SFMOMA, May 16, 2019
May. 18th, 2019 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleMy mom and I stayed overnight in San Francisco after we saw Hamilton, and in the morning we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) before we came home. This was my choice; my mom originally asked if I wanted to go see the Monet exhibit at the de Young, and while I sort of felt like I should be into it because Monet is a great artist, it's just not my thing, so I suggested SFMOMA if she hadn't been there too recently. The day we went was the first day of the member preview of the Andy Warhol exhibit. My mom is a member, and every staff person we encountered was at least mildly confused that we weren't seeing the Warhol exhibit. I'm not that into Warhol. If my mom had really wanted to see it, we would have gone, but she and my dad have plans to go see it this summer so I didn't feel bad about skipping it.
I got to choose what we saw, because my mom goes more frequently than I do (San Francisco is close enough to do a long day trip to a museum, and she has an artist friend who has a condo in the East Bay who she goes to art things with). Here are some highlights:
They currently have an exhibit of Louis Bourgeois Spiders. These are heavy welded metal spider sculptures. The exhibit has three very large spiders standing on the floor in the middle of the room, a slightly smaller one on the wall, another relatively smallish one on a small step on the floor, and a super creepy human figure with spider legs stuck into it in a glass box in a small, dark room off the gallery. The large spiders are large, like six to ten feet tall large. They balance on tiny points at the bottom of the legs, which is astounding from an engineering perspective even aside from their artistic appeal. They're weird, and wonderful. I particularly loved the creepy human figure and the one on the wall well above anyone's head.
We wandered through the Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art exhibit. One of the things that was really interesting about the whole experience of being in the museum is how definitely there are things I like and do not like. We skipped the Roy Lichtenstein pieces because I don't really like it. We lingered in the Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 273 installation. Each version of the installation is a little bit different: there are a set of instructions that have enough lack of specificity that the draftspeople installing the exhibit can make each version different. There are walls with red, yellow, blue, and combinations of the three. There was a Dan Lavin fluorescent light installation, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), that was really cool, although it was in a room with a much whiter fluorescent light piece that was painful to look at.
We saw the Approaching American Abstraction pieces. A lot of this wasn't my thing, and in both this and the Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art galleries, I kept having the thought that they're good examples of the who decides what counts as art variety of art. We did see a pair of pieces by Elizabeth Murray that I liked. I particularly liked Things to Come, which is even better in its full three-dimensional glory than in a photo.
One of the real highlights of the whole museum visit was Rodney McMillian's This Land. It's an installation that takes up a whole gallery. There's a huge abstract piece made of latex, acrylic paint, ink, and paper on duck cloth that wraps in an arc around three sides of the gallery. Set inside it are a pair of PA speakers. If you go see it, the note on the wall says the audio starts at the top of the hour and goes for about twenty minutes. (I think maybe it loops too.) We weren't that organized about it and came in partway through the audio. We walked into it and wandered around the edges of it, and then sat at the bench at the open side of the gallery to look and listen for a bit. It's worth doing that. The visual is one of those things where you see more and more things in it as you look. It's also interesting to walk around it and listen to how the audio sounds slightly different depending on where you are. The audio is a mix of McMillian performing very slow versions of Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and "Home" from The Wiz, and Tomiquia Moss, CEO of a non-profit that works with families experiencing homelessness, talking about homelessness and institutional structures that perpetuate it. If you're in or near San Francisco, it's showing through June 9 and is worth going to see.
We went through the Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture 1900 to Now galleries. This had some famous things I didn't care about, some famous things I liked, and some things I'd never heard of before. This is the gallery that had the most things that I was familiar with, and one of the great things about seeing art in person is getting a sense of the scale. They have Georgia O'Keeffe's Lake George, which looms large in my mind but is a relatively small painting. Frieda Kahlo's Frieda and Diego Rivera hangs next to Rivera's The Flower Carrier. I think of The Flower Carrier as a large image, and while it is four feet square, it feels very hemmed in, particularly by the frame it's in. We skipped the Matisses, and I confess I don't care about Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko.
We saw Man Ray's Chess Set, which my mom texted a picture of to my chess-loving brother with a caption noting that it's not for sale. We also saw Claes Oldenburg's Funeral Heart, which is the only piece I remember from when I went to SFMOMA with some friends in high school. I found my old saved things that were more or less blog entries but from a time before blogs and found the one about this. We went to the museum the day before we went to the X-Files Expo in March 1998. We had to write about a piece of art for our Theory of Knowledge class, and as I remember it, we incorporated the museum portion of the trip both to fulfill that assignment and to make the trip more educational and therefore more palatable to our parents when we convinced them that we could go by ourselves since most of us were eighteen at that point. I remember that we looked at Funeral Heart for a bit and then sat on a bench to look at it some more, because I remember talking about how it looked at different angles. The piece is itself hung above head height. I loved seeing it again, because it brought back that specific memory and the memory of taking that trip with my friends.
One of the most interesting rooms in this exhibit is one about new materials that sculptors started using in the 50s and 60s. There are two common elements that tie all the pieces in the room together: 1. They all use some form of "traditional" craft, in either material or method. 2. They're all made by women. One of them is a Ruth Asawa piece that's fascinating up close where you can see the crochet elements of it. When I pointed out that the pieces were all by women, my mom said one of her friends said something about how she does crafts, not art, and my mom told her, "You know what the difference is between art and crafts? Men make art. Women make crafts."
One of the last things we looked at was Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California. Neither of us had ever heard of Jess before, but I saw it on the website list of current exhibitions and thought it sounded interesting. Jess was a queer artist - his partner was a poet my mom was familiar with - who did paintings, drawings, and collages. They're very queer! The Mouse's Tale from 1951 has a male figure made up of beefcake images cut out of magazines. Narkissos incorporates so many detailed bits that you could look at it for a long time without seeing everything in it. The informational plaque about it says that he started working on the first version of it in 1959 and "reluctantly" stopped working on it in 1991.
I got to choose what we saw, because my mom goes more frequently than I do (San Francisco is close enough to do a long day trip to a museum, and she has an artist friend who has a condo in the East Bay who she goes to art things with). Here are some highlights:
They currently have an exhibit of Louis Bourgeois Spiders. These are heavy welded metal spider sculptures. The exhibit has three very large spiders standing on the floor in the middle of the room, a slightly smaller one on the wall, another relatively smallish one on a small step on the floor, and a super creepy human figure with spider legs stuck into it in a glass box in a small, dark room off the gallery. The large spiders are large, like six to ten feet tall large. They balance on tiny points at the bottom of the legs, which is astounding from an engineering perspective even aside from their artistic appeal. They're weird, and wonderful. I particularly loved the creepy human figure and the one on the wall well above anyone's head.
We wandered through the Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art exhibit. One of the things that was really interesting about the whole experience of being in the museum is how definitely there are things I like and do not like. We skipped the Roy Lichtenstein pieces because I don't really like it. We lingered in the Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 273 installation. Each version of the installation is a little bit different: there are a set of instructions that have enough lack of specificity that the draftspeople installing the exhibit can make each version different. There are walls with red, yellow, blue, and combinations of the three. There was a Dan Lavin fluorescent light installation, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), that was really cool, although it was in a room with a much whiter fluorescent light piece that was painful to look at.
We saw the Approaching American Abstraction pieces. A lot of this wasn't my thing, and in both this and the Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art galleries, I kept having the thought that they're good examples of the who decides what counts as art variety of art. We did see a pair of pieces by Elizabeth Murray that I liked. I particularly liked Things to Come, which is even better in its full three-dimensional glory than in a photo.
One of the real highlights of the whole museum visit was Rodney McMillian's This Land. It's an installation that takes up a whole gallery. There's a huge abstract piece made of latex, acrylic paint, ink, and paper on duck cloth that wraps in an arc around three sides of the gallery. Set inside it are a pair of PA speakers. If you go see it, the note on the wall says the audio starts at the top of the hour and goes for about twenty minutes. (I think maybe it loops too.) We weren't that organized about it and came in partway through the audio. We walked into it and wandered around the edges of it, and then sat at the bench at the open side of the gallery to look and listen for a bit. It's worth doing that. The visual is one of those things where you see more and more things in it as you look. It's also interesting to walk around it and listen to how the audio sounds slightly different depending on where you are. The audio is a mix of McMillian performing very slow versions of Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and "Home" from The Wiz, and Tomiquia Moss, CEO of a non-profit that works with families experiencing homelessness, talking about homelessness and institutional structures that perpetuate it. If you're in or near San Francisco, it's showing through June 9 and is worth going to see.
We went through the Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture 1900 to Now galleries. This had some famous things I didn't care about, some famous things I liked, and some things I'd never heard of before. This is the gallery that had the most things that I was familiar with, and one of the great things about seeing art in person is getting a sense of the scale. They have Georgia O'Keeffe's Lake George, which looms large in my mind but is a relatively small painting. Frieda Kahlo's Frieda and Diego Rivera hangs next to Rivera's The Flower Carrier. I think of The Flower Carrier as a large image, and while it is four feet square, it feels very hemmed in, particularly by the frame it's in. We skipped the Matisses, and I confess I don't care about Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko.
We saw Man Ray's Chess Set, which my mom texted a picture of to my chess-loving brother with a caption noting that it's not for sale. We also saw Claes Oldenburg's Funeral Heart, which is the only piece I remember from when I went to SFMOMA with some friends in high school. I found my old saved things that were more or less blog entries but from a time before blogs and found the one about this. We went to the museum the day before we went to the X-Files Expo in March 1998. We had to write about a piece of art for our Theory of Knowledge class, and as I remember it, we incorporated the museum portion of the trip both to fulfill that assignment and to make the trip more educational and therefore more palatable to our parents when we convinced them that we could go by ourselves since most of us were eighteen at that point. I remember that we looked at Funeral Heart for a bit and then sat on a bench to look at it some more, because I remember talking about how it looked at different angles. The piece is itself hung above head height. I loved seeing it again, because it brought back that specific memory and the memory of taking that trip with my friends.
One of the most interesting rooms in this exhibit is one about new materials that sculptors started using in the 50s and 60s. There are two common elements that tie all the pieces in the room together: 1. They all use some form of "traditional" craft, in either material or method. 2. They're all made by women. One of them is a Ruth Asawa piece that's fascinating up close where you can see the crochet elements of it. When I pointed out that the pieces were all by women, my mom said one of her friends said something about how she does crafts, not art, and my mom told her, "You know what the difference is between art and crafts? Men make art. Women make crafts."
One of the last things we looked at was Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California. Neither of us had ever heard of Jess before, but I saw it on the website list of current exhibitions and thought it sounded interesting. Jess was a queer artist - his partner was a poet my mom was familiar with - who did paintings, drawings, and collages. They're very queer! The Mouse's Tale from 1951 has a male figure made up of beefcake images cut out of magazines. Narkissos incorporates so many detailed bits that you could look at it for a long time without seeing everything in it. The informational plaque about it says that he started working on the first version of it in 1959 and "reluctantly" stopped working on it in 1991.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-19 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-19 11:41 pm (UTC)