SFMOMA with Donald Kinney

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.

Spiders from Sand to Sea

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.

Adaptations 2: Patricia's Green

For over 30 years, a doubledecker freeway ran through the Hayes Valley neighborhood like a festering wound, but the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the structure sufficiently that it was torn down by Caltrans, and committed neighborhood activists managed to keep the monstrosity from being resurrected.



Of course, there is a new, surface roadway leading from Market Street and the 101 freeway known as Octavia Boulevard, which is a case of disastrous urban planning all of its own. However, at the end of that car-centric mess, a beautiful little park called Patricia's Green was installed just as this blog was starting up over four years ago.



The first post, in fact, was about David Best's temple, which was the first collaboration between the Black Rock Arts Foundation and the Hayes Valley Art Coaliation.



The popularity and the example set by that initial temple has been wonderful for San Francisco public art. The process used to involve a long, expensive, and elitist bureaucratic tangle that commissioned work from an established artist, usually outside of the Bay Area. This would take years to fund, negotiate, and install, and if the people living around the art hated it, they basically had to lump it.



With "temporary" neighborhood installations, however, if you don't like it, just wait for a bit and the thing will be gone and replaced by something else. This Burning Man, transitory aesthetic has essentially been a quiet revolution in San Francisco over the last four years. It has also probably led the San Francisco Art Commission into some interesting new ways of thinking, evidenced by its current Patrick Dougherty commission in Civic Center Plaza, and the other "temporary" installations they have sponsored, from Louise Bourgeois' waterfront spider to Manolo Valdes' Infanta sculptures.



Patricia's Green has hosted a few sculptural clunkers over the last four years, but most of the exhibits have been magical, such as the Best Temple, the Wowhaus miniature golf course, and Koilos from Burning Man. Mark Baugh-Sasaki's "Adaptations" is a welcome addition to the neighborhood, where it will reside until the end of the year. As Matthew Hubbard commented, "twigs are the new marble."

The Infantas of Manolo Valdes

Close to a dozen large sculptures by the Spanish artist Manolo Valdes have suddenly sprung up in the Civic Center Plaza and greeted us on our way home from Palm Springs.



The large women's heads with fanciful metal headgear will be standing there through the summer in another "temporary" public art exhibition put on by the San Francisco Arts Commission.



It seems to be a similar arrangement to the Louise Bourgeois spider on the Embarcadero (click here), where an art dealer in New York, in this case the Marlborough Gallery, lends out a famous artist's work to sit in the open air in San Francisco in the hope that a rich collector will buy it for themselves or the city at large.



On Tuesday afternoon at 5PM, with the winds whipping through the plaza, various dignitaries like PJ Johnston congratulated themselves...



...and other commissioners for bringing "world-class" public art to San Francisco...



...while praising the "visionary, forward-looking, and impatient" Mayor Gavin Newsom, who showed up late to the ceremony.



The General Manager of San Francisco's corrupt and ineffective Rec & Park Department, the Nigerian Yomi Agunbiade, also joined in the hosannahs for our brilliant, forward-thinking Mayor...



...and was followed by Newsom, who uttered a few cliched banalities that were painful to listen to. What was fun was waiting to see if his industrial strength hair gel would stand up to the ferocious winds in the plaza, and it did, just barely.



The most charming moment arrived with the short speech of the 66-year-old artist himself (above left), which was haltingly translated by the gentleman on his right.



It was obvious that Valdes was tickled pink with having his work displayed in this very public "espacio," and I look forward to getting to know his Velasquez-inspired Infantas over the summer.

On The Waterfront 2: A Bourgeois Spider

The recently produced Korean horror movie, "The Host," is set on the Han river that runs through the middle of Seoul, South Korea. After an American military man at the beginning of the film requires his Korean lab assistant to pour vats of toxic chemicals down a drain which empties into the river, a tadpole then mutates into a cross between Alien and Godzilla and mayhem ensues.



In a bizarrely appropriate bit of timing, the San Francisco Art Commission on Thursday was installing a metal sculpture by the legendary 95-year-old artist, Louise Bourgeois, of a huge spider, which looks like it just crawled out of the murky, polluted bay.



The sculpture is one of a series that Ms. Bourgeois has been creating over the last fifteen years, most of which are entitled "Maman," or "Mother," in honor of her own scheming, tapestry-weaving mother (shades of "Alien" arise once again).



The sculpture is being loaned free to the City of San Francisco for a temporary stay in the hope that a citizen with deep pockets will buy and keep it here, for the not insignificant sum of $6 million.



For an index and photos of more of Louise Bourgeois' work, which I find alternately fascinating and frightening, click here, and be sure to check out the sculpture in person. It's a wonderfully poisonous antidote to Don Fisher's clunky Oldenberg monstrosity, Cupid's Bow, further down the waterfront.