Tusk, 2010, wood, 13.5”w x 12.5"d x 10.5"h

Minimalism and materiality are not two words you typically see in the same sentence.  But in Narwhellian, a compact, idea-packed show, sculptor Seth Koen cleverly conjoins the two.

Orignally, minimalist sculpture was about expressing ideas in slick, shiny surfaces, absent any sort of messy contact with the artist’s hand.  Koen’s works, which are as much about object-ness as they are about its opposite – nothingness  – simultaneously embrace the old strictures while brilliantly defying them with a nod-and-a-wink.  His forte is carved wood displayed in physically improbable shapes – shapes that even in their smooth, finely sanded condition have the feel of readymades. You can see, if you look closely, all of the places where he’s fitted together the interlocking pieces, but you’d be hard-pressed to say how, exactly, he does it.

Djiril, 2010, wood, 8.25”w x 72”d x 43.25”h

That’s precisely the kind of visual sleight-of-hand doctrinaire minimalists revered.  Where Koen leaves them behind is by imbuing his objects with a distinct anthropomorphic quality.  Hence, the title Narwhellian.  It’s a mash-up of Orwellian and narwhal, the latter referring to the arctic whale whose defining feature is a harpoon-like tusk.  It appears in the show as a visual through-line, obliquely referencing the artist’s former life on the Maine coast. 

Elements of that rural environment are clearly in evidence in the udder-like dowels that protrude from the L-shaped Tusk and in the pair of wall-hung protruberances that constitute Medusa.  One of its downward-facing appendages is swaddled in a crocheted red garment, a tender gesture that brings to mind the sort of sweaters you see on small dogs.

Counterbalancing those organic references are Djiril and Selkie, objects that look like giant cell phones equipped with outsized antennae.  This redeployment of the narwahlian tusk suggests, perhaps, that like ocean going mammals, we humans troll our own environment for a different kind of prey: information. 

Medusa, 2010, wood, 5”w x 7.75”d x 63.5”h

Beyond the obvious pleasures of such hybrid associations, there is one other important facet of Koen’s work: the way it plays with perception.  Tramontane and Ostro, for example, are only lines in space, but situated as they are at the intersection of two walls, they create the illusion of a transparent, volumetric object, suspended.

Drain, two wooden balls stationed at opposite ends of a wooden arc, also suspends gravity; it dangles  improbably from a narrow ledge, defying our instinct that says that it should not.

With great economy and visual imagination, Koen creates elegant and deliciously open-ended works that tweak the orthodoxies of Minimalism while at the same the same time engaging them with serious craft.  

–DAVID M. ROTH

Seth Koen, Narwhellian @ Gregory Lind Gallery through December 11, 2010.

"Runt", 2010, mixed media on canvas, 120" x 84" (diptych)

John Yoyogi Fortes isn’t a street artist but he paints like one – one who’s especially well-versed in American and European Expressionism.  His specialty is the urban fever dream, a realm in which subconscious fears and desires play out against backdrops of crumbling paint-spattered walls.  It’s brightly hued and richly textured world into which the artist inserts comic- and graffiti-influenced characters that are in psychic pain.  They appear — along with forms that are collaged, sprayed, and hand-painted — in colliding planes that rest on layers of scraped paint that recall surfaces where concert posters are continuously stripped and re-stapled.

Fortes creates an electrically charged, claustrophobic atmosphere filled with high-def images and stupefying excess, where little makes sense and everything seems wrapped in a cocoon of white noise.  Thus, in Fortes, fans Francis Bacon, Manuel Ocampo, Sue Coe and others of an expressionist bent will find a kindred spirit – one who’s also absorbed the influences of underground comic artists like Robert Crumb, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the whole freak-show milieu of RAW Vision, the journal of outsider art.

"Untitled", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 50" x 40"

Runt, the largest (120 x 84”) painting on view, is typical of the artist’s output over the past few years.  Out of a ground of geometric swatches laced with vertical stains and loose spray-painted lines, faces and figures appear like apparitions. Some are vividly rendered; others seem vaporous, as if summoned by a darkroom trickster in an early 20^th century “spirit photograph”.  The painting’s most prominent feature is a trio of elongated eyeballs that hang by tentacles from a mask in the manner of Roth’s “Rat Fink” character — an expression of extreme cartooning and, perhaps, a pointed reference to the ubiquity of the surveillance camera.  I say perhaps, because Fortes’ works rarely make direct statements about anything; they take an allegorical stance, but their allusions are wide-open.

Where in the past Fortes’ work pointedly referred to issues of race, identity, sexuality and global politics, the paintings here seem less driven by conscious intentions than by an urge to allow his arsenal of self-invented characters and appropriated images to interact freely.  Like many of the Lowbrow/Pop Surrealist artists with whom he feels an affinity, Fortes tends to back away from overt proscriptions, preferring instead to play hot potato with live ammunition to see what ignites.

"It Sounded a Lot Better Before I Said It", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 12" x 9"

Untitled, a portrait of an urban hipster, is cheerfully apocalyptic.  Sprouting from its Picasso-influenced face is a thought balloon filled with red splotches of blood.  Below the face, which rests on a pedestal, is a severed hand onto which spills more blood.  It Sounded A Lot Better Before I Said It features a boxy figure.  Its heart is exposed, and one of its severed limbs sports a swastika-like crest.  Both are fine examples of how Fortes projects terror into a comic format.

In this exhibition, he fills much of the gallery with small works, many of which seem small-bore when compared to his more expansive, wall-sized excursions.  A reoccurring motif these small paintings is a cigarette-smoking primate whose picaninny visage appears most memorably on Smoking Monkeys, a series of 65 wall-mounted paint can lids.  This racist caricature should shock, but when pulled out of context, as it is here, it loses power.  To understand why, look at a prior work like Immaculate Rendition (2008), where Fortes used a similar image to devastating effect, and you see that as an abstract painter with narrative inclinations – however abstruse — Fortes only hits full stride when he has a big canvas. 

–DAVID M. ROTH 

 John Yoyogi Fortes: Parallel Boondocks @ Jack Fischer through Dec. 4, 2010

To learn more about John Yoyogi Fortes watch the video of him creating Immaculate Rendition.

Now that the all-new, tripled-in-size Crocker Art Museum has opened, it’s hard to decide which aspects of this achievement are the most remarkable: the building itself, the art inside or the fact that the project actually materialized. 

Over the past two decades nearly every urban renewal idea hatched in Sacramento has failed.  Yet by operating above the fray of local politics (and, apparently, outside the black hole of post-crash economics) the Crocker, led by Director Lial Jones, scored a succession of hits.  It raised $100 million from mostly private sources.  It hired Charles Gwathmey to build an architectural masterpiece, and over the project’s 10-year gestation period, it used its growing clout to convince artists and collectors to part with some 4,000 works of art valued at between $25 and $50 million, according to Chief Curator Scott Shields.

The results are something to behold.  The new structure seamlessly blends the Crocker family’s original Italianate Victorian buildings with a 21^st century design.  Its 19th-century pomp meets high-modernist slick, but without any of the ego-flexing we’re accustomed to seeing in “art chapels” designed by big-name architects.  To be sure, there are plenty of high-tech appurtenances.  Sleek, curving exterior lines, glassed-in cylindrical porticoes (echoing Victorian-era cupolas), an exterior sheathing of aluminum and zinc panels and a saw-tooth roof, whose clear panels let natural light stream into galleries – these are just a few of the expanded museum’s key features.  (Now, you can even buy a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the museum café or take in a film or a lecture in the 260-seat auditorium – two things that were never possible during the museum’s first 125 years.)  Yet from the exterior little of this is even hinted at; you could pass by on surface streets or on Interstate 5, which abuts the museum to the west, just a stone’s throw from the Sacramento River where prospectors once plucked nuggets, and never notice.  The real beauty of the all-new Crocker lies within.

 Michael Stevens, "Spike", 1988

The upstairs galleries of the expanded 125,000-square foot new wing are a labyrinthine maze of interconnected rooms: light-filled spaces that seem to flow one into the other, each revealing a different part of the Crocker collection.  It’s a bad-news/good-news proposition.  Much of what the museum inherited from its benefactor, Judge Edwin B. Crocker, just isn’t very good.  On various buying sprees, the judge and his wife, Margaret, loaded up on Central European paintings that hang on the walls of one very opulent, very beautiful room in the original gallery.  California Impressionists, a group that made negligible contributions, also occupy substantial space.  To their credit, the Crockers amassed one of the world’s largest collections of Old Master drawings.  Those, too, have a room of their own.  More recently, the museum, which was already a major player in ceramics, acquired Sidney Swidler’s encyclopedic collection of 800 pieces.  They roam from the merely functional to the utterly phantasmagorical and are documented in a 408-page catalog written by Associate Curator Diana Daniels.

Gordon Onslow Ford, "Voyagers in Space", 1971, acyrlic on canvas

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the museum, which I’ll call the “Early California Room”, is dominated on one wall by the high-kitsch dramas of Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878), a failed prospector who earned his living painting commissions for San Francisco’s elite.  His rose-tinted, Arabian Nights meets Rape of the Sabine Women depictions of virgins being pursued by lusting horsemen look like something straight out Cecille B. DeMille.   

The really good news is that the Crocker, which bills itself as “the oldest museum in the West,” can now host traveling exhibitions and display about 20 percent of its permanent collection — up from about five percent before the expanded museum re-opened October 10 after a six-month hiatus.  This means – finally — that the Crocker can shed its reputation as a stodgy repository of inconsequential art.  It can now, for the first time ever, show its stuff.  And it has plenty to show.  Spread across two floors, and organized into various thematic categories (e.g. Pop, Latino, Funk, Bay Area Figuration, Abstract Expressionism), are works that represent a Who’s Who of Northern California art, much of it from the post-WWII period when the axis of cultural authority briefly tilted toward the West Coast.

Highlights include major works by Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Bruce Conner, David Park, Frank Lobdell, Christopher Brown, Paul Wonner, Michael Stevens, Suzanne Adan, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Viola Frey, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Hung Liu, Marilyn Levine, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Brady, Mike Henderson, William Allan, Deborah Oropallo, Robert Colescott, Peter Vandenberge, Martin Ramirez, Stephen De Staebler, Raymond Saunders, Enrique Chagoya, Stephen Kaltenbach and Peter Voulkos.

Charles Simonds (detail): "Dwelling", 1982

Then, there are a slew of wonders that defy easy categorization.  Two that stand out are Charles Simons’ ceramic wall installation which mimics, at a vastly reduced scale, an Anasazi cliff dwelling.  The other is Richard Notkin’s earthenware tile “painting” of George W. Bush, All Nations Have Their Moments of Foolishness which photorealistically depicts the 43^rd U.S. president and his sins.  It’s been in the Crocker’s possession for some time now, but it still stuns.  So does Stephen Kaltenbach’s deathbed portrait of his father.

 I’ve heard complaints that the walls are overcrowded, and they are.  But they’re done smartly and tastefully and with full awareness of the unexpected conjunctions that can arise, like the one that occurs between Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford’s painting Voyagers in Space and the biomorphic totems seen in ceramic sculptor Toshiko Takaezu’s Devastation Trees.  You’ll find them on the third floor.

Will the museum always pack so many works into the building?  I doubt it.  My guess is that this is a one-time performance, designed to give the public a taste of what the museum has acquired but couldn’t show for lack of space.

Are there other nits to pick?  Yes, I’ve got a few.  The Crocker should really have at least a couple major works by William Wiley.  The single painting of his that it has on display is the same one it’s shown for years, Columbus Rerouted (1962). It’s a pale reflection of what Wiley accomplished later.  Photography is another gaping hole.  In the entire museum, I counted only four images.  Two is by Edward Burtynsky; one is by Robert Maplethorpe; the other is by George Platt Lyne.  None are notable.

While the Crocker is not the contemporary art museum that many hoped it might become in its new incarnation, it’s not your grandmother’s Crocker, either.  While the museum remains committed to mounting shows that reflect its current and historic strengths — drawings and prints; Flemish, Dutch, Central European and Italian art from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries; American Impressionism; early and contemporary California art; international ceramics; and art from Asia, Africa and Oceania – it also plans to keep at least a toehold in the present.

Hung Liu, "Shoemaker", 1999, oil on canvas

In January, for example, it will open Inferno of the Innocents, an exhibit by Vienna-born painter/photographer Gottfried Helnwein, whose depictions of inhumanity and violence are sure to ruffle feathers amongst the Crocker’s more conservative constituents.

The single best thing about the new Crocker is that it gives Sacramentans a way to view important art locally — without having to travel or imagine what it looks like from reproductions.  In revitalizing this historic institution, the Crocker demonstrated that at least one part of California’s capital city actually works.  Now it has a museum that everyone can be proud of.

–DAVID M. ROTH

"Boston Cremes" (1962)

“Fools invent, genius steals” is a saying that applies to many artists. But finding one to whom it applies more fittingly than to Wayne Thiebaud is difficult. While California’s best-known painter has registered his fair share of inventions, it’s his melding of distant and diverse influences that set him apart in the ‘60s, and it continues to do so today.  While some of his contemporaries are starting to feel a bit shop-worn, Thiebaud, despite exposure in what feels like a continuous string of blockbuster exhibits over the past decade, retains a mystifying allure. 

Homecoming, his fourth solo exhibition at the Crocker since 1951, comes at a propitious time: it coincides with the museum’s 125^th anniversary, the opening of its quadrupled-in-size exhibition space and the artist’s 90^th birthday, which falls next month. 

Of the more than 50 works on view, some of which are located in a separate show of new and promised gifts, at least 20 were painted in the past decade.  Spanning the years 1961 to 2010, they capture Thiebaud at all the important junctures: decontextualized still lifes, portraits, surreal landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes.  They also show him evolving from pure Pop to abstraction, applying the methods he perfected in his confectionary paintings to landscapes.  These, like the cityscapes for which he is equally famous, employ radical distortions of perspective and an almost 19^th century, Post-Impressionist sense of light.  What’s different is the emphasis.  It is not on the much-vaunted confectionary paintings, but rather on everything else in Thiebaud’s oeuvre. 

"Pies, Pies, Pies"  (1961)

A realist to the core with an almost religious devotion to the formal intricacies of representation, Thiebaud learned more from the likes of Chardin, Sorolla and Bonnard than he did from any of his contemporaries, save Richard Diebenkorn whose color palette still echoes in current works.  Yet in 1962, the year of his New York debut at the Allan Stone Gallery, his lushly rendered paintings of pies, cakes and ice cream cones put him squarely in the middle of Pop.  It was a designation he initially disowned but later accepted after it brought him fame.  Like Warhol, Thiebaud began his career as a commercial artist, and like Warhol he achieved international acclaim by lionizing vernacular images that critics and ordinary folks just couldn’t (and still can’t) resist.  Why?  One theory floated in 2003 is that Thiebaud is something of a folk artist.  The idea seemed ludicrous since Thiebaud, at the time, had been teaching painting at UC Davis for nearly half a century.  But its proponent, Michael Zakian, director of Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, argued — persuasively — that Thiebaud, while no folkie, does employ a great many folk-art mannerisms.  The obsession with detail, the faithfulness to an object’s essence, the use of fixed, rigid forms in a diagrammatic style, the employment of distortions in perspective to achieve a kind of caricature, the reliance on repetition and sorting, and a devotion to painterly excess and vivid color — these are devices that folk artists have traditionally relied upon.

"Five Seated Figures", 1965, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches; "Two Kneeling Figures", 1966, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

True or false, it seems now like a plausible explanation for why Thiebaud’s veneration of simple things (pies, paint cans, cigars, neck ties, cheese wheels, cityscapes and landscapes) never falls out of style.  His art speaks to our longing for simple truths, for things we know. If I had to pick two paintings in this show that sum up Thiebaud’s bravura paint handling skills, Pies, Pies, Pies (1961) and Boston Cremes (1962) would rank near the top.  He doesn’t just render these edibles realistically – he aims a laser-guided dart at our senses, whipping the pigment into multi-colored froths that make us feel as if the works were pulled from an oven rather than an easel.  What rescues them from sentimentality is the fact that he eliminates illusionistic, spatial perspectives, preferring instead to separate objects from their surroundings like a studio photographer would. with plain backdrops and flood lights.  This isolation has a bifurcating effect: It magnifies the sterility of the fluorescent-lit, retail environment while issuing an icy, look-but-don’t-touch sensuality.

"Big Condominium", 2008, oil on canvas, 72 x 26"

Thiebaud takes a similar approach with figures.  He paints people as if they were pies and cakes.  The results, in pictures like Two Seated Figures (1962), Five Seated Figures (1965) and Two Kneeling Figures (1966) are inscrutable.  The figures occupy a nondescript space.  They wear vacant gazes and appear to be unaware of each other’s presence.  Socially and psychically, they are lost, autonomous beings.  These paintings are among the few in which Thiebaud allows overt content to seep into his work. 

The artist’s preference for realism, however, has never made him a slave to reality.  In his cityscapes, which he started in 1973 after purchasing a home in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district, all notions of spatial truth are upended in the service of pure feeling.  He re-creates the giddy roller coaster sensation of the city’s streets by telescopically compressing distance and employing multiple perspectives in a single picture.  Night Streets Study (1998), Big Condominium (2008) and Dark City (1999), for example, are exercises in pure vertigo that make viewers feel as if they are plunging down one sheer cliff and up another.  They are outrageous concatenations of impossible angles that effectively capture the feeling of a city in which a grid was imposed over a series of peaks. 

This penchant for exaggeration, which hints at both Symbolism and Surrealism, extends to his Central Valley landscapes.  Bisected by rivers and heavily irrigated during the summer growing season, this region, when viewed from the air, is a patchwork of green and brown.  Not monochromatic, exactly, but close.  Thiebaud turns up the color volume, rendering it in loud, sometimes Day-Glo hues, exaggerating to a point to where if you saw images like this on TV you’d quickly reach for the color control.  Prime examples are Green River Lands (1998) and Flood Waters (2006) in which various aerial perspectives appear as contiguous tracts, looking like they were cut and pasted from pictures taken at different altitudes.

When Thiebaud started working like this in the ‘60s, his paintings stood out against the staid color conventions of Abstract Expressionism.  As it happened, Thiebaud, during his New York stay in the ‘50s, dabbled briefly in Ab Ex and spent significant time with its leading figures: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman – all of whom claimed abstraction would yield an art that was aesthetically richer and more truthful.  Thiebaud admired their skills and ideas but couldn’t let go of representation.

"Flood Waters", 1965, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Had he done so, he would have made a formidable practitioner, as several recent works, all employing his signature juicy impasto, attest.  Mountain Layers (2010) clings tenuously to representation, but is really more of an exercise in extreme modulations of color and tonal value.  In an oblong slab of horizontal brushstrokes that appears to have been cleaved with a palette knife and dotted with nubs of paint, it shows what could be farm plots climbing the side of a monolith.  The form is circled by contrasting rings of color: flesh tones on the left, shades of pale blue and gray on the right.  The sky is mauve. Abstraction and reality exist on equal footing.  

Even at 90, Thiebaud continues to push himself.  He paints every day and finds time to play tennis, even on 100-degree Sacramento days.  "He’s got the metabolism of a snake," one of the artist’s former tennis partners told me.  In the studio, he’s got the instincts of a mountain goat: he has no fear of scaling great heights. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming @ the Crocker Art Museum through Nov. 28, 2010.

Ann Weber, “Many the Lilt the Heart May Know Here," 2010, cardboard, steel, 66" x 124" x 64"

If you wanted to examine the relationship between man and nature, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful spot than Montalvo Arts Center.  Situated in Saratoga at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains,  the place is so idyllic it’s easy to wonder whether critical reflection is actually possible.  It is. Proof is can be found in Nature and Creative Capital, an 18-month, multi-disciplinary program that began in July.  It consists of a gallery exhibition (Human Nature) examining human-animal relations and site-specific installations (Sculpture on the Grounds) that address the man-nature question.  Curated by Kelly Sicat, the program features works by seven artists whose expressions range from polemical and mythopoetic to flat-out funny.

They’re the latest in a deluge of eco-themed shows, the likes of which will probably continue as long as artists feel compelled to comment on the precipitous decline of the planet.  (Another show in this realm well worth checking out is Art at the Dump at 5M, comprised of works made from materials scavenged from SF’s waste disposal facility.)

Unlike its closest Bay Area counterpart, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, where visitors are shadowed by docent minders at every step, Montalvo allows you to wander the grounds and gardens as you please – or trek uphill through redwoods to the top of a mountain overlooking the Italianate villa built in 1912 by San Francisco’s three-time mayor and first popularly elected California U.S. Senator, James Phelan.  Phelan, an art collector and something of an aesthete himself, deeded the property to the state at his death in 1930, stipulating that it be operated as an arts institution.

David Middlebrook, two views of “Head of Man”, 2010, basalt, bronze, 9’ x 9’

Phelan, as it happens, also helped inspire East Bay sculptor Ann Weber, one of three artists-in-residence participating in Montalvo’s Sculpture on the Grounds program.  Her seedpod/space capsule-shaped sculptures (Ode to Montalvo), are built from found scraps of cardboard packaging that are stapled around metal armatures. (One of them carries a title derived from Phelan’s poetic musings.)  While such cast-offs are potent markers of brand identity and symbols of consumer waste, Weber doesn’t use them to make environmental statements.  These ungainly objects, which in the past have referenced figures, totems, giant spirals and spinning tops, operate open-endedly, oscillating in their associations between organic and industrial.  Their biomorphic and vessel-like qualities, which include protuberances and gaping holes, reflect the artist’s background as ceramicist; the industrial feel comes from Weber’s arrangement of cardboard strips into multi-colored geometric patterns, many of which retain recognizable remnants of corporate names and logos.  Arrayed here under trees and shrubs, they appear like beautiful, malignant seedpods — dropped from a realm whose arboreal progenitors are substantially larger than any on Earth. 

Ali Naschke-Messing, “From Within, So Without”, 2010, Bunya Pine, mirrored plexiglass

Nearby, and throughout the gardens, the sculptures of South Bay artist David Middlebrook comment directly (and a bit more darkly) on the upside-down state of things.  Though Middlebrook, a professor at San Jose State, typically works in the public realm or on private commissions, his works at Montalvo pull no punches.  Haywire, a bronze-cast tromp trompe l’œil piece looks like a crate tossed overboard from a ship whose cargo, a golden egg, lies on the ground.  The boxe’s harness straps hang upside-down in a gravity-defying metaphor for the illogic wasted wealth.  Incidental Incubator, a resin-cast egg shape plunked on three stacked trash bins (bronze, aluminum and rusted iron) comments on the economic stratifications of society; while Head of Man – exquisitely situated in a cactus garden against a forest backdrop — assumes a pan-national stance, expressed by an altered map of the Earth inscribed on a head; it rests on a two-ton, whale-shaped slab of basalt, one side polished, the other side raw. 

Ultimately, if the goal of such exercises is to get us to look at ourselves, then Ali Naschke-Messing’s From Within, So Without, scores a direct hit.  Into the trunk of a tree where bulbous whorls form at spots where limbs were trimmed, the artist inserts small mirrors that an arborist assured would inflict no harm.  The tree, a Bunya Pine, has the texture of elephant skin, and so the mirrors stand out, reflecting all that’s before them.  The artist’s stated goal is to bring us “back to knowing through our senses”. Her intervention succeeds.  It also recalls another more primitive practice I witnessed in San Juan Chamula, a small village in the Mexican state of Chiapas where, in one of those amazing syncretistic churches, I encountered statues of the town’s patron saints accessorized with mirrors.  The purpose, according to local curanderos (shamans), is to ward off the “evil eye” and to reflect bad thoughts back onto those who think them.  From Within produces a similar kind of animistic effect.

Celeste Boursier-Mougenot and Ariane Michel, “Les Oiseaux de Celeste”, 2008, still from video

In the New Project Space Gallery, the most arresting sight comes from the artist/filmmaker/performance team of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot and Ariane Michel.  In their laugh-out-loud video, Les Oiseaux de Celeste, a flock of finches – sequestered in a London gallery with food, water, grass and twigs – do what birds generally do.  They hop about looking for a place to roost; except here they do it on heavily amplified electric guitars.  Hunting and pecking around the fretboard, they unwittingly collaborate with the artist-provocateurs to create a Cage-like performance of light-grade industrial noise that at times borders on rhythmic and melodic.  In close-ups, which activate our anthrocentric instincts, the birds appear to be as amused by the random noises as we are.

Tim Hawkinson, "Sweet Tweet", 2004, bronze, 55" x 19" x 16"

Art world megastar Tim Hawkinson provides lyrical and disturbing counterpoint.  Famous for creating one of the world’s largest musical instruments (the Überorgan first installed at Mass MoCa in 2001), for auditorium-sized inflatables and for smaller-scaled works built of industrial and organic detritus (fingernail clippings, hair, eggs, chickens), Hawkinson has long cultivated a fascination with human-animal relationships, particularly the kind where power relationships are reversed.  The two on view here follow suit, but not in the sui generis manner we’re accustomed to seeing from him.

These make direct references to art history: specifically, to Degas’ iconic Ballerina in Sweet Tweet, where a bronze-cast figure of girl exhales a string of birds, and in Doy, where a boy’s eight-fingered hand mechanically crushes the face of his pet dog.  One musical, the other murderous, these figures typify the dichotomies that run through Hawkinson’s work and highlight our own symbiotic and sometimes twisted relations with animals.

Detail: "Sweet Tweet"

Misako Inaoka’s wall-mounted, resin-covered toy sculptures, though a bit didactic, further explore those polarities. She casts her animals variously, as energy sources, focal points of environmental disaster, surveillance tools and set pieces for biotech-fueled fantasies.  A hydra-headed deer (Connected), for example, sports a pair of linked power poles.  Solar Cow, a bovine outfitted with a solar panel, suggests that cows might someday provide us with more than just milk and meat.

Whale Spill, a cetacean sprouting an oil derrick, recalls not only the folly of offshore drilling, but also the fact that whale oil once powered urban street lamps.  Most engaging is a wall of carved wooden bird/fish, one of which has a motion-activated head that swivels and screeches at passersby, bringing to mind the benign surveillance described in Richard Brautigan’s poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. 

Masaki Inaoka, “Solar Cow”, 2010, toys, resins, wood, threat, 4” x 5” x 2”

Apart from their titles (I Am not an Animal I & II and Cock Fight ), Dana Harel’s graphite drawings of military headgear (and a lone rooster) wedded to signifying fingers provoke but do little to address the theme; they mainly highlight the pitfalls of leaning too hard on academic techniques of representation.

Overall, these two shows are good as far as they go; the problem is, they don’t explore the topic of human-animal relations as fully as one might hope.  Missing, for example, is the entire realm of spiritual connections humans once had with wild and domesticated beasts.  Never mind the fetishes of today’s pet owners.

On the other hand, it’s probably a stretch to expect that four artists to adequately address this topic.  Like cats, artists can’t be herded, and that’s as it should be. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 Human Nature (Tim Hawkinson, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot/Ariane Michel, Misako Inaoka, Dana Harel) @ the New Project Space Gallery, Montalvo Arts Center through October 17, 2010

Sculpture on the Grounds:

Ann Weber, Ode to Montalvo on the Great Lawn, through Oct. 31, 2010

Ali Naschke-Messing, From Within, So Without, on the Great Lawn, through Oct. 31, 2010

David Middlebrook, on the Great Lawn and grounds through Sept. 30, 2010

Cover: Ann Weber, “Many the Lilt the Heart May Know Here," 2010, cardboard, steel

“San Francisco”, 1973, vintage gelatin silver print, 12 x 7 7/8 inches

When the New Topographics exhibition appeared at the George Eastman House in 1975, it did not feel like a history-making event.  Ranging from bland to butt-ugly, the 168 images that comprised the show seemed destined for obscurity or worse.  That it upended the prevailing notions of fine art photography ranks as one of the greater ironies of art history, since few people saw the original show and even fewer saw its limited-run catalog.  Socially engaged photographers got it immediately.  Eager to engage with the actual circumstances of American life (as opposed to gilding its fading myths), they joined with a group of curators who wanted photography to be taken seriously as fine art.  The shift wasn’t sudden.  But the differences between old and new – when they came to light – couldn’t have been sharper.

Before New Topographics, American landscape photography meant Ansel Adams and the f/64 group.  After New Topographics, idealized visions of Half Dome and the California coast gave way to images of subdivisions, industrial parks, parking lots, strip malls, telephone wires, mobile home parks and factories. These the New Topographics artists rendered in a point-blank, documentary style so lacking in affect or subjectivity you could easily have mistaken their typological studies for the work of camera-wielding robots.  Walking through the re-creation of this show that is now on view at SFMOMA, it seems as if the photographers were challenging each other to see who could make the dullest, most abject pictures.

“Point Richmond, 1974”, vintage gelatin silver print

That their anti-aesthetic so completely dominates landscape photography today speaks to the triumph of banality, both in life and in art.  As Ed Rusha put it in 1972, in a remark that forecast photography’s role in postmodernist thinking, “Sometimes the ugliest things have the most potential.”  If that sounds like a grim assessment, take heart.  Of the nine photographers who appeared in the original show there was a dissenting voice.  It belonged to Henry Wessel.  Where his cohorts (Robert Adams, Baltz, the Bechers, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott and Stephen Shore) avoided interpretive acts that could be construed as demonstrating a subjective viewpoint, Wessel seemed to be tipping his hand at every turn.

Seven works in the SFMOMA exhibition and 12 prints in a concurrent show at the Rena Bransten Gallery demonstrate that Wessel could make bland pictures with the best of them; but his real forte was creating images that demonstrated a highly cultivated sense of the absurd; mixing the high irony of Walker Evans with the street-wise alacrity of Cartier Bresson.

 “Coronado, CA, 1976”, vintage gelatin silver print, 16 ¾ x 20 ½"; “East Bay, 1978”, vintage gelatin silver print, 10 1/2 x 15 1/2"

As such, his photos greet you with a nod and a wink. Albany, California (1973), a night shot of a tract house, parodies real estate photography, treating the home as if it were a celebrity, caught unaware by paparazzi.  In Tuscon (1974), tall weeds appear well on their way to consuming a house.  You can almost hear the photographer in the background shouting , “Score one for nature!” The ticky-tacky bungalow cantilevered into a hillside in Point Richmond, California (1974) feels like an optical trick.  It’s not, but you could take it as such if you didn’t know Bay Area topography.  New Mexico, with its minimalist rock garden and denuded tree, mocks the notion of a desert garden, while Las Vegas, a strip mall fronted by a sculpted figure balanced on a fingertip offers a precarious visual metaphor for unsustainable development.

“Las Vegas, 1973”, vintage gelatin silver print

Contrary to its title, New Topographics wasn’t about topography; it was about the “built environment”. Logically, such pictures should have included people since the environments pictured are man-made, but for the most part they don’t.  The sole exceptions are a few images from Stephen Shore.

Here again, Wessel broke with convention.  In the works on view at Rena Bransten, all from roughly the same period as the NP photos – the mid 1970s — we see a pictorial sensibility that had more in common with the previous decade’s street photographers than with the NP photographers.  Peopled or not, they beg more questions than they answer.  What, for example, is the man in a suit (who bears an uncanny resemblance to LBJ) doing on the beach at Crissy Field?  What is an airplane engine doing next to a swimming pool in Tuscon, Arizona, 1977?  And why is the house in San Francisco, 1972 enclosed in a cage, as if the inhabitants were lions in a zoo?  The “built environment” for Wessel was an alien place.

“San Francisco, 1972”, vintage gelatin silver print, 8 x 11 7/8 inches

No doubt, other NP photographers felt this, too.  But what they failed to express — and what Wessel showed in abundance — was humor.  His photo of a man walking on Coronado Beach makes the town in the background look like a distant planet.  In Waikiki, 1975, three shirtless men appear almost alien, too, strolling down a palm-studded street amidst high rises.  Then there’s his amazing shot of the East Bay hills shot from a BART train where the view is framed twice: once by a window and again through the space between an overpass and the 880 Freeway.

Making the quotidian look both strange and familiar was Wessel’s specialty.  His cohorts may have recorded the bald facts of our surroundings and elevated their impact through repetition.  Wessel didn’t need to.  His photos are self-contained stories that bring us face-to-face with our overbuilt, unsustainable existence.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Henry Wessel: Vintage Still Photographs @ Rena Bransten through August 21, 2010

New Topographics @ SFMOMA through October 3, 2010

Katherine Westerhout, "Mishkan Yisroel Synagogue", 2007, archival pigment print, 43 x 52"

Before museums, knowledge of the world beyond our immediate reach could be found in cabinets of curiosities – rooms that literally housed collections of everything under the sun, from natural history and ethnographic artifacts to archeological fragments and antiques. These early attempts to collect and categorize, which began during the Renaissance and remained the province of elites for some time to come, were designed to elucidate and impress. That such practices became a common activity, engaged in by legions of collectors everywhere, can be adduced by the widely variegated impact they had on 20^th century art.

Wondrous Strange: a 21^st Century Cabinet of Curiosities pays homage to these traditions. It contains all the things you would expect (boxes and bottles of artist-scavenged curios), but it also pulls in things not generally seen in this realm, such as painting, ceramic sculpture and tapestry. In all, 21 artists of disparate persuasions are represented in this sprawling, category-defying show.  Most express, in some elegiac fashion, the human impulse to excavate and order. 

Sharon Beals, "Nest with Soft Leaves, 2007, pigment print on etching paper, 32 x 32"

Chief amongst the excavators is Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout. Her color-drenched images of abandoned and decaying buildings begin as documentation but quickly slip into a more rarified zone, as demonstrated in Mishkan Yisroel Synagogue (Christian Altar), Detroit. In the exquisite light that permeates her forgotten buildings, we see not only the details of their decrepitude — we almost smell the rotting timbers, the humid air and the pools of rain water that collect through broken ceilings.  The experience of looking at these pictures borders on synesthesia, the phenomenon by which information from one sensory mechanism triggers or co-mingles with another. Sharon Beals’ natural history photos also, on occasion, push past genre-imposed bounds. Nest with Soft Leaves, for example, with its swirling detritus, might be taken for a microscopic shot of molecular activity.  Donald Farnsworth’s 13-foot-long, trompe l’oeil tapestry, Antiquarian Library, performs a similar feat through illusionism. From across the room it achieves the desired impact; up close it dissolves into abstraction. Look closely at how this mash-up of digital photos is translated by a computer-controlled machine and you see an incomprehensibly dense thicket of woven fabric. The effect is strangely bifurcated, like what happens when you view Chuck Close’s painted portraits at varying distances. What’s significant about this visual bait-and-switch is how it elicits nostalgia without actually permitting it. Steven Allen’s ceramic set pieces echo that approach, employing with less persuasive deception, the clay-based verisimilitude perfected by Richard Shaw and Marilyn Levine.

Donald Farnsworth, "Antiquarian Library", 2006, cotton and metallic jacquard tapestry, 62 x 158"

George Pfau’s drawing on canvas, Represented In-Flus Bodies, Cyborg Architecture, Geographic Enclosures, tickles the optical nerve, too. It reads like a dizzying treasure map, with layers of lines and skeletal shapes that appear to have arrived through some combination of stenciling and photolithography. Embedded into the picture at various depths, these forms, which are obscured with hand-painted gestural marks, trace an archeological journey that has no beginning or end.   

George Pfau, "Represented In-Flus Bodies, Cyborg Architecture, Geographic Enclosures, 2009, mixed media, 72 x 48"

Stephen Berkman, “Songbird and the Sharpshooter”, tintype

Looking at photography these days, it’s hard not to wonder if the medium hasn’t been drained of aesthetic value. For nearly two decades, big, banal, theory-driven pictures have occupied a disproportionate amount of space in galleries and museums. Yet despite this apparent hijacking, there’s a quiet counterinsurgency gathering force, composed of hundreds of photographers who are turning antiquated photographic methods to surprisingly contemporary ends. 

Baron de Meyer, “Shores of Bosporus”, C. 1905, photogravure, collection of Stephen and Connie Wirtz

Joy Goldkind (L to R): “Dora”, “Rose”, “Contest 6”, 2000-2009, bromoil, hand inked

Andreas Hablutzel, Untitled, 2001, archival pigment ink print

Ben Nixon, “Falcon’s Den, City of Rocks”, 2009, collodion negative, silver print

Chris McCaw, “Sunburned GSP #277”, 2008, unique gelatin silver paper negative

Liz Steketee, photos from “Reconstructed Memories”