"Where do you want to go? Do you think there's anything new on the fifth floor?" Patrick Vaz asked as we jumped into an elevator at SFMOMA earlier this week. An elderly lady who seemed to be in the know jumped in, "Yes, there is an exhibit up there," and so there was. Instead of the usual vague, thematic display, the top floor was filled with remarkable pieces from the last 50 years that have recently been rotating through storage.
In a witty reminder that the museum is soon going to be destroyed in order to expand it for the Fisher Collection, Sandow Birk's 1995 Scene from the Destruction, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art greets the viewer on one of the first walls.
Around the corner, Warhol's 1962 Red Liz couldn't hold the attention of the mobile device lady...
...while Jess gave his 1965 Beatles bathing painting the unwieldy title, Fig. 4 - Far and Few...! Translation #15.
A museum guard above was chastising a young couple who had ventured too close to Wayne Thiebaud's 1963 Display Cakes, possibly because they were hungry.
Hanging nearby was one of my favorite Diebenkorn paintings, the 1963 Cityscape I. If you have ever looked at a closeup in Google Maps satellite view on your computer, you'll realize that the world really does look like a Diebenkorn painting when seen from above.
Figure with Two Owls, Study for Velasquez, a large Francis Bacon painting also dating from 1963, is hung in its own alcove for maximum creepiness.
Facing each other around the corner are 1971's Untitled (Rome) by Cy Twombly above, and Sigmar Polke's 1988 The Spirit That Lend Strength Are Invisible II (Meteor...) below, with a couple looking like a Duane Hansen sculpture while listening to their art appreciation headsets.
Patrick confessed that he loved the Polke painting the first time he saw it, but that on a subsequent visit it reminded him of an oven interior that was overdue for cleaning, an association he can't get out of his mind.
Patrick also expressed his distate for the artist Julie Mehretu, represented by her Stadia I from 2004 above, who espouses holier-than-thou leftist politics while being paid a hefty sum to create an 80-foot mural for the newly built New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs. As one letter writer to The New Yorker put it after reading a 2010 Calvin Tomkins article about the artist, "The writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur once wrote, in reference to artists feeding at the corporate trough, 'They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death.' "
The final room near the sad rooftop sculpture garden was filled with some of the most recent paintings in the permanent collection, and though I was not very impressed, Patrick liked the display. "That's because your taste is more discerning, adventurous and elevated than mine," I told him, and he did not disagree.
The 1970s murdered mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, has been memorialized in the city in various ways, with a Marina playground and the downtown convention center named after him.
There was also an official commemorative statue commissioned for the then-new Moscone Convention Center from Benicia-born and UC Davis based ceramic artist Robert Arneson, and the result horrified the San Francisco establishment of the time.
The main reason for the extreme reactions were because of the etched figures in the pedestal holding the bust which whimsically and pointedly referred to the double assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by the San Francisco good old boy Dan White. Dan, who is peeking out from behind the pedestal in the Arneson drawing below, was convicted of manslaughter rather than premeditated murder by a San Francisco jury of his peers after his infamous "Twinkies" defense.
Inserting politics into a memorial was considered outrageous at the time, with the widow Gina Moscone being understandably distressed, the then mayor Dianne Feinstein being typically outraged, and the local newspapers editorializing in their stupidest and most reactionary brays. Even though everything about the assassinations was political, and continues to be so, this was not something that was supposed to be mentioned in a memorial work of art.
The problem was that they gave the memorial commission to the wrong person, Robert Arneson, above and below in self-portraits, one of the great bohemian Northern California artists of all time, who singlehandedly combined cartoons and ceramics into his own personal style.
He died too young at age 63 of cancer in 1992, but his work is looking better with each passing year.
The George Moscone bust, which has been hidden all over the world after Feinstein's banishment in various private hands over the last 30 years, has finally been acquired by SFMOMA thanks to the efforts of its director Neal Benezra, and it's been newly installed on the second floor in a room devoted to Arneson. I had never seen the piece in person before, and photographs didn't quite do it justice in terms of its size and sheer fabulousness. Thanks to whoever is responsible for bringing the sculpture home where it belongs.
On a breathtakingly beautiful Monday afternoon, there was a free concert on the UC Berkeley campus at the Faculty Glen behind Hertz Hall.
The music was an hour-long performance of Inuksuit, a percussion piece by John Luther Adams (the OTHER, Alaskan composer named John Adams) that was meant to be played by anywhere from 9 to 99 percussionists, depending upon the site.
The piece was written for Steven Schick, above on a bullhorn announcing the concert was to begin. Adams wrote it as a wedding present for Schick and his wife Brenda, who were married in 2007. In an entertaining interview with Cal Performances (click here), Schick explains:
"I walked from San Diego to San Francisco to propose to her. Part of the rationale was to listen to the way the California coast sounds and to make recordings and to think of the enormous change in my life and to give it the appropriate weight. And this was at the time that this piece was gestating with John. And that walk and what I heard and our conversations along the way–I phoned him on the day that I climbed over the last hill and saw the Bay–being outdoors and those sounds were incredibly important part of the gestation of this piece."
The piece was performed last week at the Ojai Festival in Southern California with 48 percussionists and the UC Berkeley version, billed as Ojai North!, featured 21. Schick explains:
"That’s appropriate. Matias and I walked many different sites on campus and we eventually decided to use the beautiful glade outside Hertz Hall. And that’s a spot that if you put 48 people it will be a racket; there’s no real place to put 48 people. 21 is right for a smaller space. But 21 musicians is still larger than what premiered the work – we were 18 at Banff in 2009. John has said that it is site determined rather than site specific. That means it’s not designed for a single spot, it’s designed to conform to a spot."
Inuksuit starts off so quietly, with whooshing soft wind sounds, that your hearing immediately recalibrates to listen more carefully, and the ambient sounds of dogs, people walking, a train whistle a mile west, all become part of the musical palette.
Some listeners laid themselves out on the lawn in the center of the glen and let the various sounds wash over them.
Others walked around the perimeter pathway focusing on individual performers tucked into the woods.
One of the loveliest sights were the pair of kids above who were banging sticks on a log to add to the occasion.
When the first drums started playing about twenty minutes into the piece, it was a thrilling moment, and the piece continued to climax over the next hour, with sirens, conch shells, gongs, marimbas, you name it, shimmering away around the crowd, until the sound died into a tinkling silence moments before the nearby Carillon started its 6PM bell ringing.
Steven Schick is the new artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and I have a double request for him. Could you please bring this to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in a space big enough to accommodate 99 players. And can I play one of the sirens?
A new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute is opening this Wednesday at the San Francisco Opera.
The production has been designed by the 70-year-old Japanese, Omaha-based artist Jun Kaneko (click here for some great drawings at his website detailing the production).
Kuneko is best known for his work in monumentally scaled ceramics, and in conjunction with this new production a pair of colorful heads have been plopped down on Van Ness Avenue in front of the Opera House until November by the Rena Bransten gallery and the San Francisco Art Commission. The pieces look great but the bases they are sitting on couldn't be uglier. Come on, SF Art Commission, you can do better than this.
The new Magic Flute sets are digital projections that are constantly changing, which some people are going to love and others hate. The German original is being given in a new English translation by SF Opera's General Director David Gockley and from what I have heard, it sounds pretty good. I tend to be a purist about translating operas out of their original languages, but German to English works just fine. It's Italian and the other Romance languages translated into English that usually sound absurd.
I have been wandering around rehearsals of this new production literally blind, encased in the wild animal costume above, twirling across the stage while trying not to fall into the orchestra pit. Even though I am not a big fan of the opera itself, the music is some of the best Mozart ever wrote, and the 31-year-old Scottish conductor Rory Macdonald is a real find. Twirling to his beat has been a pleasure.
