Harold Terry Lindahl Open Studio at 312 Connecticut Street, October 26-7, 2019; opening Friday Oct 25

HAROLD TERRY LINDAHL is an architect, philosopher and painter, as well as a former gallerist during the San Francisco Beat Era. He creates intricate, elegant ink drawings demonstrating the principles of his philosophical researches; abstract paintings based on those drawings that marry evocative form with color, recalling the works of Kandinsky, Klee and others; and large, totem-like structures related to Constructivism, expressing his views of the human condition at this moment in evolutionary history.  www.haroldterrylindahl.com


HAROLD TERRY LINDAHL

Ontologically, over billions of years, evolutionary processes have produced a three-brained biped species whose experience ... includes, beyond hunger and reproduction, awe, yearning, and aspiration. From Lascaux to Falling Water, Democritus to Einstein, and from Pagan rites to Psyvolutionary self-examination, we humans conduct and express anagogical [mystical] pressures through the lenses of Science, Art, and Religion. Sensorially we’re in awe. Emotionally we yearn. Intellectually we aspire. —Harold Terry Lindahl, Signals from the Vagus Gyre, 2010, p.3

SPIRITUALITY IN ART

The art world often seems caught between the Scylla of pointless shock and awe and the Charybdis of status consumerism. Art and life have converged, unpleasantly, in the art-as-business (and entertainment and fashion) era. We take heart, however, at the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future of the Swedish mystic artist.

A polymath and visionary who supported herself making traditional botanical drawings and painted landscape and portrait paintings during a six-decade career, af Klint (1862-1944) worked, in secret, on abstract paintings that are, a century later, garnering amazed interest. She left twelve hundred works, including one hundred ninety-three paintings. The seventy-six paintings in the Guggenheim show are both huge and ambitious: in scale, they are unmatched until the Abstract Expressionist era, fifty years later; and in their cosmic/philosophical themes, embodied in geometrized organic forms and singing color harmonies, they are far from the safe decoration of domesticated rote abstraction. Indeed, Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker abandoned critical understatement and called the show nothing less than ‘flabbergasting.’

As important as the works’ visual impact is their new place in art history: begun in 1906, they precede by some five years the abstractions of af Klint’s generational contemporaries who had been heretofore accorded discoverers’ honors: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), Konstantin Malevich (1879-1935), and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). This is not to diminish the men’s work, or to cite yet another ‘obstacle race’ (to employ Germaine Greer’s term) that women artists have always faced.

Af Klint made no effort to compete with the boys, and worked in virtual seclusion, known only to four women friends who studied the Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and other esoteric Spiritualist practices—New Age avant la lettre— that flourished at the turn of the century. The Five (as they dubbed themselves), who even held séances, were far from unique: William James and Arthur Conan Doyle studied the spirit world; Mondrian studied Theosophy; and utopianism was in the air. Af Klint, however, took such a dim (or realistic) view of the art audience of a century ago that she stipulated in her will that her work not be shown until twenty years after her death, for a presumably more enlightened audience. It is gratifying to report that both her work found her audience and received its overdue accolades, if only posthumously. It is also refreshing that af Klint’s art is free of the fashionable irony and cynical commercialism of current art fashion. Her major series, The Paintings for the Temple, (1906-15) was created at the behest of Amaliel, a “High Master” spirit guide, and was intended for a circular Temple, never built, which would have centered on a spiral, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. The poetic justice of af Klint’s show appearing—like an apport, a substance materialized at a séance by a medium—in Wright’s cultural “temple of the spirit” (his words), almost suggests supernatural connivance.

 

HAROLD TERRY LINDAHL

The art of San Francisco architect and painter Harold Terry Lindahl, like af Klint’s, transcends artistic zeitgeist, and is both deeply personal and universal, offering beauty and meaning to viewers of both aesthetic and philosophic bents. Like her, he worked in solitude, “carried along by a persistent Scandinavian/Scots hermeticism.”

Lindahl, now in his late eighties, worked fin Bay Area or nearly five decades as a modernist architect, in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition of Organic Architecture, before turning to painting full-time in 2008, in order to express his views about humanity and its evolution. Studying at the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s with Bruce Goff, who was influenced by Wright, Lindahl became fascinated with geometric order and metamorphic form-generation through systematic variations and modulations. After discovering the teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian philosopher and gnostic, he studied with the Gurdjieffian, Lord Pentland, in New York and San Francisco from the late 1960s to the 1980s, when he would eventually found the Intropy=Entropy Institute, housed on Potrero Hill in a building that had housed San Francisco’s first silent movie theater. The theater has been transformed into a kind of red-brick temple, partly modernist and partly Greco-Roman, replete with cast-concrete columns. It’s a fitting display space for Lindahl’s artwork, living quarters, office and workshop. (‘Intropy,’ incidentally, is a neologism coined to express the opposite of ‘entropy’: an increase in energy, potential and organization; a reduction in random.)

Gurdjieff posits the coexistence of three brains in human beings: the ancient, primitive lizard brain, controlling our bodily functions; the more evolved mammal brain, with emotional functioning; and the neocortical human brain, endowed with logic, emotion and imagination: ”coherent conscience and reason, in Lindahl’s words. These ‘internecine’ brains have different functions, and too often the lower, atavistic brains rule us when coherent conscience and objective reason are required. So do the habits and institutions from previous eras.

Lindahl discerns a spiritual crisis in contemporary culture. In 2010, in an art-exhibit catalog Signals from the Vagus Gyre, he wrote (p.2): “Traditional religions are and logical speculation moot. Yet we’re in awe, we yearn for meaning, and aspire to realize our psychological potential.” Like the visionary English Romantic, William Blake, Lindahl sees a mystical marriage between competing modes of perception as the cure for our rootless anomie. In Lindahl’s cosmology and philosophy, ancient lore (Parmenides, Lucretius, and Gnosticism) and contemporary science (Darwin, Einstein, Schrödinger) converge. The synthesis of these normally antagonistic worldviews and modes knowledge results in “an Objective Religion and an Objective Art that informs science of religion and religion of science, ” or, alternatively, “Objectivity in Art and Religion and Morality in Science.” Such an integration of our fragmented consciousness sounds appealing, of course; even without any explication of the underlying philosophy, Lindahl’s complexly beautiful works stands on their own, but a brief introduction to this hermetic polymath’s drawings, paintings and sculptures may be helpful.

 

***

 

AN OBJECTIVE ART

Gestation History and Potential of Man (2018) is a suite of forty-nine India-ink drawings, each15-1/2” high by11-1/4” wide, on Arches watercolor paper, and mounted on 8-ply museum board, which is them mounted to 24”x84” sheets of polished copper, seven to a panel.  They represent the potential for human evolution, with evolved cortices overlaid atop earlier cortices, from ‘post-simian’ man (endowed with a Paleozoic reptilian brain) into a true Homo sapiens, worthy of  the name (endowed with a Mesozoic mammalian brain).  There are seven levels of development: School Man, Transition Man, Psyolving Man (i.e., psychologically and psychically progressing), 3-Brained Gestation Man, Native Virtue Man, Indulgent Man, and Searching Man. Each developmental level is represented by an octave of variations, eight tones as in music, do re mi fa so la ti (or si) do, or rather seven, since the first tone and the last are the same note. In Lindahl’s schema, these tones have mystical resonances:

Do      Dominus, the process of creation and the natural cycle of growth and decay

Re       Regina Coeli, Queen of the heavens, the Moon

Mi      Microcosmos, the small universe, Earth

Fa       Fata, Fate, ruled by the planets.

So       Sol, Sun

La       Lactae, milk, the Milky Way galaxy

Si        Sider, star, all galaxies

Do      Dominus, Lord
Replacing the tonal scale’s full-stop keyboard intervals —i.e., the black keys—are geometric variations or progressions of form modulation: acute (re), rectified (mi), obtuse (fa), circular/arc (so), oval (la), spiral (si) and mobile (do). Likewise, colors, chords, geometric figures and behavioral characteristics are linked in a nine-part color circle in a chart entitled The Harmonics of Planetary Ergodicity; 1 lies tonally between C Major and D Minor (Cadmium Orange Light, Rational); 9, lies between B Diminished and C Major (Light Yellow-Green, Irrational).


The Harmonics of Unity (2017) is an array of forty-two small, vivid watercolor paintings, 9” tall by 7” wide, accompanied by an explanatory treatise.  These abstractions give full range to Lindahl’s technical talent, and are accessible as independent artworks to those unfamiliar with their theoretical foundations; with their stylistic affinities to Cubism, Surrealism, and even Abstract Expressionism and Symbolism, they would complement with the best modernist art of the first half of the twentieth century.

Displayed on a long wall, as they are at the Intropy=Entropy Institute, they’re imposing en masse, arranged in fourteen vertical rows in three bands or registers, which are to be read vertically, bottom to top, as 1) Involutionary Formation; 2) Evolutionary Transformation; and 3) Psyvolutionary Transformation; or, again from bottom to top, the Lizard Brain of physical survival, the Lithosphere; the Mammalian Brain of consciousness, the Atmosphere; and,at the top, the Higher Brain of an evolved humanity, the Cognosphere. “Objective art,” writes Lindahl, ...arises from the psychologically “vertical” or existential dynamics of aspiration; it functions to illuminate the relations between biological place and psychological purpose; it awakens one’s consciousness to the otherwise subconscious potential latent in ... our manifold of being-brains.”

Lindahl also associates geometric forms with various personality traits: acute angles, for example, denote a shrewd and ardent character, while obtuse angles denote a mundane and credulous one, and mobile, random lines denote a desultory, chaotic one. Whether or not you accept Lindahl’s existential vision, linking geometry with psychology, his formidable gift for orchestrating and modulating color and form to suggest evolution makes one a believer at the very least in the artist’s conviction and aesthetic vision, a marriage of systematic process—“Geometry is the alphabet and vocabulary of artistic expression”—and artistic intuition.

 

Pensive and Vigilant (2016) are stunning abstract sculptures that depict the relationship between the sympathetic and parasympathetic functions of the Autonomic Nervous System. The ANS, Lindahl writes (The Harmonics of Unity, p.24), is “a semiotic medium through which assessments and assignments of energy to fight, flight, or freeze reactions, or to the innervation of the vital organs, are processed.” If you imagine the spine as a bodily tree trunk, then the vagus nerve, enclosed by spinal vertebrae, is a communicative lattice, processing incoming signals from nerve receptors, evaluating them, and commanding the appropriate responses from muscles and organs. In Lindahl’s sculptures, triple layers of laminated glass and colored plexiglass are cut into wing forms surmounted by volutes that suggest bowed, intently focused heads, in simplified form. With the wing forms radiating from the cylindrical aluminum cores, or spines, and illuminated by colored LED lighting, the sculptures suggest both organs or embryos, self-contained and self-monitoring, and futuristic guardians or messengers, both avian and angelic.

While it is natural these days to wonder if we clever primates can manage not to exterminate ourselves, the model of intellectual evolution presented by Lindahl’s brilliant, Beardsleyesque draftsmanship and his surrealist/abstract metamorphic bipeds (Reptilian Man, Neo-Mammal, Impartial Conscience, et al., including Catholicism’s Seven Deadly Sins) is compelling and ingenious. As with religious art and even aesthetic art, we need not necessarily subscribe to the program—Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescos, for the profane? Duchamp’s Large Glass, for the uninitiated?—to appreciate the art on its own visual terms. We may even be able to absorb, osmotically, a bit of the content. Even in our skeptical age, we must renew our faith in the human adventure, and the power of reason. The New Man, that dream of modernist artists, a century ago, may prove to be, in the words of long ago and far away, our last hope.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lindahl, H.T., Post-Simian Pre-Homo Sapiens Conundrum, 2019, I=E Institute San Francisco, California, www.intropy-entropy-institute.org

Lindahl, H.T., Gestation History and Potential Of Mankind, 2018, I=E Institute San Francisco, California, www.intropy-entropy-institute.org

Lindahl, H.T., The Harmonics of Unity, 2017, Trioctave Editions, San Francisco, California. www.intropy-entropy-institute.org

Lindahl, H.T., Signals From The Vagus Gyre: Studies toward Objectivity in Art, 2010,Trioctave Editions, San Francisco, California https://www.haroldterrylindahl.com/publications/

Selz, P.; Lindahl, H.T.; Hays, S.: Harmonics of Unity: An Interview with Art Historian Dr. Peter Selz, 2011; Trioctave Editions, San Francisco, California https://www.haroldterrylindahl.com/publications/

Moan, Rebekah, “Gurdjieff Society Mounts Exhibitions on Harmonics,” The Potrero View, April 2015


Annabeth Rosen at Contemporary Jewish Museum (reprinted from KQED Art Blog10/)

Annabeth Rosen’s Earthen Humor at CJM

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped at Contemporary Jewish Museum, Jul 25, 2019–Jan 19, 2020

Annabeth Rosen’s extraordinary exhibit of clay sculptures—resembling serving vessels, table settings, and standing figures—is a virtuosic display of craftsmanship, but also of experimentation. Subtitled Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, this retrospective features thousands of ceramic fragments assembled into modestly-sized but visually and emotionally powerful composites. Rosen, the Robert Arneson Professor of Ceramics at UC Davis, shares some of that Funk artist’s outré sense of humor, but she also takes from the ceramic abstract expressionist Peter Voulkos, one of her teachers, a love of clay’s versatility, physicality and malleability. I suspect also that Stephen de Staebler’s use of broken and normally discarded pieces from the kiln nay have influenced her, and can easily imagine her reconstructed potsherd vessels in curatorial dialogue with his tragic, broken archaic figures. Tracing these possible genealogies takes nothing from Rosen’s achievement, however. We overvalue what appears unique and novel in our era of insecure individuality and compensatory braggadocio; we should acknowledge that art transcends generations, and that the best art is voraciously informed, not wilfully ignorant.

The show’s arrangement—clusters of related works separated by long risers festooned small vessel-like sculptures— suggests a festive gathering. The banquet analogy may suggest both Judy Chicago’s powerful The Dinner Party, with its place settings commemorating women short-changed by male-dominated history; and the more playful 1971 sculpture,  “Smorgi-Bob, The Cook,” by Arneson, with its forced-perspective table of serving dishes leading to a vanishing point occupied not by Leonardo’s serene Jesus, but the young artist (his first self-portrait), the master of ceramic gastronomy.




Nancy Princenthal, in her catalogue essay, “Annabeth Rosen: Shape-Shifter,” describes the effect, both oddly disturbing and hilarious, of Rosen’s aesthetic balancing act: 

... the slope-shouldered new sculptures seem to have neither fixed contours nor stable shape; even their scale appears to shift as you look. Some hint at volcanoes, others at featureless heads. Not so much covered with as compounded of hundreds of writhing, snakelike elements, they are variously volcanic, beastly, catastrophic, and unnervingly funny, suggesting ... granite, bone, molten lava, cascading water, and substances less noble: cake frosting, lanky hair ... dirty snow. Many are blackened in their recesses, as if soiled with age.

The exhibition is exciting and exhilarating, with the 120 or so works impeccably displayed. But because of the absence of labeling, it’s also somewhat difficult to absorb and navigate. The pertinent information—titles, dates, etc.—is available in binders that one can carry around, but it’s cumbersome and time-consuming. I understand the argument that labels get in the way of aesthetic engagement, and agree, to some extent, that some viewers judge work only by brand names; but let’s leave it to the viewers to decide if they want to follow the artist’s progress. Also, Rosen’s witty titles, some of which are probably invented words, are not to be missed. That quibble aside, here’s a brief verbal tour of the show, with the five bodies of work listed in chronological order.

Section 1 includes works from the 1990s upon her arrival in California from New York, with substructures resembling plates and tiles supporting dense encrustations of animal and plant life, but the geometry nearly disappears beneath the imagery, like Hindu temples swarming with statuary. Sample (1999), a grid of squirming, tentacular yellow froms reminiscent of noodles, kelp bulbs and split avocados, suggests a gigantic lasagna, albeit one the size of a bed or car; it is easy to spot at the rear of the gallery.


Section 2 comprises ten “mashup” works that abandon the pedestal format in favor of looser compositions. Rosen fabricates hundreds of ceramic forms and then combines them into surprisingly anthropomorphic structures that are perched atop steel structures that are outfitted with casters, like bizarre kitchen carts or work stations. With their ungainly, bulbous, bowling-pin forms and striped patterning, Nella, Rool, and Talley are wonderfully absurd and exuberant.


Section 3 features “mound” structures composed of hundred of pieces fired and refired “until failure and fatigue sets in,” to quote the museum notes, and then tied together with steel baling wire, which is sometimes covered with clay and sometimes left visible. The twelve small mound sculptures like “Atlas,” Block,” and “Fray, set on a low, round pedestal, suggest miniature landscapes, or Chinese scholar stones— as well as the odd confections that might have been crafted by Chef Philip Guston (in an alternate universe).



Section 4 is composed of six “bundle” sculptures, with the component pieces constrained by rubber straps (inner tubes?) rather than steel wire.

Section 5 comprises 28 works in acrylic, ink and gouache on paper that are related to the sculptures, since some are studies, but stand as independent abstract artworks.

This twenty-year retrospective, Rosen’s first in a Bay Area museum, is both fun and funny, as well as an object lesson in creative variety within aesthetic consistency. We get to follow the progress of sensibility that is combines humor, both wacky and a little mordant, with a fearless, restless creative drive. This thrilling exhibit is a visual banquet, an embarras de richesses, and should not to be missed. The Bay Area has another ceramic master to add to its pantheon.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13867880/at-the-cjm-20-years-of-annabeth-rosens-earthen-humor?fbclid=IwAR3PRdHNWHHZfq5DiayHRTs5fc7C2nAmBGvVOVsVBeWoz9ZX61bnRY2_w0U

"Strange" at Berkeley Art Museum (reprinted from East Bay Monthly, October 2019)

Spacy Oddities

 “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” Strange, a vast exhibition that draws on the Berkeley Art Museum’s extensive collection, ratifies biologist JBS Haldane’s aperçu, while extolling creative subjectivity and the artistic imagination, both disparaged in recent years as, respectively, illusory (since individuality is a myth) and compromised by its ostensible service to power. Postmodernist groupthink had a good run—until it collided with the iceberg of global capitalism and climate change. (Welcome to surrealist hell, eggheads.)

Surrealism, long considered by formalist critics a deplorable aesthetic misadventure, has regained credibility in our stranger-than-fiction, mad-Tea-Party times. Strange postulates that the surrealist impulse predates and postdates the movement’s glory years from approximately 1920 to 1940; that the human psyche’s embrace of the mythic, fantastic, and dreamlike—le merveilleux, in Surrealist terminology—even the nightmarish, is eternal.

Two Berkeley artists set the tone. A bronze sculpture by Stephen De Staebler evokes an excavated archaeological find, barely recognizable as a winged human, symbolizing the soul’s freedom, broken but unbowed. De Staebler exemplifies the “tragic humanism” that BAM’s founding director, the late Peter Selz, championed in the late 1950s. A haunted melting landscape by Ariel Parkinson, “The Inner Wilderness‑Shaman (Forest)” depicts the subconscious mind as a riot of tendrils and creepers, with life finding a way. (Sara Kathryn Arledge’s “Stellar Garden” might almost be a pendant.)

 Divided into thematically organized galleries—Myth and Magic, Inside/Outside, Dreams and Visions, etc.—the show’s very size causes it to lose focus when it considers contemporary artists, some of whom prioritize sociopolitical aims and/or artistic eccentricity over personal vision. (I take issue issue with some of the curatorial editorializing, too.) But the museum’s vaults treasures more than compensate for a few aesthetic divagations. Don’t miss, amid the embarras of celebrity-artist richesses (Arneson, Bellmer, Blake, Bourgeois, Conner, Cornell, Doig, Dürer, Goya, Hesse, Hogarth, Magritte), works by Lesley Dill, Sylvia Fein, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Gonzales, Nancy Grossman, Higgs and Ranson, Anton Lehmden, and Jill Sylvia.

 Strange runs through January 5, 2020; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, 510/642-0808; bampfa.org. —DeWitt Cheng

Why The Arnautoff Compromise is Right for Right Now (reprinted from VisualArtSource.com, 8/16/19). Sequel to previous piece in July 31 East Bay Express (scroll down)..

Victor Arnautoff, Self-Portrait, 1950 or 1951 (location unknown). HR 9490 was Cold War internal-security act.

Play It Down

The recent controversy over Victor Arnautoff’s Depression-era murals at George Washington High School has attracted national attention. The progressive artist’s dignified depiction of black slaves and the now-infamous “dead Indian” (cited by generations of ‘unwoke’ GWHS white kids) excited criticism from minority kids, parents, and activists who feel that the murals demean them and glorify patriarchy and genocide. Their arguments swayed the school board into its unanimous decision to whitewash the murals—to “paint it down” in the words of the iconoclasts, prompting writers from Time to National Review to opine on the curious, only-in-SF case. A similar controversy that erupted in the late 1960s was settled by a compromise: the creation of a pro-minority mural by the young artist Dewey Crumpler, who supported the Arnautoff mural then and still does, now.

The seemingly peremptory decision to delete the mural galvanized massive support from art-lovers and historians, who signed petitions and decried the folly of uninformed censorship. The preservationists argue that the murals should become a central part of the teaching of history and culture. Almost all GWHS alumni support the mural, including actor Danny Glover and Crumpler. After reading Robert W. Cherny’s excellent biography of Arnautoff, I wrote “The Shame of the Mural Censors: Why Art and History Matter” (East Bay Express, July 31, 2019, now online).

In the face of this widespread opposition (75% of San Franciscans oppose censorship), the school board moderated its decision, and now proposes, to its credit, covering up the offensive parts, non-destructively. While I support the preservationist argument for using the murals for education, I believe that this compromise is the best possible solution to what seems a perpetually thorny issue. When I attended the latest school board meeting, on August 13, the passion of the POC kids and parents was emotional and palpable, and surprisingly affecting (despite some dramatic posturing). Many of the anti-muralists asked, with only slight rhetorical exaggeration, “Why do we have to fight this again? We ‘ve been fighting it for fifty years,” echoing Jennifer Wilson’s article, “Black People Don’t Need Murals to Remember Injustice,” in The Nation. That the mural opponents consider the mural advocates—largely older, and white, but with many exceptions—to be patronizing and even patriarchal is unfortunate, but understandable, given the centuries of abuse, exploitation and marginalization that continue today with abhorrent racial attacks, verbal and physical, by whites fearful of losing power and status. With further demographic change (i.e., the browning of America and the political ascendancy of non-racist millennials), might the whole issue eventually lose its toxic charge, making the mural safe to regard as a historical document? Stay tuned. But in the meantime, mural proponents should be wary of overplaying their (our) hand, demanding ‘informed’ acquiescence from the mural opponents, which can seem too much like enforcing silent prayer in the Church of Great White Father One.

The compromise of temporarily covering the painful parts resolves the difficulty for now. Neither side gets a total victory; neither gets a total defeat. I now believe, after observing its proceedings, that the school board, which I had earlier mocked for truckling to PC fashion, made its ill-informed decision in good faith. It has learned not to make snap judgments. The mural opponents and advocates have learned that art and history are complicated and fraught, and that simple solutions are illusory, and, the more radical, the more imperfect and flawed. The controversy, which made San Francisco look ridiculous in the national media for several months, has proven that dialogue and compromise, the touchstones of democracy can work, even in an era dominated by tribal passions and prejudices; by the ‘fake news” president’s assertions that “What you see isn’t happening” and his lawyer’s Zen maxim, “The truth isn’t truth”; the degradation of politics into spectacle and theater driven by distractions and disinfotainment (disinformation plus entertainment); and the historical and cultural amnesia of much of the electorate. It has been, in the words of one constitutional scholar and community activist, a “teachable moment.” 

That we are now an anti-intelllectual culture does not bode well for the future. I refer the intellectually curious to Greg Lukianoff’s and Jonathan Haidt’s article from The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” from September 2015, its title probably alluding to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which advanced a similar thesis: that doctrinaire political correctness is no substitute for engagement with history, and that critical thinking skills are not just being unthinkingly critical of the professoriate’s designated bogeymen and -women. Democracy is a process as well as an ideal. If the American experiment in self-governance is to survive, if the human world is to continue, we must get informed, choose our battles wisely, and eschew whenever possible ideological showboating, however holy and eternal the cause. Play it down, people.

John Vanderlyn, The Death of Jane McCrea, 1804

 

 

Simon Neri at Avenue 12 Gallery

An edited version was published in Richmond Review, August, 2019

Avenue 12 Gallery Showcases Photo-Mosaics by Simo Neri

 If traditional matted and framed photographs that depict one instant in time from one viewpoint—“the decisive moment,” in the phrase erroneously attributed to the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—seem somehow old hat in the everything-right-now digital era, the current show at Avenue 12 Gallery may be what you’re looking for.

 Urban Rhythms features a variety of photographic collages or mosaics by Simo Neri, shot in Paris, Rome and New York, before her recent return to San Francisco, and printed on cotton canvas and silk. Presenting multiple views of places and events that capture the complexity and simultaneity of contemporary life, they may remind you of the multiple views in Picasso’s cubism and the ironic photo arrays in Warhol’s Pop, a century ago and fifty years ago, respectively. The show opened June 26 and reopens, after a hiatus, on July 31, continuing until August 17.

 If you are unfamiliar with Avenue 12 Gallery, it’s a gem of a space located at the corner of 12th Avenue and Lake Street in the Richmond, across the street from Mountain Lake Park. Formerly a convenience store, the light-filled storefront was converted to a showroom for Japanese furniture and artifacts under the name TableAsia in 2005. Vince Meyer, who with his wife Rachel Murray Meyer owns the gallery, grew up in the Richmond District, and learned metal work from his father, the proprietor of Metal Mending, on Clement Street, between 12th and Funston, across from the Christian Science Reading Room. VInce took over the business from his retired father, and operated it until 1988. In the mid-1980s, a client brought him a tansu, an antique Japanese storage chest of exquisite craftsmanship, requesting that he fashion a steel base suitable for displaying the piece in a western home: raising it about eight inches to table height; protecting it from kicks and scuffs; and bestowing on it the formal presentation worthy of a museum piece.


 Vince: “I fell in love with the whole Japanese aesthetic, the art, the culture; I started reading about Buddhism and Zen, and watching Kurosawa movies—the whole deal.” Devising a strong but minimalist powder-coated black steel structure, he was discovered by other antiques clients as well as a few artists, and Table Asia continues today with in the gallery, discreetly subordinated to the contemporary art, and online (tableasia.com), with custom contemporary furniture fashioned from beautifully carved and gilded windows, doors and ranma, and wooden transom screens, as well as hanging painted silk scrolls and framed katagami, the intricately cut paper stencils used in block-printing fabric for kimonos.

 Several years ago, the Meyers decided to hang the artwork of several painter friends and local artists in the gallery. Rachel: “We thought it was just going to be one show at that point. But it was exciting to see new work on the walls and the artists were so happy to see their work on the walls.” VInce: “We started meeting new people, and it expanded. We always thought of it as an expansion rather than a change.” Rachel has been an art collector since college, buying a painting at the Smith College Art Gallery in installments from her waitressing job (“I have to have this. I want to live with this.”). A professional artist and photographer herself (as well as an industrial engineer), she also had prior experience selling photographs, both hers and those of William Giles and Ruth Bernhard; she was also involved in an art auction benefiting the Dalai Lama. “Sharing the space” with artists and the art community is a priority with the Meyers, who are active participants in the Bay Area art scene as well as members of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association.

In her July 20 talk at the gallery, SImo Neri displayed the passion and intellectual curiosity that mark all of this gallery’s exhibitions. She distinguished between theoretical or project-based artists, who work from a premise, and artists who “go out and hunt and capture visual opportunities ... opportunistic photographers,” with whom she feels a closer affinity. She also identifies as a “serial photographer: “One image does not tell the whole story. Combine enough single images, and patterns and rhythms emerge.” Indeed, for Neri, rhythm is more than a compositional device: it’s her view of the structure of life on earth, visible in the of her patchwork quilt of her earthen-hued photos, “Mura Romane II (Roman Walls); the herringbone pattern of alternating diagonal architectural vistas in “Paris Perspective” and “NYC Perspective”; the architectural treasures of Korea, copied from old books and colorized in Prussian blue in “Door and Windows” and “Roofs”; and collages of Paris garbage (“Trash’), Brooklyn graffiti (“Talking Walls II”) and protest-march signs (”Signs of the Times”). Each Urban Rhythm photocollage is composed of Cartier-Bresson images à la sauvette, to use the French term, taken on the sly rather than planned and pre-visualized: each assemblage of grab shots, to use contemporary American photo parlance, is elevated to the level of art.