October 25, 2009

25Oct09

Saw the new Hiroshi Sugimoto work at the Fraenkel Gallery on Thursday night. He’s one of my favorite photographers. His earlier portraits don’t do much for me, but the architecture series, the theater series and most importantly the sea series have been some of my favorite works for the last few years. The exhibit is called Lightning Fields and the images online are striking, but you don’t get the full effect until you’re standing in front of them. From reading around the web his method was to apply electricity directly onto his film, and the results are pretty astounding. Online they look sort of flat, but in person there’s an unbelievable depth to the photos. The blooms are rounded and seem bulbous, and the fern-like light fields look almost like mountains rising out of a valley of deep black. I may try and go back before it closes on the 31st, just beautiful. I was really pleasantly suprised. I expected to like them but wasn’t expecting it to be quite as beautiful and deep an experience.

Wandered my way over to SFMOMA by way of an uncomfortable farmer’s market and then the Metreon. The Metreon is just so depressing. It’s huge and empty and anytime you even remotely looked towards a person working, there was a weird desperation. It’s an empty shell, bereft of stores and people. Empty, or almost empty malls, scratch that, dying malls, are very sad places.

The big exhibit at SFMOMA right now is Richard Avedon’s photography which I could probably care less about only if I didn’t know it existed. I was worried there might not be enough to keep me occupied but it turned out the Avedon wasn’t as large as I imagined. The old favorites were all there, the Still room, the large Rothko, the Cornell corner and Judd’s boxes. At the end of their selections from the permanent collection was a small exhibit called Not New Work curated by Vincent Fectreau. Nothing blew me away and in fact I disliked a few pieces, but the idea itself was wonderful and the selection overall left me smiling. Fectreau picked 20 rarely seen works from the permanent collection to show in two small rooms. There was a whimsy to the selection and to the two rooms generally, and a tendency towards concept over form. That said, some of the forms were stunning. Robert Overby’s “Hall Painting, first floor” was the standout for me; a false entrance to a non-existent hallway that was both beautiful and dirty, looking like rust and decay. Untitled (Torn Sky Painting) by Joe Goode deserves a mention in that I really expected as I rounded the corner to love this painting but it left me oddly cold. I have no idea why. Honestly though, the highlight was the exhibit “book”, a collection of postcards all depicting the weirdly imposing New by Christopher Wilmarth. New consists of two large rounds of wood connected by a thick plate of glass stood vertically. While the postcards are focused on New, because the main portion is glass you also end up seeing the majority of the exhibit. I have to believe that was the exact intent. I bought it and am trying to figure out the best way to show them on my walls.

I don’t have much to say about the second floor. There were some beautiful photographs, but I’m finding it harder and harder to talk about representative photography. I’ve decided to accept this as a fault of mine and revel in my enjoyment of abstract photography and confusion about representative photography. I noticed a couple Sugimoto’s from the theater series that I enjoyed but ended up walking through this floor quickly.

The highlight of this trip was an exhibit I didn’t know existed called “Focus on the Artists.” by Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still. The idea was simple, an exhibit consisting of a room devoted to a single artist. The theme might as well have been “Artists BW really loved a whole lot”. Diebenkorn was the only artist I didn’t know beforehand. The two later abstractions were frankly gorgeous. Simple blocks of mostly muted, pastel colors brought to mind Rothko and Mondrian but his paintings resembled neither. The Guston’s were fun, but the focus was early and late, none of the middle abstractions which are my favorite. There’s something about his representational stuff that just WORKS for me. Part of it is the context of them, and knowing that back then his friends and supporters treated him like a turncoat because he dared to use representational imagery. The Stella and Kelly rooms were overwhelming in a good way. Especially the Kelly pieces. There’s a purity of both content and concept in his work that I find so invigorating. I love Still, and predictably loved his room and the Marden selections were interesting; but the Ryman room was a masterpiece. A series of meditations on whiteness, blankness, space, border and painting itself. Each piece was attatched to the wall differently, some in frames, some with bolts in the middle, some with tape; and the attachment became part of the artwork. This blurring of work vs. hanging equipment vs. wall on which it’s hung was interesting and I spent a long time in this room even with the guard who kept staring at me. I saw a couple pieces by Serra both here and in the sculpture garden. My favorite of the bunch was Gutter Corner Splash. 7 decayed wedges of lead in a row leading back towards a splash of lead on the wall, in, yes, the corner. The play between hard and soft, solid and liquid were interesting, especially when you consider that Serra’s most famous works tend to be about making these very solid hunks of metal look airy, weightless and precarious. It was unlike any Serra I’d seen before.

I had wanted to go back and see my favorites from the collection. Another few minutes in front of that Rothko, the way it pulls the eye in. The bench is placed perfectly so the only way to perceive it in one look is to let your eyes go soft, a little out of focus, bringing foreground and peripheral vision into the same plane. There’s both a stillness and a subtle movement in this particular Rothko, and that blue on the bottom, almost an Yves Klein blue, is luxurious. And another few minutes in the Still room, staring at the largest piece in the room, the striped one, with Untitled from 1960 with huge swaths of the canvas left untreated and smears of white and black with browns and rusts in between. It’s one of the least imposing of his works I think, and is becoming a favorite because of the space on the canvas.

But alas, I was tired and decided to head home after a quick trip to the shop. The SFMOMA shop is really large, surprisingly large, and while there’s alot of crap, there’s also a whole lot of really interesting bits of design. Was tempted by the whiskey stones and the ceramic “I am not a paper cup” cup but decided to go only with the series of postcards mentioned earlier and the first Christmas gift for someone dear to me.

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