Grumpy Art Freak: 3 San Francisco Art Openings Make Me Hate Everything
On February 23rd I attended 3 different art shows in the Financial District, or whatever you want to call this neighborhood. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts held the opening of Nate Boyce's Polyscroll, a solo show of sculptural video pieces, with vertical screens projecting the movement of textural digital fields, ice scraping, frosting colored, like an Abstract Expressionist painting translated into a .gif and hung on a white wall. The show is interspersed with little abstract sculptures as well. White-washed, technically-minded, techincality-driven and lackluster. The wine and cheese was more interesting, no one seemed to know what to make of any of it. Within minutes of milling about the reception room, a nerdy man caught my eye and talked museum fundraising with me, then handed me his business card.
A few blocks up, was a show at Et Al, with works that will be changing weekly, it's hard to write about what I saw as it will likely be gone before I can finish putting down my thoughts. The space begins as a dirty hallway, with a sink full of dishes and some garbage recycle and compost cans, the only sign of art is the amazing entrance sign Something about melancholy music, and drops down suddenly at the turn of a corner into a steep downward staircase, a dark basement down below. It felt like the dirty house shows of my college days, makeshift flood lighting, and confused yet determined audience members. Within seconds of landing on the bottom floor and beginning to mill about the crowded space, a man shouted in my ear WHAT IS THIS PLACE and handed me his business card.
The art was...varied. There were severed fingers, backlit photographs of someone's everyday life, a marquee like you see at a BART station, but long, turned on its side, and scrolling trite prose rather than anything either informative or interesting. I don't understand it as a medium. You had to stand looking at it with your head cocked, and read one slow word at a time a story that was, from the 3 minutes or so that I witnessed, going nowhere and saying nothing. I don't see the point in the discomfort, the story meant nothing to me, and the storytelling medium was horrible. I'm all for bad art as good art when done thoughtfully or provokingly or tenderly or anything. But this I just didn't get. I liked the severed fingers the best, they were interesting, I liked the colors and the textures, I liked how they were just placed unassuming on the ground, likely to be stepped on (thought lit brightly with one of those flood lights).
Next was the grand opening of a spot called Capital. This was honestly the only part of the night I remotely enjoyed. The space is tiny, just a storefront. I can't even imagine how the space was used before it's so small. It can comfortable hold perhaps 10 people, and that's without the jagged rusty metal mobile hanging in the middle of the space. That being said, they've done a decent job of turning it into an art viewing space, like a miniature gallery. On one wall, a giant stupid painting of a picture frame or somesuch. On another wall, two black and white photographs showing a truck in a landscape, one pre-explosion, the other post-. Somewhere between the two walls hangs the aftorementioned mobile. Posters being given away at the door depicted a ghostly white anime hand, like from the Last Unicorn, gracefully reaching towards triangles and other sharp shapes that mirror the mobile. What I loved was everyone standing outside. It was an experience akin to Savernack, you go in, you spend a few personal moments with the art, then you grab a free Bud Light and stand on the sidewalk with the small crowd of art buffs drinking and smoking.
Out there I learned that the mobile is made of pieces from the exploded truck featured in the photographs. I also noticed the lighting for the first time: fluorescent lights whose tubes were somehow decorated! Instead of white office lighting blazing uninterupted, there seemed to be a semi-transparent layer of photograph, shades of blue and strands of hair, like a photograph of someone with long hair swimming. This delighted me. Adorned fluorescent lighting is one of the tackiest things I can think of. Hair as art makes me go wild, because hair is at once elegant and a symbol of beauty, as well as dirty and nasty. The locks were detailed, making me think again of texture. They were swirling, which made me think of choking and drowning. They were flowing, which made me think of beauty and grace. So many emotions garned by those stupid lightbulbs! So much more emotion than I got from anything else. Knowing that the truck was exploded, and assumming that it was exploded merely for the photographs and possibly for the mobile, made me angry. So much waste feels pretentious and entitled. the photographs weren't even that good. The painting was so whatever I don't even remember what it was except that I was not interested in it.
The city is hungry for art. The artists are hungry for substance. Space is at a premium, driving spatially-aware concepts in art. There's some kind of ephermeral joyless nothingness happening all over the art scene. I sense half-hearted irony, unconvincing striking out into the oblivions, sardonic wimperings, and just a touch of hopelessness. There's so much that feels thoughtless and lazy, like people are riffing off of things they've seen be successful elsewhere and losing all the heart of it in the process. I keep asking myself what the point of it all is. Has it merely yet to be canonized to my liking? Why do I revere Barnett Newman and sigh heavily at all of this?