Art

Berkeley, Pacific Film Archive, Le Bonheur

I actually don’t get back to the Berkeley campus or its surroundings very often, and when I do, it’s usually on the north side where my graduate-school life centered: the computer-science or computer-music centers, the winding roads of the hills, or the “gourmet ghetto.” It’s pretty rare that I find myself on Telegraph Avenue or along the south side of campus, as I did this time. It seemed like very little has changed, many of the shops, restaurants and institutions along the street are still there, many of the buildings look the same. But it did seem a bit cleaner.

While in Berkeley, I saw a screening of Agnès Varda’s film Le Bonheur at the Pacific Film Archive.

It basically a film about a young family living a Paris suburb and leading a life that seems so overly perfect that something bad clearly is going to happen. In this case, it is the husband and father François beginning an affair with another woman. As the affair progresses, the film, whose its rich colors and classical soundtrack do seem to resonate “happiness”, very gradually begins to feel a bit unsettling, and eventually a bit creepy.

Even as it is a film about a particular set of circumstances and events that happen to a family, it is also very much a film about colors. Each scene seems to focus on a specific color. The initial scene of the family on a picnic in the countryside is all yellow, and the family’s (somewhat small and cramped) apartment is blue. In each of these scenes, everything matches the primary color, from the flowers to the background light to the clothing worn by the family. This is particularly apparent with yellow and blue dresses of Therese, the wife and mother (and coincidentally, a dressmaker). She reprises these colors throughout the film, they seem to represent the “happy” aspect of the family. By contrast The scenes with mistress Émilie, particularly those in her apartment, are stark white, with only sparse adornment such as movie posters on the wall. The colors also change with the seasons over the course of the film, from yellow in spring to bright green in summer, to muted orange and brown in the autumn.

Before the film, I did take a quick trip through the Berkeley Art Museum. Although they did have interesting exhibitions – Mario García Torres’ multimedia installation focusing on ruined buildings on a Greek Island that once housed modernist performances and installations, and an eclectic assortment from the permanent collection – it was in some ways overshadowed by the building itself, with its large space and oddly angled concrete balconies.

Perhaps the thing that makes visiting Berkeley most different now is that I am living in San Francisco, so the trip is now going from a large city to a medium-sized college town and then back at night. It’s not good or bad per se, it’s just different, and coming home to the city at the end of the day (instead of the trip in the middle) has become quite familiar, and comforting.

Art notes: SFMOMA, Kentridge, Shettar, First Thursday

This was a rather art-intensive weekend, even by our recent standards at CatSynth., spanning Thursday through Sunday. This article will only touch on a few items.

At an unplanned visit to SFMOMA, I encountered for the first time work of William Kentridge. Kentridge is a South African artist working with stop-motion films, multimedia, dance and theatre. His work spans from whimsical to overtly political, often dealing with themes from both South Africa and the region. My initial impression of Kentridge’s work from the exhibition ads and the first passing glance at the gallery were mixed. The figures in his earlier animations, such as Soho and Felix are caricatures, with squat bodies and exaggerated features, are usually not that inviting to me. But one can quickly see the immense time and skill that went into these works, which are made from a sequence of charcoal drawings. And having seen the craft, I started to notice the art, and able to step away from the figures themselves to see the mixture of film, animation and music at a more abstract level. His later works, such as 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon, and Day for Night, allow for a more abstract viewing, and also introduce his self portraits and self-deprecating sense of humor. Set on six screens, I moved between abstract animations of star and insect movements, and the artist spilling coffee onto his blank paper.

Probably the most interesting was his newest piece, I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008, loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose. There was of course a partly live-acted, partly animated nose as the “star”, but also other elements depicting the demise of the Russian avant-garde under Soviet rule, and elements mixing abstraction and Soviet-style realism, with muted color fields, geometry and text. There was also an interlude of South African choral music for good measure. I wish I had been in town for the performance and lecture last month.

The final works, based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, were the most elaborate, with video projects based on archival film, animations and stills projected into wooden stages with live mechanized shadow puppets. It was clear that the audience was transfixed in a way I usually don’t see for multimedia and video presentations in an art gallery.

This is probably worth going back to see in more detail. I simply did not have the time to stay and watch every video and animation.

Also at SFMOMA were some exhibitions I had seen but not written about previously, including the portrait photography exhibit Face of Our Time. I usually don’t go for straight-out portrait work, but these mostly large images worked in the context of the other exhibits at the museum.

I did take note of the abstract and whimsical sculpture of Ranjani Shettar. Her work combines modern technologies and traditional Indian craft techniques, but with none of the nostalgia or adherence to cultural stereotypes that often dominates Indian art, at least as it is presented in this country. Her sculptures do have a very naturalistic quality, reminiscent of much contemporary work in the western U.S.

Last Thursday was also the First Thursday open galleries in downtown San Francisco for April (this year is going by so fast, isn’t it?). I should first recognize Trevor Paglen, who was showing both at SFMOMA as a SECA Art Award recipient, and at the Altman Siegel Gallery. It is quite a coincidence to see the same artist at two venues in a single week.

Perhaps my favorite show was Ema H Sintamarian at the Jack Fischer Gallery. Her drawings/paintings consisted of surreal, curving architectural elements, with an almost cartoonish quality. Bright colors and shapes against a white background.

The show by South African artist Lyndi Sales was intricate and very meticulous, work digital cuttings of found and printed objects – it was also a poignant tribute to her father’s death in the Hederberg crash.

Portraits seem to sneak their way into many of my experiences this week, with Gao Yuan’s “12 Moons”, a series of photographs with a Chinese take on the “Madonna and Child” theme. She was featured at MOCA Shanghai last year in 2008 (MOCA was of course closed the main weekend I was there).

Susan Grossman presented chalk and pastel drawings of photographs, that quickly revealed themselves to be familiar scenes of San Francisco. The black-and-white coloring and soft edges also serve as a fitting close to an article that begin with the soft charcoal drawings of William Kentridge, even if the subject matter could not be more different.

Museum of Broken Relationships

On Saturday (the 14th), a friend and I visited the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is currently at Root Division here in San Francisco. The museum was founded in Zagreb, Croatia in 2006, “dedicated to broken hearts”:

The Museum of Broken Relationships is an art concept which proceeds from the assumption that objects possess integrated fields – ‘holograms’ of memories and emotions – and intends with its layout to create a space of ‘secure memory’ or ‘protected remembrance’ in order to preserve the material and nonmaterial heritage of broken relationships.

It has toured several countries – this is its debut in the United States.

The museum is built of donated artifacts, each with an anonymous story about the relationship it represented. There was a large variety of artifacts, such as the handcuffs in the poster shown above. There lots of love notes, the most interesting was one that was pasted to a mirror which was then shattered and the pieces cut out and encased in glass. There was also a large number of stuffed toys, such as Valentin below:

Some more toys, a prosthetic hand and a wedding dress:

There were a surprising number of prosthetic body parts on display, including the hands shown above and a leg with an interesting story. The story for the wedding dress can also be found online here.

The stories are as diverse as the artifacts themselves. Many of the standard broken-relationship variety: “it wasn’t meant to be” or “over the years we drifted further apart.” Some involved tragic events, the death of one or the other parter in the relationship.

One image that was rather sad involved a small painting of the Sesame Street character Grover. It was painted as an affectionate handmade gift to someone who kept a stuffed version of Grover, but the recipient then dismissed this gift as “childish.”

A funny piece was a set of shot glasses donated by someone in San Francisco (there were several local pieces donated), with the tag line “PS: his name is Larry and he is an asshole.”

The evening opening was actually quite crowded. I suppose I should not have been surprised so see so many people out to celebrate broken hearts on Valentines Day. However, judging from the attire of many of the visitors, they were stopping here either on the way to or the way from a romantic dinner. Or maybe this event was their “date”, as there was plenty of food and drink provided.

There was a brief performance piece involving an accordion and a dancer in a symbolic tying and unraveling of knots. It was rather difficult to see or here, given the density of the crowd.

Root Division does seem to have some interesting exhibits. Next month is an exhibit dedicated to algorithms, mathematics and problem solving. Now attempting to relate that back to broken hearts…

First Thursday and Mission Arts & Performance Project

Today we at CatSynth review two very different recent art events we visited here in the city.

First up is First Thursday, which I haven’t been able to attend for the past few months because Thursdays tend to be busiest days of the week (several of my performances have been on Thursdays, for example). This Thursday was no exception, but I was able to do a “speed tour” before heading off to a friend’s party.

My favorite exhibit of the evening was Dystopia at the Robert Koch Gallery. This was an exhibition of photographs exploring the edges of the urban landscape, including “ruins”, abandoned lots and buildings, and some whimsical photos that played with human elements within architectural settings. Regular readers will know the theme of this exhibition is in line with my own photography, which most often features urban and architectural elements. The participating photographers were Benoit Aquin, Ken Botto, Jeff Brouws, Matthias Geiger, Alejandro Gonzalez, Richard Gordon, Colin Finlay, Navad Kander, Shai Kremer, Brian Ulrich, and Michael Wolf. The gallery has provided an excellent online slideshow of the exhibit, which I encourage everyone to check out, especially if you have enjoyed Wordless Wednesdays here at CatSynth.

Part of the fun of events like this is all the interesting people that one sees. And the occasional non-human as well. This dog I saw at the Don Soker Gallery had decent taste:

Our canine art critic also stopped by some interesting modernist and text-based works at the neighboring Altman Siegel gallery, part of an exhibition called “A Wild Night and a New Road”.

Down the hall, the show entitled “Who Got the Chickens” by Stephan Pascher was wholly uninteresting to me, except of course for having the best title of the evening.

We made a brief excursion from Geary Street to Hang, which featured an opening by Freya Prowe. Several of her paintings include the interesting combination of fish and a female angel or fairy creature dressed in black, as illustrated in this detail from a larger work:

I attended a very different kind of art event on Saturday. The Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP) is a “bi-monthly street-level community arts happening”, featuring local artists in garages, storefronts, studios and private homes in the Mission District of San Francisco.

By transforming garages and backyards into mini-galleries MAPP shows how ordinary spaces can be made extra-ordinary to bring people together to share in a diverse experience of fine art and performance. The garages, as they are unpretentious and open to the street, pose the possibility of exposing the arts to a lot of folks who might not ever enter a gallery or theater. This process helps take the art from the margins of our communities to where it may come to be more widely see and understood as a vibrant and vital force necessary to the health of our society.

The Red Poppy Art House was for a longtime the force behind MAPP, and you can see images of past events on their website. They were not participating in this months event, and indeed the entire program was much smaller than the one I attended last year. This month also focused primarily on performances, music as well as spoken-word and dance, with very little in the way of visual art. Nonetheless, there were some interesting performances.

The Peace Planet was set up in a private residence on Harrison Street, providing an intimate setting for musical performance. Of course, the extremely large attendance made things feel more crowded than intimate. But I did manage to get a seat, and heard Classical Revolution perform some very traditional string works by Bach – the mission of Classical Revolution is bring classical music out of the concert-hall setting into “highly accessible” public venues, such as bars and cafes. There was also a more contemporary piece the program called Spontaneous Combustion by Jorge Molina , for prepared piano, classical voice, percussion and several didgeridoos. The piece had heavy Latin and jazz influences, and was relatively tonal in C minor (my favorite tonal key). I am not sure how much was improvised, and because of the crowd I did not get a chance to talk with the composer or performers.

Down the street at Area 2881 was the evening’s primary visual-art exhibit, featuring robot performance and kinetic sculpture by Carl Pisaturo:

These robotic sculptures combine technology with modernism and industrial themes, which in some ways brings us full circle to the photography exhibit that opened this article.

San Francisco Tape Music Festival

As promised, here is my post on the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. I had an opportunity to attend last Saturday’s program.

First, a word about “tape music.” Of course, it does not actually have to be on tape. Indeed it is now most often rendered as digital media: DVD or audio files. The San Francisco Tape Music Collective (which runs the festival) defines it as “audioArt diffused through a surround-sound speaker environment.” Essentially the “audio art” is music or other sound rendered onto media, and the performance is the live performance of that media in a hall through a speaker system. The way the media is mixed into the speakers and the live space creates a unique performance. And the fact that the material is recorded on media allows composers to create sounds that could never be performed live, even with modern computers – although the gap between what can be done live and what can only be rendered is narrowing over time. In the early days of electronic music, tape was in fact the only way to realize sounds, and thus the only way to perform the music. Modern tape music carries on that tradition.

The idea of going to concert hall and listening to a recording may seem odd, but like any other performance, it is about matching the content and presentation. There are really good tape-music performances, and really bad ones, and I have been to both. The Saturday performance at the festival was definitely a good one. It included classics of electronic music, such as John R Pierce’s Stochatta, one of early experiments in computer music at Bell Laboratories; and Lubiano Berio’s Thema (Ommagio a Joyce). Both pieces were premiered over 50 years ago. John R Pierce may be familiar to longtime readers of CatSynth as one of the co-discovers of the Bohlen Pierce scale.

Most of the other pieces on the program were far more recent, with the most recent being the premier of Cupido’s Suitcase by Cliff Caruthers. A series of three pieces in the first half, Winter Light (for Ingmar Bergman) by George Cremaschi, Pre-fader: Highly reverberant states by Goran Vejvoda and Chart Tempo & World Retrograde by Jon Liedecker/Wobbly explore three different aesthetics within recorded sound art: simple (but very powerful) sound synthesis with two oscillators, complex collages of sounds, and remixing of popular-music elements, respectively.

One piece that also got attention when the program was first announced was a piece by The Fireman, which is actually a due of Paul McCartney and Martin Glover aka Youth. As a piece on the program, I don’t know that is as memorable as the others I have discribed.

The program closed with a rather “hard” piece buzzz by Geraud Bec, which I leave to the reader’s imagination. Works by Maggi Payne, Zhiye Li and Kent Jolly rounded out the program.

Overall, a very even performance, there was no point at which I didn’t want to be there listening. I also think that this series is fairly accessible for those who are not familiar with contemporary or experimental music, nothing is too harsh or too provocative – then again, I don’t know if I am the best judge of that.