OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

I first paid a visit to 871 Fine Arts when it was housed at 49 Geary. This must have been about three years ago. The long and wide room had posters on its walls, as well as original works by George Herms, Jim Dine, Franz Kline, and many others. In the very back was a tight square room packed with art books organized into interesting sections: Prints, Drawings, California Artists. The poetry section had an emphasis on its inevitable intersection with visual art. I went back a few times, often during the first Thursdays, in which the building was packed for all of the openings, though I often found 871 to be the most pleasurable place to visit.

871 Fine Arts moved to its current location about a year ago. It’s on Hawthorne now, a side street just off of Howard, south of Market. The new space is on the bottom floor and seems better suited to both the gallery and bookshop aspects. More space for the books overall, with a strangely exquisite light falling onto massive chrome shelves. The art is given two long walls and is also placed as an accent around the books, behind the desks and then a free standing glass case as well.

The current show (at the time of my visit) is paintings and drawings by June Felter. I overhear 871’s owner Adrienne Fish telling a visitor that these works are “classic California figurative,” and that Ms. Felter has just celebrated her 90th birthday, with two of the paintings in the show completed this year. Her use of color is consistently striking, especially within her beach scenes. The colors in these jump out in a manner I more often associate with abstract painting. I was dreaming of a summer house in which I might hang one. Felter lost many works in the 1991 Berkeley/Oakland fire, but managed to save her slides, and over the last ten years has been rather obsessively producing a series of books from these mostly lost works.

One of the things I have most admired about 871 is its relaxed and very inviting atmosphere. Adrienne seems to know offhand where even the most obscure volumes reside (for example: a picture book by John Cage on how to make mud pies; Piero Heliczer’s The Soap Opera, and 12345678910, a collaboration of poems and drawings by Robert Creeley and Arthur Okamura)

Sitting down at Adrienne’s desk, I mention that last year at the holiday sale I picked up a small book on John Altoon and that I always seem to be attracted to artists who are considered by some to be wildly uneven. She says this seems to describe every artist at some point.

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Try as we might to get away from the museum, it always lures us in with something bright. This summer in San Francisco, we had the Richard Avedon exhibition and the show which matched Georgia O Keeffe and Ansel Adams (as some wags call it, Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm.) Then there’s “Not New Work,” curated by SFMOMA’s Apsara Di Quinzio and selected by Vincent Fecteau from the museum’s own hoard of antiquity.

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I’ve never met the painter Harry Jacobus but his position in San Francisco art history is unassailable, and his romantic vision has this sort of, oh I don’t know, sublime excess that speaks to me even today.  Maybe you have to be in the right mood to get him, and perhaps that’s why his reputation is highest among poets, musicians, and other artists.   That’s just a guess on my part.  The work is decorative, pleasing, and stops just this side of florid, but all these things are true of Cezanne, right, and yet Harry Jacobus is a name unknown except for, hmmm, I am tempted to use the term cognoscenti even though that seems dead wrong!  But I do love him.

Some find his work unbearably twee, even trite.  If you find the early, romantic pictures of Jess too sincere, you are definitely not man enough to stare down the limpid realities of Jacobus at his most characteristic. (With Jess and the poet Robert Duncan, Harry Jacobus founded the legendary King Ubu Gallery on Fillmore Street back in 1953.) Thus it was with great interest that I opened my mailbox to find an invitation to a show of Jacobus’s crayon drawings—some paintings—that was going to be held at a private home in Berkeley right behind the Claremont Hotel.

I went with Eric Delehoy, a friend of my wife’s who was visiting from Portland, a man whom I hoped would appreciate the rarity of the occasion. Eric, a writer himself and one of the editors of Gertrude magazine, just gulped and got into the car, and from there we got lost three different times.  So when we tiptoed in, the event had begun and our hostess was playing some French music on the piano and it was like a Raul Ruiz film come to life. Either she had taken all her other art work down, and just hung every wall with Jacobus work of all periods, or she actually has this on her walls every day. (more…)