was just as entertaining, with heterosexuals everywhere, dressed in green, gurgling green beer and stumbling into the street, tottering drunk girls sent home in taxis by boys who wanted to continue partying, one couple drunkenly breaking up on the sidewalk…

The Rineke Dijkstra retrospective is pretty fabulous. Her photographs present people formally almost always in the center of the frame, looking directly at the viewer. The references to place are minimal—a beach, a room. The subjects aren’t engaged, they’re observed, revealed. There are also videos on view, of club kids dancing for the camera, single static shots that last so long that the initial awkwardness of the dance movements gives way to something revelatory and intimate about each subject. Another multi-channel video piece focuses on kids who are shown responding to one of Picasso’s weeping women. They discuss what the painting could mean, in raw, unguided engagement with the work. Their speculations about why she’s sad range from the, well, childlike, to incredibly insightful.

I remember before I moved to San Francisco, seeing some hysterical documentary about earthquakes and plate tectonics, about how Los Angeles and San Francisco are slowly moving towards each other. I wish it would hurry up. I really like this guy.

Christmas is over, back to work. Thank you, Santa.

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Bearden, Cage, Dali and My Farmer Tan

Yesterday I visited a show of Romare Bearden collages at the Tampa Art Museum, Southern Recollections. The exhibition examines how the South served as a source of inspiration for Bearden, years after leaving it, both celebrating and eulogizing a lost way of life. The imagery is nostalgic, full of archetypal depictions of African American life with many symbolic and ritual allusions. Much of the work focuses visually on the time of day before and after work, chillaxin, or on women’s work, wash days, bathing. Formally, they pulse with color, but visually flat, and where there’s no color, there’s a jazzy monochromatic harmony, leaning towards abstraction. The works are displayed in a looney almost haphazard fashion, loosely chronologically, but really, I couldn’t figure out the logic behind the arrangements, other than trying to visually approximate Bearden’s own use of collage.

Also on view was a John Cage piece, 33-1/3, from 1969, performed by my sister Carol and me. There are about a dozen record players arranged in a circle in the center of a large gallery. Carol and I selected several records to play simultaneously, and at different volumes: an acoustic album of various Nelson Riddle arrangements; Devo’s Are We Not Men?; Peggy Lee singing with Benny Goodman; Led Zeppelin; a John Cage album from the early 60s; some instrumental hip hop thingy; I can’t remember what else, but our cacophonous creation served as acoustic backdrop for the rest of our museum tour. And everyone else’s.

On to the new Dali Museum, where the crowds were dense like in San Francisco, only in flip-flops and sunscreen. I really love Dali’s early surrealist paintings, and stepping into his simultaneous id, ego and super-ego orchestrations. There’s all the sexual queasiness and anxiety of youth, so beautifully and meticulously painted, with such visual invention.

Today I’m off to the beach to bob around in the Gulf and even out this farmer tan.