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Documentary Photographs by KIRK CRIPPENS at SLAC Building 52

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is proud to announce an exhibit of works by the acclaimed Bay Area photographer, KIRK CRIPPENS. California Plates features large-scale color photographs taken from several separate bodies of work shot in northern California over the past nine years.

Documentary photography began at the turn of the 19th century with Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, recorders of the grim lives of the American working class in the Gilded Age. It received further impetus in the 1930s, during the Depression, when government agencies hired young photographers to capture the plight of migrant laborers and tenant farmers in the American South in order to generate support for New Deal programs. Two of the photographers associated with New Deal agencies—the Farm Services Administration and the Resettlement Agency—were Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who have been given recent retrospectives in the Bay Area, at the Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, respectively. While these photographers were given subject assignments by their bosses, the works vary with the artists’ personalities. Lange was more polemical and political than the reserved Evans, for example. The works of both succeeded, however, because of their striking aesthetic form (informed by abstract painting and sculpture) and powerful, dramatic storytelling, qualities that make them succeed with contemporary viewers experiencing a renewed empathy for the “forgotten man” of eighty years ago.
 

LAINA TERPSTRA: Departures
TAMA HOCHBAUM: Bi Series
George Lawson Gallery

Two artists look at the great mystery, time, through painting and photography in this provocative curatorial matchup. Laina Terpstra’s small to mid-sized oils on canvas at first appear to be elegant., curvilinear abstractions in muted palettes of brown, ocher, black and white, but it soon become clear that they represent the motions of absent actors, like the blurs in long-exposure photographs. Motion became a subject for artistic interpretation at the dawn of modernism with the influence of photography. The most famous example would be Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase,” but also in the running would be the lesser-known but equally memorable contemporaneous oil by the Futurist Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” with lady and pet dachshund endowed with a panoply of rotating legs, as if photographed under strobe lighting. Terpstra joins this witty tradition by making works—all visually satisfying by themselves—as variants or homages to Old Master paintings by Pieter de Hooch, Jan Steen, Jacques Louis David, and, the master of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, Caravaggio. If the monochromatic “Room of Resistance” suggests, with its ectoplasmic white veils floating in darkness, Max Ernst’s grattages set into a Redon noir, “From Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy” seems to depict the swirling Baroque draperies of that painting minus the actors of the sacred drama, Raptured to a better place? Don’t miss the small and large versions of “From Pieter de Hooch’s Man With Dead Birds and Other Figures in a Stable,” compelling mashups of Old-Master gravitas and modernist abstraction: postmodernism worth its salt—and, wonderful to relate—such contrapuntal pairings can be done!—worth hanging with the originals.

In the smaller gallery are four nocturnal-landscape photo mosaics by Tama Hochbaum, a former painter and printmaker, who now uses a camera to depict “an unfolding of time, a story told.” Shown here are four 48”x48” squares composed of eight 16”x16” prints, with the center squares absent. Hochbaum’s centerless square polyptychs, featuring shots of the night sky in various locations, and shot presumably forty-five degrees apart, are based, I am told by gallerist George Lawson (thanks for the memories!), on the neolithic jade bi, a carved circular disc with a circular hole at the center, representing heaven. —DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

GAY OUTLAW: Ozone
Anglim Gilbert Gallery

 The Bay Area conceptual artist Gay Outlaw infuses her inquiries into epistemology—what makes something a work of art, or not—and the properties of varied materials, some unusual, like the caramelized sugar of a few years ago, with craftsmanship and wit. Her current show, entitled Ozone—a reference to the damage wrought by global-climate change?—comprises work in bronze, clay, wood, aluminum, encaustic, digital photography, cast glass, and pâte de verre, or glass paste, made from firing colored pigmented glass powders in a mold. While the works explore different ideas, and do not obviously come from the same artist, a spirit of experimentation and discovery pervades all. (By the way, everything is officially untitled, but the pieces are given humorous parenthetical designations.)

 The stars of the show were the eleven pâte de verre Meatloafsunset sculptures, life-sized renditions of those familiar ingots of mystery meat, arrayed on a tabletop, as if posed for a Wayne Thiebaud painting. Each is given a glazing or topping of an unusual color e.g., teal, cyan, yellow, pink, amber, etc., suggestive of sweets rather than savories. A pair of abstract folded-metal sculptures adorned with paint—Kitchen Sink and Bent Box—and a quartet of bronze or glass sculptures, idiosyncratically evoking vessels, modelmaking and hats, are dispersed throughout the gallery. Outlaw’s strangely funny, memorable mixed-media wall pieces pair color photos of street photography with blobs or ‘flows’ of colored glass paste, as if someone had flung colored mud onto the picture-frame glass, and the artist had found the desecrations to be  mprovements (as Francis Bacon sometimes flung oil paint onto canvases that he wanted to save or improve, gambling with destruction). The glass blobs, or lava flows, also recall the free-form poured urethane sculptures of Lynda Benglis. Outlaw’s titles are as droll as the idea of the works playfully tantalizing the viewer (or spy), but, like Hamlet, pointedly retaining their mystery: Untitled (Spring Green Flow with Artist Hair), Untitled (Orange Flow with Waders), and Untitled (Navy Flow with Wistful Poodle).— DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

RAC Exhibits Works on Paper by Painter Joan Brown

In 1958, the twenty-year-old Joan Beatty, about to marry, was ill and bedridden; art books provided by her fiancé, the painter Bill H. Brown, changed her life. She later recalled: "I'd never seen any of this stuff”—i.e., on Rembrandt, Goya, and Velasquez—“and I felt this tremendous surge of energy.” Enrolling at the California School of Fine Art, she was encouraged by her mentor, the painter Elmer Bischoff (later a colleague at UC Berkeley), to find her own artistic way, and she worked through Bay Area Figuration, beat and funk toward her mature style, which combines a refined lyricism with the kind of eccentric-outsider outlook which the Bay Area nurtures.

In San Francisco galleries in the 1970s and 1980s, Brown was, if not ubiquitous, at least highly visible; some of us young know-it-alls found her simplified drawing, flat modeling and bright colors a bit too easy to like, Matisse for the masses; and the autobiographical element too sweetly northern California and even New Age, Kahlo without the angst. However, when the painter died in 1990 at age fifty-two in an art-installation accident in India—she was a follower of Sathya Sai Baba—her thirty-four year long creative life assumed a retrospective gravitas that had always been in the work, just not foregrounded. You can see the depth of her emotion in the early Abstract Expressionist works of the late 1950s, caked and crusted with oil paint. The artist Wally Hedrick said of her: "There was the innocent child, sort of flowing through time, and there was the mature artist, and they just happened to be in the same body at different times." He also remembered Bischoff’s non-judgmental judgment: “I have this extraordinary student. She's either a genius or very simple.”

Is that a false dichotomy? The art world is quick to move on to the eternal new, so fans of Brown as well as those unfamiliar with her work are well served by Joan Brown: In Living Color, a selection of works on paper borrowed from private collections. Through November 18. Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Street, Richmond; (510) 620-6772; www.therac.org. —DeWitt Cheng

A few months ago, I wrote about the new curatorial strategy in effect at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, of showing contemporary artwork interspersed with the permanent collection of traditional European art. The artist was the sculptor Urs Fishher, and I had mixed feelings about the exhibition, which was installed both in the French neoclassical courtyard dominated by Rodin’s iconic  TheThinker, and inside, amid the works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, and other dead white males of lesser note.

 It’s at http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=4169.

The current sculpture show, entitled Good Muse, by Sarah Lucas, is stylistically similar, hip and ironic, apparently geared toward attracting younger viewers unable or unwilling to confront the boring, passé art of politically incorrect creators. While Fischer achieved a certain piquant charm by juxtaposing his large bronze casts of amateurish clay sculptures with the columns and courtyard, and Rodin’s pensive colossus, Lucas’s soft figurative sculptures merely disrupt whatever contemplative atmosphere may remain in the museum in this year 100 or so of Our Duchamp.

But first, a quick tour d’horizon. A large pair of women’s boots cast in concrete, Jubilee, stands at the center of the foyer gallery, with its permanent Rodin residents now flanked by translucent cast-resin toilets placed atop small refrigerators and pedestals. The visual discontinuity is enough, but the pretentious banality of the curatorial notes is in my opinion excruciating. Jubilee is presented as a contemporary riposte to Rodin’s Gates of Hell (placed, as it is, amid details from that monumental work): the material, we’re told, conjures up the cement boots of gangster lore, “and thus aligns a woman’s sexual power with ... renegade violence.” The seven Floppy Toilet works, cast in urine yellow, and seemingly melting or dissolving, “serve as a reminder of our servitude to the biological needs of our bodies,” with their “unexpected and often comical grace ... contradict[ing] their scatological implications in favor of more existential considerations.” Two abject, dolllike sculptures made from tights stuffed with cotton fluff, and entitled Tit Teddy (Gates of Hell), are ignominiously placed atop the pedestal for Rodin’s The Three Shades, while two similar stuffed-tights figures, sit in adjacent galleries. Titti Doris, a cluster of balloonlike breasts with long spindly legs but no torso, arms or head, slumps in a chair, “a fertility goddess wrapped up in the insecurities of a little girl.” Washing Machine Fried Egg, a pair of flaccid legs surmounted by sunny-side-up eggs for breasts, “simultaneously iterates and lampoons the patriarchal idea that a woman’s purpose is ... serving a husband’s sexual appetites and domestic needs.” The monumentally ithyphallic Innamemorabiliumumbum “combines the iconic tropes of the reclining odalisque or harem girl with that of the predatory satyr eternally ready and on the hunt for love.”

Even more appalling is a trio of nude female figures, truncated at the waist and sprawling or reclining suggestively. Cast from life in white plaster, they derive from the Greco-Roman marble-statue tradition, but they’re the anithesis of classical dignity and gravitas: the supine Margot has a cigarette inserted in her anus; the sitting Pauline has one in her buttocks; the prone Michele, legs spread, has a cigarette placed in her vagina. The explanatory labels discuss female exploitation and empowerment—you go, girl, victim!—but how can any self-respecting woman, especially an enlightened, educated one,  see these as anything but deeply offensive and, yes, misogynistic? To be fair, Lucas trashes the male gender as well, as we’ve seen, but are people really as contemptible and mindless as portrayed here? (Rodin’s portrait of Camillle Claudel and hers of him stand, by the way, near the entrance to the toilet-rich gallery.) The classic tradition, with Rodin as its Romantic culmination, often ennobled man, and we live in an antiheroic and sometimes misanthropic age—for out anthropogenic sins?— but it was also cognizant of madness and tragedy, none of which is on display here.

These two shows, Fischer and Lucas, purport to honor the work of Rodin. Want to do that, for real? Tolle et lege (take up and read): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais