ArtOpticon.us

TERRY ST. JOHN: Figures, Landscapes & Still Lifes: Six Decades of Painting

Dolby Chadwick Gallery

 The huge crowds at SFMOMA’s Matisse and Diebenkorn show prove two things: that Bay Area Figuration (BAF) has an enduring appeal, and that, even in our deeply unserious culture, serious artists learn from serious artists, tribal elders whose work speaks across time. The painter Terry St. John has a long history in the BAF tradition, having studied informally in college with his friend James Weeks, a Diebenkorn student; and, after earning an MFA, going on to an illustrious career as painter, curator and educator. Frances Malcolm’s incisive catalogue essay quotes the artist: “Painting somehow gave me an opening to the future and a sense of hope ... it was salutary.”

 This career retrospective features thirty figure studies, landscapes and still lives, mostly in oil on canvas, cardboard or panel, but including eight figure studies made between 2012 and 2017 (during trips to Thailand) in ink wash on paper. St. John’s painterly, expressionist style will remind viewers of Diebenkorn and Weeks, but if Diebenkorn’s lyrical color and refulgent space owe a debt to Matisse, St. John’s heavy, simplified forms, at times almost obscured beneath his rugged, scumbled impastos and high-contrast lighting, suggest to my eye the monumental, archaic figures of Picasso’s Iberian period preceding the invention of Cubism. Thai Woman With Tuba (2016), Chiang Mai Balcony (2016), and Bupha By WIndow (2016), to name only three works, are beautiful paintings, but powerful and sculptural rather than pleasantly luxurious or chromatically melodious: Spanish duende rather than French delectation? In some pieces, you may descry other influences percolating into the creative mix: David Park in Solveig (2014); Guston and Rouault in Lanna Farm Woman (2015); Munch (whose influence can be seen in the landscapes) in the early Uncle George (1956). Don’t miss these wonderful landscapes and still lives: Studio Still Life, Berkeley (1985), Still Life/Studio (1978), View From Holy Cross Church, Santa Cruz I (1985), Berkeley Marina (2004), and the unassuming, delightful Berkeley DMV (2015). —DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

 

 

KAORI YAMASHITA: Remote Ancestors at Bass & Reiner

 

Kaoti Yamashita’s ten sculptures in Remote Ancestors, delicate small to medium-sized structures of ceramics, tile, wood and mortar, take the form of scaffoldings based on quotidian real-world structures: walls, boxes, frames, vases or amphorae, maybe even architectural frameworks. If some of these handmade, untitled constructions recall Minimalist works by Sol Lewitt in their geometric, serial form, their apparent fragility suggests not abstract, timeless mathematics, but vulnerability and transient beauty. Mono no aware is a Japanese term for the pathos of things, or empathy toward things, which are all passing with infinitesimal slowness away (if we choose to look at things sub specie aeternitatis, in the perspective of cosmic time), with some, if one may editorialize, vanishing considerably faster than that—visibly.

 

One pyramidal floor-standing piece invokes architecture, but one quickly realizes that the walls and floors replicate the mortar holding bricks together; it’s as if the bricks had become invisible, or been removed, like the scaffolding beneath completed Roman arches. A trio of vases or vessels is made of mortar skeins as well, not in orderly formations, but in ramose cracks, as if a shattered vase had been glued together, and then the fragments had decayed, leaving only the repairs remaining, in an extrapolated or extreme version of kintsugi, the Japanese aesthetic tradition in which broken objects are repaired with precious metals. A small rocklike ceramic piece is joined by its skeletal double, Yamashita’s structures have a family similarity to postminimalist works by Eva Hesse and others that dramatize and anthropomorphize abstract form. There’s poetic feeling, here, and Zen philosophy about “the contingency of structures in daily life” and the “innate nothingness that persists through continuous change” (to quote the fine Post Brothers essay for a 2015 show in Berlin), for those who look for it. —DeWitt Cheng

REX RAY: We Are All Made of Light

Gallery 16

 The death of designer and collagist Rex Ray two years ago at age fifty-eight was a serious blow to the San Francisco art community. A prolific designer or rock-band posters (counting David Bowie and the Rolling Stones among his clients), flyers, T-shirts; supporter of the gay community; and collagist extraordinaire, possessed of seemingly infinite creativity and craftsmanship, Ray, with that wonderful alliterative nom de plume, was something of a one-man movement. He once declared himself “too feral for a real job” and symbolized for many, with his anomalous career the old freewheeling, bohemian San Francisco, now fading into legend. Fortunately, a great deal of his universally admired work survives. SFMOMA, which owns some forty works by him, just installed a small show, pairing his work with Paul Klee’s (a curatorial match that grates with us purists, but we magnanimously put that aside, yes, we do).

 A larger show, We Are All Made of Light, comprising some thirty works on canvas and paper, along with some archival prints, with one wall-filling work, “Wall of Sound” (1995-2000) comprised of five hundred page-sized individual collages—fills Gallery 16, a few blocks south of the museum. It’s an age of supposed democratization in the art world, where everyone is an artist (or at least everyone who pays art-school tuition), but some of us are clearly more equal than others. Gallery owner Griff Williams praised Ray as “the hardest-working artist I’ve ever met,” and the combination of dedication and talent shines from every work, from the large floral canvases, “Rosathoria,” “Lichina,” and “Clavaria,” with their stylistic hints of Aubrey Beardsley and Friedensriech Hundertwasser—and Spiro-Graph and Spin Art; to “RR 19” and ”Isidia,” baroque-hallucinatory Rorschach tests; to the psychedelic mandala of “Phaedoarubas,” which suggests the drug experience, as Fred Tomaselli’s collages do, but without the actual contraband: just painted, cut paper, exquisitely arranged and assembled. I could go on—“No. 2920,” “No. 3271,” “No. 3444,” “RR 145, ....  If people emit iight, through bio photons, as scientists postulate, artworks radiate, too.—DeWitt Cheng

 

 

 

 

Art History vs Cultural Amnesia

Since the election, I’ve been taking my usual holiday reading/video break (when not following the news with grim, heartsick resolve). This December, I spent watched the Great Courses art history lectures of Professor William Kloss, an independent art historian affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. Kloss’s professorial demeanor, his drily humorous, courtly lecture style (”I thank you for your kind attention.”) and his encyclopedic knowledge lead me to recommend Kloss’s lectures—on European art from 800 to 2000, 17c Dutch painting, and Italian Renaissance art—to anyone planning a serious art-centric Grand Tour, or seeking a refresher from fake FoxKoch news. Iron butt a prerequisite.

 How do we foster both an informed electorate and an art audience immune to hucksterism? Noah Charney in “The art of learning: Why art history might be the most important subject you could study today” (http://tinyurl.com/jh4zmcr) questions the technical, market-based emphasis of contemporary education,that scants the liberal arts because, in this view, only STEM learning (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) “makes money or increases power.” Charney disagrees, citing Berger’s 1972 book, Ways of Seeing, and the TV series adapted from it:

Berger … taught us how to unpack what we do see, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the fiction, and to uncloak hidden ideologies in visual images. For instance, the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) way in which women are objectified by everything from Renaissance paintings to contemporary TV ads. This could not be more relevant today, with messages, overt and covert, presented in speeches, the television news, promotional videos, body language (during televised presidential debates, for instance) and more. Our culture is far more barraged by images than Berger’s was in 1972, only heightening the relevance of his lessons (the main addition being that the images, these days, are moving and are consumed on laptops and phones).

Can the discipline of art history, commonly seen as frivolous, save the world? Even Barack Obama, one of the most cultured and thoughtful men ever to occupy the presidency, once mocked art history degrees as the epitome of impracticality. (He later apologized, after predictable pushback from powerful art-history lobbies.) But I would agree, with Charney and Berger, that those in the arts, who struggle every day with questions of presentation and illusion, have better BS detectors than those who scoff at fancy-pants degrees in ‘soft’ disciplines. (We artsters have other Achiles’ heels.) Let’s stop being amnesiacs, unthinking reeds bending to prevailing cultural winds.

Here’s an illustration. Goya, that consummate walker of political and artistic tightropes (matched only perhaps by his contemporary, J.L. David), revolutionary and counterrevolutionary, painted in 1800-1 a portrait of power that is now famous for its sly subvertion and mocking of its subjects. Charles IV of Spain and His Family, a huge work, presents thirteen members of the royal family, accompanied by the painter himself, standing at the canvas, in the shadows. Brightly illuminated and sumptuously dressed, the royal couple, (famously characterized by critic Théophile Gautier as “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery”) and their lackluster issue are revealed as vapid nonentities devoid of character or intelligence. Fred Licht in Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art wonders (as we all do) how the artist, the official Bourbon court painter, got away with this “degrading…description of human bankruptcy.”

The answer is that Goya cleverly patterned the composition on a beloved earlier court portrait, Velasquez’s 1656 Las Meninas (The Bridesmaids), with its tiny mirror at the far end of a huge room, reflecting the king and queen. Since we see what they see, we are, in effect, transformed into the royals in this cleverly constructed, subtly flattering image, safely steering clear of dangerous lese-majesté. Goya flatters his royals, too, ostensibly, with beautiful color and brushwork in their costumes and decorations, but he uses Velasquez’s mirror idea irreverently, to undermine monarchical authority. Licht:

In the Goya, too, the attentive glances of most of the portrait subjects are just as strongly focused on an object outside the picture…. But we look in vain for the one object that might yield a clue as to what all these people are looking at. After all the trouble to which Goya has gone to base his composition on Las Meninas, he withholds the one element that makes Las Meninas take on meaning: he withholds the mirror and its telltale reflection.

Licht: “The mirror is still there, but it is no longer within the picture. It is the picture.” We viewers, as with Velasquez, become the subjects: in this case, the aimless, nondescript, overdressed royals, contemplating our estimable likenesses with considerable self-satisfaction. Pierre Gassier describes Goya’s royals as placed on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim smile, points and says: 'Look at them and judge for yourself!'"^[

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Expats

 We who are fortunate enough to live in dynamic, diverse and scenic San Francisco are watching the real–estate news these days with increasing feelings of trepidation. With the tech boom, housing prices and rents have been skyrocketing. The latest figures show a median apartment rent of around $3800, with no flattening of the upward trend in sight. This has occasioned various protests against the tech interlopers and their disruptions: blockades of the Google buses that ferry IT hipsters from the Mission District down the peninsula to Silicon Valley; and calls for more low-income housing (some of which is coming on line, to use a now wry figure of speech) and special protections for artists. While some of this may come to pass in the fullness of time, many of us are close to being resigned to exiting San Francisco eventually for the dreaded suburbs, and probably sooner rather than later. We worry about the viability of an art world largely depopulated of artists, except for the lucky, talented few whose work will resonate with the new mogul class.

Rather than continue to bemoan this wave of change, let’s consider how the decentralization of San Francisco’s art world throughout the region—to outlying cities like Vallejo, Richmond, Fremont, Hayward and beyond—may have some beneficial side effects. Artists in general come from middle-class backgrounds, so we’re not exactly bedraggled refuges with our household goods and gods piled onto pushcarts, so the question is: can the art diaspora actually help?

Some considerations:

—Art schools will continue incubating talent in the stimulating urban environment. Artists after graduation will continue to band together for moral and aesthetic support, as in the past. If San Francisco never had a central gathering place like New York’s Cedar Bar in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, it has had informal, ad hoc affinity groups that operate autonomously but come together at times, some of them served by local nonprofit venues with a mission of presenting the new. Social media have made ‘chilling’ easier than ever, so mere proximity is less important, and new cohorts will form on the urban peri[phery. Artists are nothing if not creative and flexible.

—If the group mind is useful for young artists, groupthink is destructive to mature artists. It is naïve to believe that creativity comes only from bringing a critical mass of talented people together; indeed, sometimes isolation is essential: read Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self. In our contemporary culture of mass distraction, we all need time to think and hear ourselves think. Those artists who have persisted with their work past the blush of youth, into their forties (and beyond!) and have created dazzling, profound and beautiful work—largely unknown (alas) to the art market—bear this out.

—Can contemporary art, which has for several generations set its sights on the authoritative tastemakers at the top of the social pyramid, regain its footing as a vehicle for mass communication and transformation? The modernist, utopian goal of shocking the bourgeoisie in order to create a new sensibility has devolved into the postmodernist goal of pandering to the status-anxious and not necessarily informed collector/consumer. Art education, in my humble opinion, went off the rails when it sidelined the teaching of art history (which should be artists’ common frame of reference) to focus on philosophy and aesthetic theory, which inculcate, despite a superficial Marxism, a cynical pandering to snobbery and self-satisfied irony—some revolution! The art historian Suzi Gablik in Has Modernism Failed? (1984) blamed the modernist retreat from society into pure abstraction for art’s perceived descent into frivolity, but, whatever their faults, modernists took themselves and their art seriously (even those iconoclastic Dadaists). I think that too much Pomo art, despite its stated communitarian ideals (which Gablik championed in The Re-Enchantment of Art (1991), to mixed effect), continues to preach to the MFA/PhD-socialized crowd. Can artists out in ‘real’ American connect with average people? I work in Silicon Valley, where people are smart as can be, but there’s less art consciousness than I would like, certainly. Are there potential Herb and Dorothy Vogels out there who simply never saw art, correctly or not, as important or relevant?

It is received wisdom, of course, that art scenes develop and thrive with a fortuitous combination of surplus money, creative energy, and a critical mass of talent both in the creation and dissemination (marketing) of art. Can a geographically decentralized, somewhat diffused art scene—perhaps less trendy—be a good thing for an art world overly driven by money and fashion, by financial egotism rather than aesthetic ambition? Time will tell, but we will have to make change our friend, as someone in Hillary’s circle used to say. See you on the Facebook holodeck and at the eating court in the mall.

PS. Josef and Anni Albers, Bauhaus culture heroes, loved buying furniture for their ranch-style New Haven home from Montgomery Ward: applied modernism via the American system.— DeWitt Cheng