Enrique Chagoya and the Mexicans

Two large traveling exhibits at the Palm Springs Art Museum were a fascinating contrast, with scores of Keith Haring drawings, paintings and prints on one side of the ground floor, and a show devoted to the work of the Mexican artist and Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya on the other.



Haring's work isn't aging very well and its stabs at political importance seem ridiculous, especially in contrast with Chagoya's wild mixture of pre-Columbian art, Mickey Mouse iconography, and Republican gargoyles from Reagan to Bush put into an expressionist blender.



He's my new favorite artist that I'd never heard of before, even though "Borderlandia" was displayed in Berkeley in the Spring of 2008. (The diorama above isn't by Chagoya but shares many of the same concerns.)



The Palm Springs Art Museum, which used to be filled with lots of dark nooks and crannies, has been opened up over the last year to open space and natural light and the changes look great.



There is a "Western Art" gallery on the ground floor with the gringo take on the American Southwest...



...and a gallery upstairs dedicated to the Latin American view of the same region.



It's particularly amusing to watch pre-columbian statues looking across the aisle...



...at a wall of Rufino Tamayo paintings...



...and modernist prints from Guatemala City.

Enrique Chagoya 1: Electric Works

A beautiful, high-end print shop called Electric Works opened on Eighth Street between Mission and Howard a couple of years ago, and along with digital photography and printmaking, the huge space features an art gallery (click here for their website).



Last Thursday evening they hosted the opening of a new show by local artist Enrique Chagoya, and it was one of the most enjoyable art openings I have ever attended.



Earlier this year, writing about an exhibit by Chagoya called "Borderlandia" at the Palm Springs Art Museum (click here), I wrote: "He's my new favorite artist that I'd never heard of before."



This exhibit, which will be at Electric Works for the next two months, confirmed my belief that Chagoya is one of the greatest artists in the world right now, working in a huge variety of mediums from painting to prints to fold-out books.



The artist, who lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford, was in attendance at the opening (above) and he was a funny, genial host.



His work is an unstable mash-up of Catholic iconography, pop cultural references, and pre-Columbian Mexican art...



...that magically comes together in beautiful ways.



He also displays a wicked sense of humor...



...taking on art world figures and Andy Warhol in one fell swoop...



...with Cannibull's "Museum Director's Tripe" and "Critic's Tongue" soup.

Enrique Chagoya 2: Super-Bato Saves The World

The show is called "Super-Bato Saves The World" and the opening party was fun...



...with free Tecate beers being served by gorgeous young women...



...T-shirts for sale...



...and a glamor quotient among the guests that almost made me feel like I was in Manhattan.



In truth, if Chagoya were operating out of New York City, the center of cultural commerce and distribution, his work would probably be selling for five and six figures rather than the three to five figures at Electric Works, though I got the feeling that the artist didn't really care.



The piece de resistance of the exhibit is a trio of fully functioning slot machines.



The apocalyptic theme of the slots is the Mayan calendar year of 2012 when the world as we know it is supposed to end.



Chagoya designed coins for use in the machines with "2012" stamped on them along with the motto: "Life is a dream, then you wake up."



Like any casino slot machine, people were soon addicted, trying to get three lines of "SAVED" lined up rather than "BARS."



At the end of the party, I asked Chagoya if he really believed the world was going to end in 2012.



"No, I'm not one of the believers. I have a niece in Mexico, though, who just went on a journey with a Mayan shaman where she had a Eureka moment in the middle of their jungle trip. She told me the shaman had explained that all the environmental stuff we're doing is helping a little, so that the end is actually going to be a little later. Not a whole lot later, but not 2012 either."

End of Humanity On Hold

A couple of years ago, the San Francisco based, internationally recognized artist Enrique Chagoya (below left) had an art show at the Electric Works gallery called Super-Bato Saves The World. Chagoya was playing with iconography involving the end of the current Mayan calendar during the Winter Solstice of 2012, and the hysterical portents of planetary doom it was supposedly prophesying.



I asked the artist at the party if he was one of the Apocalyptic Believers, and his reply has lingered:

"No, I'm not one of the believers. I have a niece in Mexico, though, who recently went on a journey with a Mayan shaman where she had a Eureka moment in the middle of their jungle trip. She told me the shaman had explained that all the environmental stuff we're doing is helping a little, so that the end is actually going to be a little later. Not a whole lot later, but not 2012 either."

Unfortunately, that sounds about right. There have been plenty of Cassandras warning of Doom for Mankind over the last five decades, but certain voices have resonated with me.



As a teenager in 1969, I heard the Stanford scientist Paul Ehrlich give one of his doomsday population growth speeches at a school board convention at Bill Graham auditorium in San Francisco's Civic Center. Though most of his specific apocalyptic scenarios were as off-base as the Mayan calendar prophecies, his basic point about algorithmic overpopulation and the problems it would cause remain as potent as ever. In a 2011 interview in the LA Times, Ehrlich notes: "When we wrote it, there were about 3.5 billion people on the planet; about half a billion of them were hungry. Today there are 7 billion people on the planet and about a billion of them are hungry. We've lost something on the order of 200 million to 400 million to starvation and diseases related to starvation since the book was written. How "wrong" [were] we?"



Artists have always been the world's most powerful prognosticators, and the apocalyptic visions of novelists John Wyndham, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have for some reason hit me with an almost mystical intensity over the years. It was especially disturbing to read an except from an article by Atwood written seven years ago for the British magazine Granta which was featured in Kit Stolz's environmental reporting site, A Change in the Wind.



The Canadian Atwood notes one of the more disturbing scenarios we are looking at in the near future:

"The Arctic is an unbelievable region of the earth: strikingly beautiful if you like gigantic skies, enormous landforms, tiny flowers, amazing colors, strange light effects. It's also a region that allows scant margins of error. Fall into the ocean and wait a few minutes, and you're dead. Make a mistake with a walrus or a bear, same result. Make the wrong wardrobe choice, same result again. Melt the Arctic ice, and what follows? No second chances for some time.

You could write a science fiction novel about it, except that it wouldn't be science fiction. You could call it Icemelt. Suddenly there are no more small organisms, thus no fish up there, thus no seals. That wouldn't affect the average urban condo dweller much. The rising water levels from--say--the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would get attention--no more Long Island or Florida, no more Bangladesh, and quite a few islands would disappear--but people could just migrate, couldn't they? Still no huge cause for alarm unless you own a lot of shore-front real estate."

"But wait: there's ice under the earth, as well as on top of the sea. It's the permafrost, under the tundra. There's a lot of it, and a lot of tundra as well. Once the permafrost starts to melt, the peat on the tundra--thousands of years of stockpiled organic matter-- will start to break down, releasing huge quantities of methane gas. Up goes the air temperature, down goes the oxygen ratio. How long will it take before we all choke and boil to death?

It's hard to write fiction around such scenarios. Fiction is always about people, and to some extent the form determines the outcome of the plot. We always imagine--perhaps we're hard-wired to imagine--a survivor of any possible catastrophe, someone who lives to tell the tale, and also someone to whom the tale can be told. What kind of story would it be with the entire human race gasping to death like beached fish?"

Insistent voices hinting that humanity as we know it is not going to be around much longer was one of the reasons for starting this blog, with its focus on documenting a small corner of the world on a near daily basis. Creating records for a radically altered future feels like a calling.

And with that cheery thought, Happy Winter Solstice 2012, everyone. And thanks to the Asian Art Museum for all the Buddhas.

de Young Museum Reopening

The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park has recently reopened with a Frida Kahlo exhibit that was scheduled to begin last March before the pandemic shut everything down. The marketing for the exhibit made it sound inconsequential, consisting of associated objects and outfits that Frida wore at her home in Mexico City and her journeys in the 1930s and 1940s to San Francisco.

I was afraid the exhibit would be a conglomeration of ridiculous Frida tchotchkes, like the SFMOMA gift shop during their Kahlo exhibit in 2008. However, I am happy to report that the exhibit is surprisingly interesting, with half a dozen famous paintings, quite a few drawings and paintings I had never seen before, and especially a wealth of photography depicting the artistic bohemias of Mexico City and San Francisco in the first half of the 20th century. Guillermo Kahlo, her father pictured above, was a professional photographer and created a number of self-portraits that are striking forerunners of his daughter's surrealistic paintings of herself.

The only problem with the exhibit is that it is installed on the second floor in a series of narrow rooms where it is virtually impossible to safely socially distance. The employees and other patrons were all trying their best, but the architecture defeated all of us, and we did not linger.

Downstairs in the large basement special exhibit space, the de Young celebrated their 125th anniversary earlier this year with an open call for recent work by artists in the nine Bay Area counties.

6,188 artists submitted 11,514 artworks digitally in June.

According to their website, "Every artwork image was reviewed anonymously multiple times by a group of qualified jurors who did not know the identities of the artists. The jurors included four Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco curators in charge and three prominent Bay Area artists: Mildred Howard, Hung Liu, and Enrique Chagoya."

The judges whittled the number down to 877 works by 762 artists, and the winners were hung floor to ceiling in an overwhelming display.

The noisier pieces tend to obliterate the quieter ones, but if you sit on a bench and just study the entire wall, all kinds of odd treasures can be discovered.

Unfortunately, the space did not feel all that pandemic safe, with too many people trying and failing to stay six feet away from each other. Fortunately, the best way to check out this exhibit is online (click here). The well-designed website is devoted to each of the 877 pieces, along with an artist's bio and a price. Just about everything is for sale, and 100% of the proceeds go to the individual artists, so if you happen to be working and making money, this might be a great way to encourage and support an artist whose work you admire.

On the first floor, Uncanny Valley consists of a half dozen large rooms with conceptual art devoted to Artificial Intelligence involving lots of wall text, and it can safely be skipped.

Do seek out Pierre Huyghe’s Exomind (Deep Water), which is also somehow part of Uncanny Valley.

Situated in the eastern sculpture garden outside the museum, it's spooky and fabulous, with a live beehive on top of a naked young woman's head.

SFMOMA Free Tuesday 2: Fifth Floor Feng Shui

The top, fifth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art always creeped me out, not just because of the suspended foot bridge which terrifies my friend Patrick Vaz (click here), but because the place had such bad feng shui where it felt as if one was trapped and there was no way out.



You'd find yourself going by the Filipino security guard phalanx...



...walking by big modern art installations...



...that were all trying to grab attention in different ways.



None of that's changed much but there is finally a sense of freedom in the air because the back of the fifth floor gallery now leads to a new rooftop sculpture garden.



So looking at large Chinese conceptual photographs...



...or an Enrique Chagoya painting...



...doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic...



...because the great outdoors beckons.