Art

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.

Art and music notes from the past week

During one of my long walks this weekend, I stopped in at Crown Point Press and found in the hallway several prints from Changes and Disappearances by the composer John Cage, a hero of ours here at CatSynth. My first impression was that these were graphical scores (i.e., scores where the performers interpret visual images), but they are in fact intended as independent works of visual art. However, many of the same compositional techniques can be found in both Cage’s music and visual art, as described in this essay by Ray Kass:

It occurred to me that his etchings had an extraordinary correspondence to the methods he utilized in composing his music – and that they were visual counterparts of sorts, related in a manner that one might not have expected…But the connection between Cage’s use of “chance” methodology in his various kinds of work (composing, writing, installation & performance art, & now printmaking) made sense in a way that awakened me to the great scope of his work.

I don’t think this was a special exhibition per se, as Cage had a longstanding relationship with Crown Point Press and they have displayed his work on several occasions. The main exhibition was a series of works by Tom Marioni.

Both Marioni and Cage were featured in The Art of Participation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Among the works in the exhibition were Marioni’s Free Beer (sadly, no free beer was being dispensed at the time, even though it was “Superbowl Sunday”), and John Cage’s most famous piece 4′ 33″. The full score was posted on a wall, and it was also displayed on a grand piano in its original form. I can’t say this was presented as a “participatory work”, however. Simply looking at the piano and listening to the museum commotion for the alloted time does not constitute a proper performance of the piece.

There were, however, plenty of other interactive pieces in the exhibition to explore, such as Lygia Clark’s Diálogo: Óculos (Dialogue, Goggles):

Last week, I attended an evening of electronic-music performances at the Climate Theatre, part of the regular Music Box Series. This series usually does not feature electronic music, but this time they darkened the room and presented “electronic soundspaces.”

Christopher Fleeger opened the evening with lively performance featuring a touch screen, percussion controller and laptop. The music mixed synthesized and other familiar electronic sounds with some odd and amusing recordings, such as a rap extolling the virtues of Tallahassee, Florida as a center for faiths of all kinds, and a very memorable piece of “stand-up tragedy” about one man’s experience with “the store” – in the poem, every line ended with “the store” and often included other references.

The second performance was by James Goode and featured a mixture of acoustic sources (percussion, toys, etc.) with sampling and looping, and reminded me a bit of my own performances at the Santa Cruz Looping Festival and other venues (it reminds me that I haven’t written about that). It can sometimes be a challenge to sustain full energy for an entire solo set of this nature, but Goode made this seem easy.

Goode and Fleeger closed with an extended duet improvisation. At least one balloon went flying into the audience.

I also attended the Saturday performance of the 2009 San Francisco Tape Music Festival, which I will discuss in a separate article.

Jackson Pollock’s Birthday

Yesterday (January 28) was the birthday of the artist Jacskon Pollock.

Regular readers know that we at CatSynth are big followers of modern art, and Pollock was one of the most well-known and influential artists from the rich period of American art in the 1950s and 1960s. He is most often associated with the large and diverse movement abstract expressionism, but his work is quite distinctive even with in that context, and his large “drip paintings” are instantly recognizable.

I first encountered Pollock’s work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and later at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I did have an opportunity to see a major retrospective at the MoMA in 1999, which brought together not only his large iconic paintings, but his earlier works that mixed abstraction with Native American and folk influences – although these works were “modern” they were more conventional for contemporary art of the time. I managed to find this article from the News Hour (PBS) discussing Pollock and the 1999 retrospective.

Although Pollock is held in high regard by those who follow and care deeply about modern art, he is often treated derisively by people who simply don’t like modern or abstract art. He is perhaps the most associated with the phrase “my five year old could do that.” The idea is laughable. This is unique and skillful art, especially on such a large scale. Such paintings were not seen before the 1940s, and centuries of five-year olds never produced anything like it.

Google has a tradition of honoring major artists on their birthdays with a themed home page, and yesterday they did so for Jackson Pollock:

Thanks to The Madville Times for capturing the above image.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Cats of China

This weekend, we visit the cats of my recently concluded trip to China.

Suzhou is renowned for its silk. The climate is particularly suited to silkworm cultivation (though one would not think so given the freezing temperatures during this trip), and the city has long been a center for both production and craft. Cats are a common motif on the “two-sided” embroidered silk paintings of Suzhou:

Outside the Suzhou Number One Silk Factory, I encountered this stray cat running through the parking lot.

Cat in Suzhou, near the Number One Silk Factory

In Shanghai, I saw this cat in a clothing shop on Dingxi Road:

Dingxi Road is a commercial street in an outer neighborhood, not far from Zhongshan Park and completely devoid of foreigners. The shops that line the street cater to local residents, and the clothing shop where I encountered the cat was no exception. I think the shop’s owner was surprised and delighted to encounter a foreigner – and more surprisingly, a scruffy “white guy” – who was interested in cats. On the other hand, I think the cat was a bit annoyed by the attention and would prefer to sleep:

Some things are the same everywhere.

We are spanning continents, as Weekend Cat Blogging #190 hosted by Kashim at Paulchens FoodBlog in Vienna.

In the far away state of Florida, Pet and the Bengal Brats host the Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos.

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this weekend by the House Panthers (of which Luna is a member).

And of course the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Suzhou Humble Adminstrator’s Garden and Tiger Hill

In addition to its many canals, Suzhou is famous as one of the major centers of classical Chinese gardens. Perhaps the largest and best known is the Humble Administrator’s Garden.

The garden is about 13 acres and about 500 years old (at least one site suggests it is exactly 500 years old, having been built in 1509). The “humble administrator” was a government official Wang Xianchen, who clearly could not have been that humble with a spread like this. It is interesting to note that gardens such as these were almost always private, and the idea of maintaining them is relatively recent.

The elements of the garden include the plants, water, architecture (much of it the more minimalist and geometric Ming Dynasty style) and rocks, such as the lakebed rocks in the photo above. The natural and geometric elements fuse in a way that seems very fresh and modern, and one can see where many twentieth century artists, architects and designers may have gotten their inspiration.

This is the sort of place where I could easily get lost in the visual elements for a long time.

But of course we had to move on. We next visited one of Suzhou’s other well-known landmarks, Tiger Hill. The highest point in the city, Tiger Hill was originally the site of a king’s tomb, and later a Buddhist monastery and temple.

Although this photo makes the pagoda at the top of the hill look perfectly straight, it is actually leaning quite strongly to one side:

Supposedly, it is the many attempts over the years to locate and excavate the tomb in the hill that has led to the weakening of the ground below the tower and its severe tilt. The entrance to the tomb was finally discovered in the 1960s in pool lower on the hillside during a sever drought. However, it has remained unexcavated, lest the tower tilt even further.

The top of the hill supposedly provides a spectacular view of Suzhou, but with the dense winter fog I was not able to see very much.

Suzhou Grand Canal at Night

So far most of my touring has been at night. That will change over the weekend, but meanwhile here are some nighttime images from the Grand Canal in Suzhou. The city is crisscrossed by a network of canals, one of many things for which it is famous.

The architecture of the bridges and buildings along the canal range from very traditional, as in the above photograph, to more modern. In all cases, however, things are always brightly lit with colored lights here. Even the trees are bathed in a green glow.

The Grand Canal forms a loop that circles the old city, and one can observe segments of the old city wall and the towers just beyond it.

Here is a more modern building along the bank of the canal. It blends the geometric modern features that regular readers of CatSynth know I am fond of with more traditional elements.

Daytime will provide different view of the city entirely. The large buildings and their lights which are so prominent at night fade into the background, while the more modest homes that come down to the edge of the water become visible, as do the city’s famous gardens.