I took Donald Kinney, a Marin County photographer, to the newly expanded SFMOMA for his first visit last Saturday. We started on the 7th floor watching 20 minutes of Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors, and then descended to the fifth floor to hang out with Louise Bourgeois' spiders.
A huge retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg from New York's MOMA opened last Saturday on the fourth floor, and a cruel line from Peter Schjeldahl's otherwise laudatory New Yorker magazine review from last May jumped out: "For a great artist, he made remarkably little good art."
Scheldahl opens his appreciation with: "While creating the universe, did God have in mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with a car tire around its middle would materialize to round out the scheme? It came to pass, in New York, with “Monogram” (1955-59)—goat, tire, and also paint, paper, fabric, printed matter, metal, wood, shoe heel, and tennis ball."
The art is all over the place, including a vat of bubbling mud from the late 1960s with one of the best pieces of wall signage ever.
You will be splattered.
You will also be surrounded by museumgoers addicted to their mobile devices.
Then we meandered to the third floor where there is an even larger retrospective of the 20th Century American photographer Walker Evans. (The photo above is of a Havana dockworker in 1932). The exhibit, focused on Evans' use of the "vernacular," originated in Paris and is so overstuffed that the effect is finally numbing. It probably would have been twice as interesting at half the size.
My photographer friend lamented the disappearance of so much of the quirky, tattered signage that once was predominant all over the country. (The above photo is from Nova Scotia in 1971.)
On our way out of the museum, digital signage was flashing a picture and quote from my friend Charlise Tiee, who seems to be the ubiquitous Cultural Poster Woman of the Bay Area, along with her husband Scott and her son Theo who is obviously going to be a superstar of some sort when he grows up.
At the Palm Springs Art Museum, there is a witty juxtaposition in the permanent collection gallery of Enrique Martin Celaya's 1996 painting Bird which consists of a blank canvas and a tiny bird in the center being flanked by one of sculptor Louise Bourgeois' spider sculptures.
At SFMOMA, on the fifth floor, there is currently an exhibit of close to a dozen of these simultaneously alluring and repelling objects.
The spider was not a figure of fear for the sculptor, but meant to represent her beloved French mother who sheltered her from an autocratic monster of a father.
Still, if you have any trace of arachnophobia, this is not the exhibit for you.
Like virtually every other woman artist in history, Bourgeois had a career that was mostly ignored, except for the fact that she outlived her relative obscurity by surviving so long. She died in 2010 in New York City at the age of 98, a few decades after she had become officially celebrated worldwide.
Part of that fame came from her instantly recognizable series of spider sculptures which she began creating in the 1990s, copies of which seem to exist in every modern art museum in the country if not the world.
While roaming the large gallery of arachnids, I marveled once again at how many people these days go to a museum and spend most of their time looking at their mobile phones. Why bother going to a museum in the first place if all you can focus on is a glowing little screen?
This was most painfully displayed by a young couple with a daughter in a princess costume on Saturday who plopped themselves on the floor in front of the large screen above at The Visitors, and proceeded to whip out their mobiles, making it impossible for people behind them to ignore. After about 10 minutes, I became irritated enough to tell them to shut off their damned devices, and the husband became very belligerent, shoving his face into mine and saying, "This exhibit is not just for YOU!" After telling him to fuck off, I went for a guard and the trio soon stomped out of the dark room noisily, allowing the rest of us to bliss out in peace.
A collection of arty soundscapes called Soundtracks has been installed throughout SFMOMA and has taken over the entire 7th floor of the museum. Not a fan of conceptual art installations, I visited with low expectations, and was happily surprised.
Many of the installations are light and playful, and a large contingent of children last Monday were loving them.
A tin can telephone house, Amalia Pica's 2014 Switchboard (Pavilion) would not have been out of place at the Exploratorium, though unfortunately it didn't really work sonically. According to the online catalogue, the difficulty of communication is part of the point of the piece, though not a very compelling one.
That didn't keep everyone from trying their best to make primitive wireless communication happen.
The French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot created the 2012 clinamen, a marvelous circular pool of water with a slowly moving current that buoys a collection of floating porcelain bowls that bump into each other, creating bell-like textures that are exquisitely hypnotic.
In wall signage, the artist requests that no cell phones or photography be allowed because the experience is meant to be meditative, but good luck with that injunction.
The greatest discovery was in a dark room with nine screens angled off of each other, showing an hour-long video called The Visitors. I saw the last thirty minutes, and about ten minutes into the experience, I burst into tears, possibly the first time in my life that has happened in a museum.
The 2012 work by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, strumming his guitar in the bathtub below, is so lovely and surprising that I don't want to spoil the effect. Just go.
And afterwards read this wonderful review by Laura Cumming in The Guardian of Kjartansson's Barbican retrospective last year in London. She ends the post with: "The Visitors is a marvellous creation, rhapsodic, mesmerising and overwhelmingly affecting. It runs for more than an hour but you could stay there for ever. I could not pull myself away."
Somebody should produce yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except in this updated version there are no spores or plant pods taking over people's bodies. Instead, aliens rewire everyone's brains through mobile devices.
On buses and trains I often watch dumbfounded as everyone surrounding me retreats into their private digital worlds while in a public setting. It's spooky.
Like so many other people, I spend most of my life staring at screens – at work, writing this blog, and keeping track of the monstrous lunatics currently in charge of the U.S. government.
On a long Fourth of July weekend trip to Central California visiting family and friends, it seemed time for an experiment which involved not looking at a computer, mobile device or TV screen for four days.
It was heavenly, and so was the visit with sister Susan in Arroyo Grande, who dragged me along on a short hike above Lake Lopez with her friends and dogs.
Sue's place on top of a hillside was looking exceptionally beautiful thanks to the torrential rains this winter.
Two years ago, her husband BJ tore out the front lawn and planted drought-resistant landscaping. The result looked like a Sunset Magazine cover pictorial on the good life in Central California.
He had also planted a vegetable and herb garden enclosed by fencing to keep out the neighborhood wild animals on the hillside.
On Sunday evening BJ picked four types of lettuce for a garden greens salad fresh from the garden.
Using fresh basil, we made pesto sauce for one of the simplest, healthiest, most delicious meals of my life.
Two days without hearing any absurd news also contributed to personal health, and I slept ten hours before heading further south to Santa Barbara. The view above is from the back balcony of Jack Murray, a friend for almost 50 years.
Fourth of July was spent on Amtrak's Coast Starlight, which travels daily to and from Los Angeles and Seattle. It was packed with tourists from all over the world, many of them living and working in the Bay Area, on the same long weekend getaways to the Central California coast. In the parlor car for wine tasting, there was a sweet, smart Brazilian couple from Espiritu Santo who were living in San Jose while he worked at Google. In the dining car, I broke bread with two Tibetans raised in South India who currently lived in Berkeley and a young man from Haiphong, China by way of Canada who was coding for a start-up in San Francisco's Mission Bay "where I can't afford my rent even though I'm being paid well."
There were also a few passengers engaging in the opposite of digital detox which seemed like a missed opportunity.
Commuters waiting for northbound trains to San Francisco with eyes glued to mobile devices are missing the beautiful light of dawn.
