Art

Henri Cartier-Bresson at SFMOMA

Today we review the major retrospective of photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson at the San Francisco Museum of Modern of Art (SFMOMA). It will be closing in two weeks on January 30.

The exhibition focuses primarily on the period between 1932 and 1973, a rather dramatic sweep of the middle of the 20th century. It was interesting to see the world change in his images, from scenes that were already nostalgic in the 1930s to the beginnings of a familiar world in the 1960s and 1970s. Overall, the exhibition can be seen in two ways, as an artistic study of a master photographer or as a historical document of a photojournalist. The arrangement of the exhibition, into several chronological and geographical periods, followed by sections on beauty, portraiture and confrontation with the modern world, emphasize these two aspects of his work.

In some ways, the latter speaks more strongly to me, even though it is not the aspect most emphasized by the curators or most reviews. For example, among his many images depicting scenes from France is this one stark image with a spiral staircase and a blur of bicyclist in the background. One can focus on the shapes and textures and the motion.

[Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyères, France, 1932; gelatin silver print; 7 11/16 x 11 7/16 in. (19.6 x 29.1 cm); Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York; ©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.]

In another depicting an alleyway Paris, the human element is left out altogether in favor of vegetation and architectural elements. I found myself quite captivated by an image of a highway in New York City in 1947, that I am pretty sure was the Henry Hudson Parkway. He presents several abstracted images of the human body as object of beauty, which seem to have more in common with architectural images and quite separate from his portraiture or more documentary photos.

But it is the latter that makes up the majority of the exhibition, with several segments featuring his early travels as a photographer and then his experiences as a photojournalist. He often made multiple trips to the same places and captured the changes. For example, he had been Shanghai in 1948 during the war the led to establishment of the Peoples Republic of China, and took this photograph of a surging crowd.

[Henri Cartier-Bresson, Shanghai, China, 1948, printed 1971; gelatin silver print; 13 x 19 1/2 in. (33 x 49.5 cm); Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel; © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.]

He later returned to China in 1958 on assignment to document scenes from the Great Leap Forward. His photographs from this series depict worker rituals and banners with Communist slogans. My favorite was translated as “Work like the devil to change the face of China in most of the regions.” I like that the Chinese leaders took the time to be realistic by suggesting only most of the regions.

One series where the documentary crossed over into art photography for me was his 1960s depiction of employees at Banker’s Trust in New York. The photographs are very crisp and high contrast, they radiate a sense of modernism. One can also get a sense of wry humor in the faces of some of the workers. Perhaps I am just channeling Mad Men through the images. It’s also an interesting contrast to some of his other photographs from the United States, which through his lens seems a foreign country just as China would be. This scene outside a polling place in Indiana certainly seems very remote:

[Henri Cartier-Bresson, Greenfield, Indiana, 1960; gelatin silver print; 10 7/16 x 15 3/8 in. (26.5 x 39.1cm); Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer ; ©2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.]

Another photograph depicting the Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, is downright creepy.

There is a tension between old and new that seems to be run through his work. He seems most fond of scenes of traditional life at a slower pace, whether in his native France or elsewhere. But he doesn’t shy away from modern scenes and modern notions of beauty, as described and the final section of the exhibition does focus on the changing landscape of Europe and Asia, with industrial and urban scenes that contrast sharply with the slower-pace traditional settings in some of his more well-known images. In addition to images from factories, there was a photograph of a billboard in Tokyo, for example, that were taken decades before my visit but seem at once familiar representations of the modern world.

One that seems to transcend the different aspects of his work and career is the image of a woman peering out a door in Calle Cuahametoczin, Mexico City. Indeed, this photograph is the title image for the exhibition.

Cartier-Bresson’s long career and fame also gave him access to make more formal portraits of noted figures from the middle of the 20th Century.

[Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Paris, 1945; gelatin silver print; 13 9/16 x 9 1/8 in. (34.4 x 23.2 cm); Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer; © 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.]

The portrait of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Irène Joliot-Curie is the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie) is very serious and composed. On one hand, one sees the expressions of a great dynasty of scientists, but at the same time, their difficult story during World War II – Cartier-Bresson had his own dark experience as a prisoner during the war. Each of his portraits were unique – the 1965 photograph Jean-Marie Le Clezio with his wife has the modern streamlined look of the time that I particularly like from French films of the era. The warm and joyous portrait of artist Saul Steinberg with his cat was probably my favorite in this series.

The exhibition will remain at SFMOMA through January 30. It will then travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (February 16, to May 15, 2011).

Jonty Harrison at 2011 San Francisco Tape Music Fesitval

On Sunday night I attended the final performance of the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. This performance featured a retrospective of works by composer and “sound diffusion guru” Jonty Harrison. He was visting from Birmingham, England, and on site to present his pieces and personally mix and diffuse the sound in the hall.

“Tape music” of course need not be on audio tape – indeed, all the pieces in the performance were rendered from digital media on a laptop. Indeed, it would better be described as “sound diffusion performance”, in which pre-recorded media is mixed and rendered via a large speaker system into a concert hall. The immersion in the sound coming from the speakers and the fact that this experience is shared with other audience members, makes this a true performance rather than simply listening to a CD on a home stereo system. Additionally, the active shaping of the sound via live mixing and diffusion makes each performance unique – the speakers are the instrument. The environment at the theater at Fort Mason was relatively comfortable for listening, and the concert featured a state-of-the-art 18+ speaker sound system. I was fortunately able to get a seat towards the center of the hall in order to get the full experience. One of the other motivations for performances with pre-recorded media was that many electronic sounds could not be rendered in real time on available technology, although that limitation has diminished. It was probably the only way for Harrison to realize his 1982 piece Klang, but my sense is that portions of his 2004 piece Rock’n’Roll could have potentially been done in real time, albeit without the precision of pre-recorded media.

Klang opened the concert. It began with a sound that suggested a metal or ceramic kitchen dish – the program notes say that it was in fact a casserole. At first, the connection to the recordings was quite transparent, as if listening to an ensemble of invisible casserole performers. But over time it diverged from the original, with more time stretching, harmonization and other effects and layering into larger structures. This builds up to a climax of pitch-shifting sounds that seem more water-like than casserole-like before returning to the original sound alone for the conclusion of the piece, I liked the way Harrison built up the piece from a single simple sonic idea – a compositional technique that he employed for all the pieces presented this evening.

..et ainsi de suite… was described as a “French Suite rather in the manner of the musique concrete tradition.” It is based on a series of acoustic recordings of rough wine glasses that were transformed through a variety of signal processing techniques to form a series of movements. Like Klang, it featured an exposition and recapitulation of the original sounds, but I did not get an overall narrative of the other movements, which featured more signal processing. Instead, I found myself getting lost in the sounds, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

The next piece, Rock’n’Roll, was the most recent of the pieces in the concert, composed in 2004. It is based on the sounds of a “garden roller with a concrete wheel” and the ensuing sonic mischief when trying to roll it around the composer’s garden pathways. I had to do a Google image search after the performance to find concrete garden roller. It seems that these are more commonly found in the UK. Nonetheless, the sound of rolling concrete against stone does provide for a rich source of material as does the sound of falling and breaking rock. This piece kept close to original timbres, though Harrison did explore time and especially space with advanced mixing and diffusion into the 8-channel array. By mixing the sounds spatially, sublet timbral effects can be achieved, and the listener is not watching a garden roller but instead listening from within a pile of falling rocks.

It seemed that each of the pieces followed the pattern of exploring a particular physical material: ceramic, glass, concrete/stone. The next piece Stream was all about water. However, while it was initially quite recognizable as water, the sound quickly took an otherworldly quality – the listener was immersed in an environment that was unmistakably liquid, with bubbles and burgled and undulating waves, but unlike any natural aquatic environment on Earth. Once again, I got lost within the sonic environment and lost track of the details and progression of the piece – although it did quite loud at times.

The final piece Hot Air was a bit of a departure, and felt like it had a more dynamic sound pallets and musical structure. It was nominally based on another element, air, but the sonic source material seemed more varied than inth previous pieces. There were direct references to air, such as stretching balloons, whistling sounds, and things being hurled through the air. But the timbres also had a very machine-like and industrial quality at times, and these were things that I visualized while listening to the piece. Large industrial machinery, neon electrical signs, etc. But every so often a clear reference to air came through, and some of the moments with balloons or other objects were quite comical. I even heard some of my neighbors in the audience laugh.

During the intermission, I viewed several works of visual art by Aaron Finnis based the concept of tape. Basically, he used magnetic tape on paper to create minimalist textures of vertical stripes.


[Aaron Finnis, Modulation 2000 (2MB R-T-T-Y).]

The simple texture and geometry and connection to the festival theme was itself interesting, but there was an added dimension when one matched the titles to the works. The titles, included information about the tape used, such as capacity in megabytes for data tapes, or duration in minutes and seconds for audio tapes. For example, FIELD 9000 (9MB, ASCII Colors) described the data size and content of the media, although the media was now a visual art material and perceiving the content was not a possibility. Additionally, three of the cassette audio tapes seemed to be drawn from recordings of pure tones, with labels such as SPACE 440 (4.00 mins, A400).

Election Day (of the Dead)

Well, it is Election Day in the U.S., the closest thing we have to a national civic ritual. And in California, that means another of our exceptionally long ballots. Here is this November’s sample ballot plus voter guide:


[Click to enlarge.]

I have to admit, as voter guides go, this one has a pretty cool cover with a detail of the spiral staircase at San Francisco City Hall. And although it’s not the largest we have had, but still pretty substantial.


[Click to enlarge.]

Indeed, elections here can be a bit unwieldy. I find myself voting on all sorts of things, like arcane budget issues or judges that I feel completely unqualified to make a decision on. Of course, there are fun things like having our Proposition 19 (legalization of marijuana for sale in the state) and serious things like Proposition 23, an attempt to suspend our leading climate and energy law – a law that is actually a point of pride for many of us as we watch the much of the country (and our national leaders) fail on the issue. One sign I particularly liked was a dual “Go Giants!” and “No on 23” banner hanging from a building on 3rd Street, with the subtitle “Beat Texas (Oil)”. As often happens, baseball and elections collide. Our celebrations yesterday may end up being short lived depending on how things go today.

In addition to a sense of civic duty, you get a cool sticker:

I quite like having English, Spanish and Chinese all represented – there is something that feels right about it, a sense of people from different backgrounds coming together for a collective purpose.  Of course it is not all the languages spoken by residents of the city, but it is still a decent cross section.  It also made me think about a statement I had heard yesterday, thinking more optimistically about the future, that demographics is currently on the side of those with a more cosmopolitan and progressive view of the world as the older generations with their traditional notions of racial, linguistic, religious, national and sexual boundaries fade away.  But that’s a story for another time.

My current polling place is at SOMArts Cultural Center, so going to vote also means taking in the current exhibition, the annual El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) exhibition. This years theme was “Honoring Revolution with Visions of Healing”  and featured  “altars and installations that will honor the dead and provide offerings to the living.”  It was certainly interesting to have an exhibition with the theme of “revolution” adjacent to the place where I was voting.  And while the theme may be connected to the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, many of the pieces were more general in nature, honoring loved ones who have passed away, or tied to current events, such as disasters and war. For example, I was drawn to this piece because it featured musicians:

[Judy Johnson-Williams and Judy Shintani. Honoring Construction Workers, Rebuilding of the New Orleans, Revolution with Visions of Healing. (Click image to enlarge.)]

At first I was not quite sure what the construction workers were about. But once I understood that it honored the workers who were helping to rebuild New Orleans, the combination of music and construction made sense. It has a double resonance, looking back on Hurricane Katrina, but there are also echoes of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer. The piece was a collaboration by Judy Johnson-Williams and Judy Shintani. The also had another piece nearby, “All Cats We Have Loved”:

[Judy Johnson-Williams and Judy Shintani. All the Cats We Have Loved.  (Click to enlarge.)]

Their accompanying statement was very touching:

For all our kitties who have been run over by autos, are missing in action, and disappeared into the ethery to go onto their next lives. Hopefully you are having fun pouncing and are purring up a storm! We miss you! Meow!

The passing of a loved was also the subject of one of the featured pieces, an alter by artist Adrian Arias to his mother who passed away this year.  The large installation was almost entirely white, but with bits of color in the arranged objects.  Please visit his blog for images of this piece, including a performance by the artist.  Individual remembrances were also part of Susana Aragon’s “Life is a Revolution.”  This piece featured tribute images on transparencies arranged on the wall, a series of moving screens onto which images were projected, and a mirror in which ones own reflection was project (as the artist suggests, it was a bit of a challenge to make the reflection work).  The piece has a very moody but also clean quality to it that kept my attention:

[Susana Aragon. Life is a Revolution.  (Click image to enlarge.)]

In their piece “Trapped”, Ytaelena and Bruce Lopez present a narrow and dark cave-like space which viewers can enter.  It seems inviting enough, with a warm earthy aroma.  But inside there is the faint sound of a person calling for help, and a detached hand in the middle of some vegetation.  The piece is inspired by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the earthquake in Chile.

Finally, on a more positive note, Lanell Dike invites viewers to write messages of love and gratitude, and place them on an array of lights in her interactive piece “Make a Love Offering.”

[Lanell Dike. Make a Love Offering (close-up view)]

I did decide to participate and left a message, not far away from where I cast my ballot only a little earlier.

Maira Kalman, Contemporary Jewish Museum

Today we visit another local exhibition that will be closing soon, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) at the Contemporary Jewish Museum here in San Francisco. In addition to seeing the exhibition itself, I also attended the opening in July.

Kalman is perhaps best known for her many covers for The New Yorker magazine, as well as her illustrated blog for The New York Times. Indeed, looking at her many illustrations on paper in the exhibit, one of the first things that comes to mind is “these look like New Yorker covers”, both in the style of the illustrations and the satire of life and people in New York.

[Maira Kalman, New York, Grand Central Station, 1999, gouache and ink on paper. 15 3/8 x 22 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.]

[Maira Kalman, Crosstown Boogie Woogie, 1995, gouache on paper, 15 3/8 x 11 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York. (Click to enlarge)]

These particular illustrations depict the life and people in New York’s transit, subways, commuter trains and such, and so have a particular resonance for me.  I did specifically recognize a few from The New Yorker, including the infamous “New Yorkistan” map, which renames various New York City neighborhoods:

[Maira Kalman, New York, Grand Central Station, 1999, gouache and ink on paper. 15 3/8 x 22 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York. (Click to enlarge)]

Many of the names in the map play on inside jokes about the stereotypical residents of boroughs or specific neighborhoods, rather than on the actual names themselves. I would have liked to see “Tribecastan”, as the name seems like it could in fact be from central Asia.

[Maira Kalman, Woman with Face Net, 2000, gouache on paper, 17 x 14 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.]

The above work, Woman with Face Net, is the iconic work from the exhibit, and on opening night many of the female staff and volunteers at the museum wore similar hair nets as a tribute. It is interesting how the image uses the combination of red and black, which for me personally is quite powerful, especially in the context of female fashion and dress.

In addition to the works on paper for publication, the exhibition presented some of Kalman’s text and installations, which feature numerous household objects. I particularly liked the juxtaposition of this set of objects with the caption in the background. It was not clear of this combination was the work of the artist herself, or of the curators.

[Installation detail. Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. (Click to enlarge)]

There were also some older pieces from her long career, including this “remix” of former U.S. Presidents with new hairstyles.

[Maira Kalman, Presidents, 1978, graphite, ink, correction fluid, and paper collage on vellum, taped to board. 12 5/8 x 11 5/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.]

Patriotic themes, at once both genuine and satirical, were a common theme among many of her works, and is the theme of one of her blogs at The New York Times, along with the scenes of life in New York. There are also scenes of her childhood in Israel – one image of a young girl in front of a Bauhaus building Tel Aviv was perhaps my favorite in the entire exhibition. She definitely has a soft spot for dogs, especially her dog Pete, who is presented very affectionately in many of the illustrations. Others were more abstract, still life of individual objects, or figures taken out of any environmental context. I did like this page of individual sketches that reduced many of the themes to icon form. Although her drawing style is quite different, it made me think of the William Leavitt exhibit I saw earlier this year.

[Maira Kalman, Endpaper (What Pete Ate), 2001, gouache on paper. 14 7/8 x 22 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York. (Click to enlarge)]

I also had the opportunity to attend a live discussion with Maira Kalman on the night of the opening. Above all, I recall her being quite funny – not surprising given her illustrations, but she specifically had that dry sense of humor I tend to appreciate. As a blogger, I did note how she described the medium with a bit of derision, even while she had embraced it. At the same time, she displayed a very sentimental side, when talking about her dogs, and her late husband Tibor Kalman. And her recommendations on how to pack lightly for traveling were simultaneously practical and romantic – something to keep in mind for future trips abroad.

One interesting question that arose during was whether this could be considered a “Jewish exhibition”. While not originally conceived as such, it has taken on that identity in part because of the institutions where it being presented. After leaving the CJM, it be at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, and then at the Jewish Museum in New York. There is rarely a satisfactory way to answer a question like that, whether the heritage in question is Jewish or anything else. For example, similar questions arose for Stella Zhang’s 0 Viewpoint about whether it was “Chinese art”.

Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) will still be open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum until October 26.

CatSynth @ SF Open Studios in October

It’s October, so once again it is time for Open Studios here in San Francisco. We at CatSynth will be out and about, revisiting friends and hopefully finding new art and artists as well. This time, in addition to full articles, I will also be “live tweeting”. You can follow @catsynth or with the #sfopenstudios tag. If others use it, too, it will be all the more fun.

UPDATE: there is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app available via the ArtSpan site for following artists and posting Twitter updates. I will be checking this out for tomorrow 🙂

New Topographics, SFMOMA

If one were to construct a photography exhibition for me to attend, it might look something like New Topographics at SFMOMA. Indeed, “construction” is an apt term, as most of the photos explore the human alterations to the natural landscape, particularly in the western United States but in other locations as well. Yet, the natural landscape does continue to play a central role in the environments and in the images. It shapes how the human-made structures are constructed and arranged, and how they decay. The exhibition was originally presented in at the Eastman House in Rochester, New York in 1975.

“A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographics signaled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance. This restaging of the exhibition includes the work of all 10 photographers from the original show: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel.”

It is hard to imagine that such a portrayal of landscape was new to art photography at the time. The ideas and subjects in much of the contemporary photography that commands my attention, as well as my own photographs that often appear on this site for Wordless Wednesday. But it was certainly a sharp contrast to the traditional views of landscape in photographs, especially view of the American West, which tended to be not just natural but a romanticized form of nature. One only need step beyond the exhibition to SFMOMA’s main photography collection to see the changing views of landscape and romantic imagery.

The desert tends to be my favorite natural landscape (along with the coast), and is prominently featured in many of photographs. It has a stark beauty, but it also acts as a vessel for human artifacts. Set in the desert landscape, one can linger on the contrasts and similarities between artificial and natural. The straight lines and simple textures don’t get lost in the landscape, and are in fact amplified by it. In Joe Deal’s Untitled View (Boulder City), the roads, buildings and the trailer are partially obscured by natural elements. In a sense, they are distilled down to the lines , which are emphasized by the wires and shadows that traverse the image. At the same time, the natural landscape also seems to follow the straight lines, and in turn the soft undulations of the terrain and reflected in shallow peaks of the partially hidden houses.

[Joe Deal (American, b. 1947), Untitled View (Boulder City), 1974, George Eastman House collections. © Joe Deal.]

The lines (no pun intended) between the natural and artificial aspects of the landscape are further blurred in Frank Gohlke’s Irrigation Canal, Abuquerque, New Mexico. Here we see a completely artificial environment, the concrete-sided canal with vegetation establishing itself at the edges of the water.

[Frank Gohlke (American, b. 1942), Irrigation Canal, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1974, George Eastman House collections. © Frank Gohlke.]

At first glance, the mud and vegetation seem to mar the otherwise smooth and clean surface of the canal. But in reality, they are part of the environment, and thus part of the image as well. One could say the same thing about the reverse situation in Deal’s photograph, where the human-made elements have become part of the natural landscape.

Lewis Baltz takes the theme of straight lines to its aesthetic extreme in both the artificial and natural aspects of the environment. His images feature perfectly rectangular buildings set against the flat landscape in Orange County, California.

[Lewis Baltz (American, b. 1945), Jamboree Road Between Beckman and Richter Avenues, Looking Northwest, George Eastman House collections. © Lewis Baltz.]

Some of Baltz’s other photographs feature facades of rectangular commercial buildings either straight on or at angles. Close-up and with less context from the landscape, they begin to feel more abstract. This is particularly true of East Wall, McGraw Laboratories with its extremely high contrast black and white rectangles. In South Wall, Mazda Motors, 2121 East Main Street, Irvine, the landscape is seen only in the reflection of a window, once again a rectangle inside another.

The sharp contrast and combination of architecture, landscape and abstraction made Baltz’s pieces among my favorite in the exhibition. Similarly, my attention was also drawn to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their photographs featured industrial and mining buildings in Pennsylvania. Some of the buildings were in states of disrepair, such as Loomis coal Breaker/Wiles Barre, Pennsylvania (1974), or even seemed on the verge of collapse as in the image below:

[Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007 and b. 1934), Pit Head, Bear Valley, Pennsylvania, 1974
© Hilla Becher, 2009.]

The structure seems to melt back into the natural environment, and at the same time provides a series of straight (albeit somewhat distorted) lines and geometric shapes. Once again, the high contrast of the image allows one to focus on the abstract elements without completely losing the context that it is a building on a hillside. It would be easy to dismiss these photographs (and indeed many in the exhibition) as social commentary or socially-inspired art, but they have detached quality and the emphasis is on the visuals details – in particular those details that I look for in when viewing and evaluating modern art. The Bechers’ images in particular have a sculptural quality, something that comes out even more directly in their book Anonyme Sculpturen.

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947), Buildings on Tremont Street, Boston, 1975; George Eastman House collections; © Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon’s work stands apart from the others in the exhibition in that depicts urban landscapes from Boston and Cambridge. His Buildings on Tremont Street, Boston depicts a classic 20th century vertical city image of tall and densely packed but quite detailed buildings. Nixon’s image Boston City Hall, Covernment Center Square and Faneuil Hall provides another type of contrast in the landscape that is particular to cities, a tension between modern and traditional architecture. Set against a backdrop of larger buildings, one see a popular older landmark contrasted with the modernist and rather controversial Boston City Hall. It’s a building I actually quite like visually, and it brings us back the rectangular shapes in Baltz’s southern California images.

I conclude with this quote from the exhibition catalog – a rather extensive volume that includes not only the images but a detailed discussion as well as a reproduction of the original catalog – that I find illuminating in thinking about the work of these artists as well as my own photographic interests:

Photography based on attraction to, even love of, the subject while neither revealing that motivation nor imposing it on viewers – it may confuse viewers accustomed to being seduced or sermonized. Adding another degree of complexity is the likelihood that the attraction and love were likely not pure, but instead joined to anxiety and repulsion. Reconciling these opposing forces was an exercise undertaken by each of the New Topographics photographers in different ways.

[New Topographics, copublished by Steidl Publishers and Center for Creative Photography in cooperation with George Eastman House, page 18.]

The exhibition will be on display at SFMOMA through October 3.

[All images used in this article were provided courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Individual copyrights displayed in captions.]

Angela Oswald, Hilla Heuber, Valerie Scott at SoCha Cafe

A few weeks ago I attended a group opening at SoCha Cafe. It is in the far southern end of the Mission District in San Francisco (or at the edge of Bernal Heights). I usually don’t find myself in this area unless I am on the short San Jose Avenue Freeway, but that’s a topic for another time.

One of the artists whose work I specifically came to see was Angela Oswald.

[Angela Oswald. (click image to enlarge)]

Her paintings have a surreal quality, organic but other-worldly. She also tends to use dark colors with a few light elements, a palette that was quite apparent in her pieces in this show. The painting in the image above also evoked an underwater landscape. These themes can be seen in her other work as well.

I was immediately drawn to two very geometric architectural-themed paintings by Hilla Hueber.

[Hilla Heuber. Blue Moon (2008).  (click image to enlarge)]

I like the clean straight lines of the images, and how they evoke structures and spaces within an imagined city. There are small details beyond the abstract shapes, like the standpipe in Blue Moon that add the sense of an urban setting. At the same time, she uses the color and geometry to play with our sense of space – they seem to be simultaneously interior and exterior views. (Indeed, the title “Inside Out” suggests that this ambiguity is deliberate.)

[Hilla Heuber. Inside Out (2008).  (click image to enlarge)]

Although not included in this show, Hueber also does photography. I liked her “remixes” of Richard Serra’s sculpture in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park as well as her images of the photogenic Contemporary Jewish Museum here in San Francisco.

I was also introduced to Valerie Scott, who presented several large-scale paintings in the front room of the cafe. Her paintings were very abstract but intended to convey her “joy, depression and sorrow”.

[Valerie Scott. Untitled.  (Click image to enlarge)]

Her largest piece Untitled featured amorphous areas of primary colors (red, blue and yellow) with fuzzy edges. Although it appears vertically online, it was hung horizontally at the show. By contrast, Can’t See the Forest For The Trees focused on shades of green and more minimal gestures.

[Valerie Scott. Can’t See the Forest for the Trees.  (Click image to enlarge)]

Although the shapes were more sparse, the painting itself had a strong texture. It looked a bit like an areal view of a landscape. Some of Scott’s newer pieces (such as Mo and Blowin’ in the Wind, which I don’t think were part of the show) are quite different, and have much more defined shapes and sharper contrast.

The Fisher Collection at SFMOMA: Calder to Warhol

I have been meaning to write reviews on some recent exhibitions I have seen set SFMOMA: the selections from Fisher Collection and New Topographics photography exhibition, both of which I have actually seen multiple times. This article covers the Fisher Collection, which will be closing this coming Sunday, September 19.

I have been spending some time thinking about what it means to write “CatSynth reviews” for a major exhibition like this about which so much has already been written. In the end, it’s about personal significance. It was really a microcosm of many of the exhibitions and artists that I have followed or discovered over many years – indeed, the exhibition included artists that i had first discovered through retrospectives at SFMOMA including William Kentridge and Chuck Close, or artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt whom I have gotten to know better through the museum’s programs. It is also an opportunity to explore what does (and does not) captivator me with modern art.

One of the things I find most compelling about modern art is the simplicity and sense of calmness I can feel in its presence. This is particularly true of the more minimalist and geometrically inspired works shown on the upper floor of the exhibition. This included those labeled formally as minimalism like Sol LeWitt, but also the large monochromatic panels of Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra’s geometric metal sculptures.


[Installation view with Janus by Gerhard Richter (1983) and multiple pieces by Richard Serra. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.]

There is something about this type of art that I find very comforting, especially in a large scale presentation like this. I can focus on lines and curves and colors and nothing else. I can get absorbed into the repeating variations in Sol LeWitt’s drawings and sculpture, or allow my mind to go blank in Ellsworth Kelly’s simple series of panels. (Perhaps this is what made the placement of Anselm Kiefer’s straw-infused works inspired by the Holocaust in the middle of the same gallery all the more jarring.)


[Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Green Black Red (1996). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]

Even Alexender Calder’s more organic forms fit into this category and were placed together with the others on the upper floor of the exhibit. It would be interesting to consider Calder’s curving but solid mobiles next to the intricate and delcate straight lines in LeWitt’s Hanging Structure 28c and Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud VIII.


[Alexander Calder, Eighteen Numbered Black (1953) . Sol LeWitt, Hanging Structure 28c (1989).]

LeWitt also touches on my interest in mathematics and algorithms (and technology) in art, and conceptual art, most notably in his Wall Drawing, which was created directly on the wall of the gallery in colored pencil from the artist’s specifications.

Gerhard Richter was a bridge between the minimalist and geometric art and the other parts of the collection. His Farben 256 with its array of solid-color rectangles was closer to the previously described works (and although I liked it I couldn’t help but think of a paint chart). Other pieces were more photographic – my favorite of these was Verwaltungsgebaude with its modern arctecture and motion.

The other direction that my artist interests tend is towards urban environments, including graffiti or industrial scenes. Cy Twombly’s large paintings in the exhibition feature repeated curving scribbles that remind me of the graffiti that I often photograph. The white scribbles on gray background in Untitled (Rome) reminded me specifically of walls I saw shooting photos in Warm Water Cove.

Twombly was placed along other works from the middle of the century. A large-scale piece by Lee Krasner was prominently featured (I have yet to see a solo retrospective of her work). A canvas with bright blue by Sam Francis caught my attention. The permanent collection of SFMOMA prominently features works by Richard Diebenkorn, and I think I liked those more than his work in this collection.

In addition to minimalist and geometric works, I also tend to notice art with a playful or surreal nature, or things that are particularly unique. William Kentridge’s installation based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute falls in this category. He built an entire miniature stage with archival photographs and moving images set to selections from the opera. While much more elaborate and complex than the previous works, the performance was still very arresting.

Strictly speaking, there was relatively little photography in the exhibition (although many of the paintings seemed derived from photographic sources). Of the few photographs, the strongest was an image by Sophie Calle which depicted a decaying bed in a courtyard of an apartment building, and was accompanied by a rather morbid story. Another of the featured photos, John Baldessari’s Blue Moon Yellow Window, Ghost Chair was quite painting-like with its extreme contrast and colored overlays.

I certainly did not touch upon everything within the exhibition in this brief review, so those who are interested are encouraged to check out the online exhibition page, or visit if you are in the area in the next five days.

[The photos in this article can be seen on flickr.  You can also see photos by others tagged SFMOMA on flickr or via SFMOMA’s online communities page.]