I often wonder why so many people’s attitudes range from disinterested in to alienated from to actively hostile to the arts. When a controversy erupts, as in public art, the vehemence of the public’s anger can be staggering. Some seem to react viscerally to art more than many arts professionals, but the passion can be suspicious, sarcastic, even hostile. I assume that this is some form of superheated class antagonism that erupts under pressure. Yet artists are not a breed apart, we’re middle class people by and large. And the profession of artist (read critic/professor/writer) is hardly unattainable; it’s part of a spectrum of work via aesthetics that probably includes a solid plurality of people who work for a living.

My dad was a used car dealer. His word for a perfect used car was “a cream puff.” He could look down the side of a car and instantly tell from the subtleties of the paint job if it had ever been in an accident. He had a deep appreciation for the way a car looked. This was a visual expertise that always amazed me and made me proud of him. I think this is so applicable to so many careers that I’m amazed that people can’t make the leap to see how what they do every day is parallel to what an artist does. There are professions that are so close to fine art that I don’t need to make a case for them: movie makers, designers, architects, fashion designers. But there’s also a range of jobs that use aesthetics to approach visual perfection: housepainters, carpenters, antique dealers, sales people who need to articulate a visual argument: clothing, shoes, furniture.

If we push the idea a little further, we can think about all the professions–teachers? speakers? business writers–whose success turns on striving not to settle for okay, but to find the perfect turn of phrase, rhetorical note, pedagogical trick, that cinches a solution to a problem, that for me, is also the essence of art. Or the athlete who practices a move over and over until what was at first clumsy is now mastered. Or a scientist who pursues a line of thinking that can be seen as trivial or absurd (Swimming Bat) but who comes up with a new way to understand the world in some small way, is practicing the same discipline as an artist.

I am not a pollyana; I know much art is difficult and the life of the mind is degraded in our culture. Yet throughout my career I have found artists who, if they find an audience, inspire delight: Trimpin, Tom Friedman, Charles LeDray, Devorah Sperber, Tim Hawkinson, ad infinitum.

I don’t know how the public and the arts have developed such a chasm, given the natural bridges among who we are and what so many of us do.

You know where it is, in that mystic region where parallel lines meet and Valencia bumps into Mission with a startled glare like a Peter Arno cartoon.

Paula Pereira and Pernilla Andersson at the opening of their show, “On Time,” at San Francisco's Soap Gallery, March 2010

That’s where the Soap Gallery is and that’s where I went on Saturday evening to see the opening of “On Time,” a new installation of large-scale paintings by the Northern California-based team T.W. Five. Studio space in San Francisco is expensive, so T.W. Five rents a big studio in San Jose for something like $400 a month, and they need a big space if this work is any criterion. (And they’ve been going to school at San Jose State.)

I walked in off the street at twilight time and rubbed my eyes, like a beggar in old Baghdad, in sheer astonishment, or a frisson closer to terror. For at the far end of the gallery loomed what looked to me like a full-fledged baggage carousel, moving counterclockwise, an array of brightly colored bags passing before my gaze. The gallery, inauspicious from the street, opens up once you’re through the narrow doorway, and the back wall is splendidly lit, transformative. Whatever Paula Pereira and Pernilla Andersson are doing, it combines elements of Pop Art predecessors from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist to Peter Saul and Victor Vasarely, and emerges out the other end with the sinuous beauty of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Fooled into grabbing a bag!

If those crazy birds from classical legend, who picked at Zeuxis’ grapes in classical Greek legend, had been around, they would have barreled through the gallery to grab a perch on those suitcases.

“Tricked again,” I exclaimed to the gallerist, who directed me to the two artists, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, that is, Pereira and Andersson, who could explain better what they were doing. I think, however, that a large part of me wants to be tricked. What else am I doing in the art world? When I was a teen on acid, I used to stare at the plates in the old Abrams World of M.C. Escher, pondering, how did that staircase go up and down from either side? Which wrist, with its delicately rendered cuff, is propelling which fine pen to draw the other wrist doing the exact same thing? In trompe-l’oeil lie some of the secrets of the universe—at least, some of its very best jokes.

This big painting leans against the right-hand wall of the gallery space.

Artist Pernilla Andersson on a bus from her days in Sweden. Hint: it's a really a painting, a flat surface, that she's leaning against, so weary, like she's done this a thousand times.

What’s peculiar about the precise and beautiful chart is the logic it scores in spite—or because—of the unwieldiness, softness, or subjectivity, of the data it represents. It’s as if we’re so grateful for the visual clarity (the argument) that we’re willing to give a pass on methodological rigor.

Andrew Kuo analyzes Bright Eyes (New York Times)

Take, for instance, Andrew Kuo’s seductive charts recording a weeklong series of a Bright Eyes concerts in New York. What could be more subjective than “how good was that encore?” What could be less putatively subjective than seven multicolored extruded bar graphs, USA Today-style? You know it’s personal but it induces an experience of the impersonal.

Of course this is the point. We’re so awash in data that we cannot make decisions. We have access to enough GIS layers to drown a graduate program without ever giving us a useful conclusion. Just the act of making a simple infographic today is an acknowledgment of this predicament, an ironic avoidance of the databloat of our bullying zeitgeist. The “subjective” infographic is a guilty pleasure: we know it doesn’t represent reality any more than the Harper’s Index represents a statistical analysis. Because we can all enjoy it, it’s not quite masturbation; it’s more like really well-done porn.

“Church Accommodation” in the 1870 Census via radicalcartography.net

The classic Statistical Analysis of the 1870 census is a good countermeasure if we get too jaded on the infographic (posted on Radical Cartography via Boing Boing). The graphics are simple and informative and handcrafted. These are worthy of wall-hanging, or maybe needle stitching into your aunt’s favorite throw pillow. Even if they didn’t represent something important about 1870 America (which they do), they’d be convincing studies in pattern, color and proportion. The earnest commitment to the data through graphic craft stands in for the authenticity of Kuo’s personal experience on show night.

Barry McGee, Untitled, 1996

A few weeks later, when I return to take a better look at the works of Leslie Shows, Simon Evans, Barry McGee, etc., my feelings are mixed. It’s great that the museum is supporting younger local artists, but does this art with its found materials (a.k.a. garbage), skateboard images and graffiti, want to be there, all gussied up and crowning the walls of gallery 204B? I remember openings for these artists at Jack Hanley’s gallery on Valencia, Adobe Books on 16th Street, and Rick Jacobsen’s short-lived Kiki Gallery (1993-95) on 14th Street—musician friends or the artists themselves tormenting electric guitars, art lovers spilling out onto the sidewalk, swilling canned beer, smoking and talking a mile a minute, the crowd so dense that passersby had to walk in the street to get around them, neighbors calling the police. I remember the wooden fort-type structure Chris Johanson filled Jack Hanley’s with, how we had to climb on it and bend our bodies and peek through crevices to view the pictures he’d affixed to it. I remember the stench of cat urine at Adobe, the dust, the labyrinth of scenesters sipping red wine from plastic glasses amidst book-laden tables that prevented anyone but the most devoted from making it to the tiny back room to view the art. I remember the art serving as a backdrop to plays, poetry readings, and acoustical music sets—and Jerome Caja taking a bubble bath in a claw-footed tub during his opening at Kiki. I turn around and around in gallery 204B and no matter how hard I try, I can’t feel the aura of those raucous nights clinging to this work. This art, I think, has lost the battle. It is now one with the impenetrable cleanliness of the institution.

Chris Johanson, Untitled (Figures with black presence), 2002

When I walk through an art museum, I sometimes experience a rush of the living community that created the objects—this other place and era that was invariably filled with light, because aren’t all artists supposed to be obsessed with light, like they feed off vast amounts of brightness and they work in studios with huge plate glass windows and skylights. When I stand in front of an Impressionist painting, it’s not just any old light bouncing off the canvas, it’s the blinding sunlight of 19th century absinthe-fumed Paris reaching through time and shining on me. That’s a great museum day. On a bad museum day, all I see are objects ripped from context, denatured. The moisture-controlled air grows colder, more tomblike, and the art seems to be waiting, like crypted vampires in a Hammer horror film, waiting for a few drops of blood, a clueless archeologist’s bloody nose or a devotee’s dramatically cut finger, waiting so that they can reanimate and wreak bohemian madness.

Jorge Fick oil painting, hanging in my kitchen

In my kitchen above a prep counter hangs a square canvas from the early 50s, by the Detroit-born painter Jorge Fick (1936-2004), who worked at Black Mountain College with John Chamberlain and Franz Kline. The oil painting originally belonged to the late Donald Allen, who published many of Fick’s contemporaries in the Evergreen Review and the seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. I don’t know the name of the painting nor its exact year. Don Allen told Kevin that Fick’s painting, comprised of gray, pale blue, and black rectangles, is of a window at Black Mountain. It’s soothing to stand at my cutting board and stare at this window with its opaque black panes. The painting is spattered with grease and tomato bits, it feels the changing atmosphere of my kitchen, the chill of winter, the flames under my tea kettle, the dampness of yesterday’s hail storm. Allen took better care of it, but I like to think the Fick is happy living with us. Like my mother’s cat, it’s been moved from a much cushier environment to my disgraceful funkiness, but it continues to thrive, to intersect with a living, breathing world.

Leslie Shows, Two Ways to Organize, 2006

You want to hold on to a scene, to make it last forever, but art communities are transitory, neighborhoods are transitory The Mission scene is over. No longer is it a cheap place to hang out and make art. Condos have replaced garrets, and outsiders take cabs to $$$ restaurants. When I lived there in the mid-80s it was nearly impossible to get a cab there because cabs didn’t bother going to such a shit hole. Some artists have moved to downtown galleries, others have left town. I hear Jack Hanley is closing his San Francisco gallery. The urinating cat at Adobe passed away. When I see artists I know displayed in a museum it’s a bit tragic, for that entry into the museum comes with whiffs of loss, of vibrant worlds that are no longer. Maybe it is my Mission scene, the one I remember, that is over; Kevin reminds me that, somehow, even in these inflationary times, a whole new crowd of young artists is working hard and doing beautiful things in the Mission; and that in fact many of the Mission School artists are still with us, Colter included. During the anniversary weekend “75 Reasons” show, we heard designer Jennifer Sonderby explain that she chose Leslie Shows’ Two Ways to Organize for the cover of SFMOMA’s 75 Years of Looking Forward catalogue because of the painting’s layering. Sonderby likened the history of art to geological strata, with each artist adding to the strata. What I see as the “real” San Francisco may be disappearing, but I realize that when I moved here in 1979, one month before Harvey Milk was assassinated, I was already stepping into an onrushing stream of hope and regret. Art museums. We love them, we hate them, with their canonized objects so far removed from their roots. The art museum taps into our fear of death, imbuing these fragile materials with immortality. When I reconsider Barry McGee’s bulging assemblage I realize, it’s not pregnant, it’s bulging with something from another dimension, trying to break through.

My answer was that he was confusing buildings with artists. Art scenes are complex amalgams of strengths and weaknesses, but in large part they are a factor of artists producing work worthy of attention. I felt that San Francisco had been doing that job just fine for as long as I’d been around (since the mid-70s), and that that activity seemed to move right along without any meaningful impact from the edifices going up all over town. My point being that buildings take on meaning when we see what human impact they have and what is put in them. The attention that local artists get is what goes up and down, but the production is steady. Not to say that that steady production doesn’t have stronger moments than others.

More than a decade later, things have improved along these lines. SF MOMA is much more friendly to the region than in the past, not only as evidenced by the increasingly rigorous SECA awards but by the highly inclusive recent 75th anniversary events, and the ongoing education department engagement, such as this blog. Even the De Young now has a contemporary series that has shown such local stalwarts as John Bankston and Michael Arcega. Berkeley and Oakland have both been historically strong regional presenters. (I did my best at Yerba Buena to establish a tradition of primary commitment to support of local artists; what direction the current leadership takes remains to be seen.)

The notion of world class is the McGuffin in all this. I know world class is  just a phrase, but it’s one that sets my teeth on edge. It’s the kind of language choice I associate with celebrity gossip on television. Can’t you just see the folks interviewing the movie stars on the red carpet Sunday night at the Oscars pushing a microphone into Tom Cruise’s face and chirping, “Isn’t this just a world class event?” Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless. World class is a term that I believe leaked over from the sports world. In ranking how fast the fastest sprinters can cover 100 meters, it has objectivity and meaning. Slopped over to a realm such as the arts, it only pretends to some kind of verifiable truth. So while it feigns being about the best of the best, it really means, “talked about and caught up in the international hullaballoo that we all hear so much media talk about,” with a dash of “appreciated by we who are at top of the heap.” Both meanings reveal values that imply that our worth as people and arts professionals is determined by a competitive pecking order. Juxtapose this with the values of someone like local hero Ted Purves, who is an artist who worked for almost three years in his East Bay neighborhood through an organization he and his wife Susanne Cockrell started called Temescal Amity Works. Are their modest, yet deeply, profoundly moving community-based projects world class?

So, a long and long-winded way to say, we need and love gorgeous, progressive, thriving art presenters, the more the merrier. But let’s not equate these facilities with the health of our art scenes. These buildings are only one of a couple of dozen factors that make us all rich in our arts surroundings, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I wanted to conclude by mentioning another miraculous art building’s upcoming arrival. I went on a tour of the new Crocker Museum in Sacramento on Thursday the 4th. It won’t be opening for several months but the building is essentially done, and it’s quite wonderful. It’s a one-hundred million dollar investment overseen by tireless director Lial Jones. In particular, there are several spectacular galleries on the third floor that will be the envy of most museum professionals. You can see the sawtooth clerestory-style skylights here:

Kathryn Bigelow

…on your first time to be used in the photography of  an Academy Award recipient for Best Picture and Direction:  Bay Area native Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Let’s hear it for small-gauge filmmaking!!  ¡Viva celluloide!

I used to pride myself on being really “with it,” going to shows, roaming the streets in an artistic manner and just generally being on the city’s creative pulse, rah rah rah. Ha! I know now that I am truly out of it because I have missed seeing these awesome stickers plastered in the Mission district along the same time as SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary shenanigans, but found them on one Steve Rhodes’ flickr site (thank you!). Someone had gotten their hands on a bunch of permanent collection labels and went ahead and added their own DIY sensibility to things. The collection, it seems, has grown to encompass a lot of municipal objects, along with a Judaica sensibility. Total LOL! Lurv it.

Anyone know the backstory? Or maybe some things are better left unattributed…

Kathryn Bigelow presented the Oscar for Best Director by Barbra Streisand at the 82nd Academy Awards

…0n the first of your graduates to take home Best Director and Picture Oscars.  The history of film instruction at SFAI includes the participation of such luminaries as Sidney Peterson, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and George Kuchar. Kathryn Bigelow continues SFAI’s currently challenged legacy of small-gauge celluloid filmmaking:  The Hurt Locker was photographed in Super 16mm.

Photo by Rebar

Certain bits of a museum are there for practicality and comfort – track lighting, plugs, elevators, thermostats, water fountains. Unlike the museum building or the work it houses, these niche spaces are designed to fade away into relative invisibility, to support the museum-going experience, and certainly aren’t meant to inspire or represent our cultural values. (Objectively one could read the presence of exit signs and wheelchair ramps as a culture’s endorsement of safety and accessibility, but that might be reading too much into things.)

On the other hand, our behavior is certainly, if subtly, shaped by these things we’ve been trained through repetition and exposure to ignore. No one stops in front of the unmarked door painted the same color as the wall in the corner of the gallery; one politely steps past it, and on to the next piece. A visual language composed of neutral paint and the most utilitarian of door knobs signals that this is not part of the show.

Photo by Rebar

If there’s one ubiquitous invisible fixture of the museum who invariably shapes behavior, it’s the museum guard. As fixtures, guards carry a host of responsibilities – they’re protectors, explainers, and wayfinders; their presence implies that artwork is worthy of protection, and we act accordingly.

Because they’re perceived as such a part of the institution, it’s not often that we give much thought to a guard’s experiences in the museum space, which must be unique, being both a part of the social code and exposed to it at the same time. So it’s exciting that a group of museum guards at the NY Met, many of whom are artists themselves, have decided to launch an art journal called Sw!pe, in which to showcase their own creative endeavors. According to 25CPW, the gallery where the launch party and opening was held on Thursday, “through this publication, the journal and its editors, hope to provide a platform and inspiration for other cultural institutions to showcase their own creative workforce.”

photo by Rebar

More than just talking about being museum guards, these artists are taking their position and leveraging it, processing it, activating a part of the museum infrastructure that simply wasn’t obvious before in a creative, engaging way. Out of the niche and into the spotlight.

While this intervention isn’t happening in the museum space itself, it has the potential to change the scripted social code of the museum nonetheless. Imagine engaging in a conversation with your helpful museum guard, not about the nearest bathroom or photography policies, but about their latest work or favorite masterpiece. It never really crossed our minds before, but now we wonder – why so invisible? When is the next employee show?

ZOMA Contemporary Art Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Exterior side view of main space, Zoma Contemporary Art Center

Rebar asks the question: How do artists engage with the space of the museum? This question was on my mind on a return trip to Ethiopia Feb 9 – 22. What does such a question mean in Ethiopia? What does a “museum” mean in Ethiopia? Of course there are countless, countless Ethiopians who do not know there is such a thing as a museum. There are also many who know of the thing, but for whom such a place is irrelevant, and those people include individuals from every class of society, including Ethiopia’s leaders and its educated elite. In fact it is surely the latter who bear much of the responsibility for the sorry state of artistic display and preservation at Ethiopia’s National Museum in Addis Abeba.

The National Museum of Ethiopia, where one can see Ethiopian art, artifacts, and a facsmile of LUCY, the oldest hominid ever found.

Department of Inventory and Inspection of Cultural Heritage, a building that is kitty corner to the National Museum.

Typically displayed painting in the National Museum: wire to nail, hung in front of an empty vitrine.

Detail of mud and straw construction, Zoma Contemporary Art Center, by Elias Sime

The most exciting, interesting, and forward-looking thing happening in Ethiopian contemporary art is the ZOMA Contemporary Art Center (ZCAC), the brain and love-child of curator/anthropologist/artist Meskerem Assegued. 2010 is a particularly important year for ZCAC, as they’ve just inaugurated a permanent home in Addis, and are in the process of building an artist’s residency program and museum space in the tiny village of Harla, between Ethiopia’s eastern cities of Dire Dawa and Harer. The Addis ZCAC is also a residency space – equipped with living quarters for up to two visiting artists, studio space, and a spectacular communal space suitable for small performances or discussions. The residencies are open to artists from all over the world. The built space of Addis ZCAC is itself a kind of giant sculpture, the work of artist Elias Sime (whose solo show at Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2009 was a hit), who has spent the last 9 years conceiving and building it. Using traditional craft techniques and the tukul house form (circular shape; mud and straw walls; bamboo ceiling) and primarily recycled and reclaimed materials, Sime has created a truly magical space. All manner of supernatural occurrences will happen there, along with the making, showing, and discussing of culture by Ethiopian and visiting international artists. A hyena will appear on an interior balcony reciting Ghez poetry. The giant Gota grain container’s lid will rise up and out will float a genie to hover over the courtyard, not granting wishes but making them: May this space inspire. May this location — near an open drainage sewer, near the South African Embassy, near the teletubbies courrugated sheet metal mural, near the European Union Ambassador’s residence; in the center of a country where 80 languages are spoken; in a place rich with social, natural and cultural beauty; in a place impoverished by decades of abusive leaders and third world development politics — may this location, this contemporary art center unique in Africa, unique in the world, foster a new generation of Ethiopian and foreign artists, designers, thinkers, writers, creators and dreamers.