Back to Museums

Yesterday was my first museum visit since before-the-Event.  It had been 15 months since I have been inside any museum.   About one year ago, I walked by the de Young Museum for the first time during the lockdown.   That moment made me profoundly sad.  Since then, I have walked by the museum many times and gotten used to the museum being closed.

I always prefer weekday afternoons for my museum visits — it is the best time to avoid the crowds.  Yesterday it was nice and mellow.  Masked up and vaccinated, with our reservations on our phone, my friend and I got to get in some museum time.   There is signage reminding us to social distance, passageway walls have had art removed to prevent visitors from lingering and some of the gallery benches have been removed.   The museum felt a little bare, but it was still good just to be inside and wandering around.   

The big change, after spending a year painting books, I am now really paying attention to paintings of books.  I have always enjoyed the de Young’s gallery filled with trompe l’oeil, yesterday it was becoming a real favorite.   John Frederick Peto’s books are so inspirational.   Although, I will never have the patience to master that level or realism in my own work.

A Handbag?

A Handbag?  Yes, a Handbag.  Lots of handbags, purses and pocketbooks all in a museum exhibit at the V&A in London.  These products might be worth a lot but are they worthy of a museum exhibit?  

 

I won’t be traveling to London to see this one. But if I did, I would set up a pop-up exhibit out in front of the museum.   I would place cardboard boxes on the street as display stands to show off the best knock-off handbags $10 can buy.  

  “No officer, these bags are not for sale.  This is performance art!”

If the de Young is negotiating to host this show, I’ll be ready…

I actually have some history with handbags.   Like most artists, I ended up doing some temp work.   One time the agency sent me on an assignment to a small, designer handbag company.  I headed South of Market to a warehouse in an alley near the Stud.   This was the 1990s, back when some of the warehouses were still warehouses.   There was even a sweatshop on the first floor.

 

The space was filled with cardboard crates full of new merchandise shipped from overseas.  In one corner was an office area.   The temps (we started with three of us) had to work on the floor in the middle of everything.   Our job was to take new, large craft paper boxes and cut and fit them, inside and out, with pretty handmade paper (they spent a fortune at Flax).  The paper had to be spray glued into place.  It was labor-intensive and each box took nearly an hour to finish.  The plan was to use the pretty boxes to ship samples to journalists, fashionistas, etc.   “P.R. Sweetie.  P.R.!” 

 

A handful of enthusiastic, young women worked in the corner office.  All were very well dressed — especially to come to work in a urine-soaked alley.  They were nice and pretty much left us to our task.  Occasionally you would overhear snippets of conversation.   Let’s just say, I never needed to watch Sex in the City.   I lived it for about a week.

 

For a temp job, this was a better one.   Still, one of my temp coworkers never returned from lunch.   Another stopped showing up after a few days.  I was delighted.  More work for me.  All by myself, I worked about 9 days at this company.

 

They were in such a hurry, they asked me to come in on a Saturday.  There I was, all by myself, making overtime.   And here was my chance.   I could steal a few handbags.  But then I asked myself, “What would I do with them?  Who would I give them to?”  I thought about it.  My mom, my sister, all of my friends who carry a purse — not one of them would have any use for these delicate, useless little handbags.  No shoulder straps, small and impractical.  For the record, I did not steal a thing.

 

At that moment I began to realize the real purpose of carrying a designer handbag.  It is not just about the label and the cost. A woman carrying a precious handbag communicates to the world that she only goes to places where she does not have to worry.  Nothing bad happens in her world.  She certainly does not take public transportation.   Does she even walk down a street in a “bad” neighborhood? That handbag says she rides in a very expensive car.  Like those impractical and tortuous high heels, the handbag is way to reinforce her class and her perceived status.

Part 1: Layout – The Artist’s Scrapbook

I have been buying about-to-be-discarded books from public libraries for years.  In San Francisco we have weekly sales plus two semi-annual events that are huge.  The typical price I pay is always $1.  These are books usually a step away from the recycling bin.  Sometimes I read the books but more often they get cut up for other mixed media projects.  In the last few years I have begun converting these books into artist scrapbooks.

This entire year I have been laying out a new artist book in an old copy of Layout: The Design of the Printed Page by Allen Hurlburt.  40 years on, the book still stands up as a good design book.  One might ask why I just did not add it, intact, to my own library.   There are no shortage of used copies available online for less than $5.  The book is not rare.  And, if you wish to indulge a delusional hoarder, you can buy the same book for $965.  I see these sort of dealers at library sales all the time.

 

The Layout Scrapbook  is now full.  It includes pages of my own work, ephemera old and new as well as some of the mail art I receive.   It includes things picked up at this year’s inspirational Codex Art Book Fair.  The book contains pages with contributions from the artists at the San Francisco Correspondence Coop.  There are two pages full of ticket stubs. Mostly from 2019.  It is like a diary of museum shows I saw.   Another page was inspired by my visit to Then They Came for Me — an excellent show about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  My response to this who was to create a collage by adding maps of the U.S. Southern border where children are currently being forced into concentrations camps.  In the center of the collage is El Paso where a week after finishing the collage, a terrorist targeting Latinx people drove across Texas and murdered 22 people and injured 24 others.

 

Next — Part 2: Mail Art in the Scrapbook

New Zealand Memories

Yesterday I popped into the de Young Museum to check out the exhibit of Gottfried Lindauer’s Maori Portraits.  As always, it’s the under-hyped shows like this one that tend be best at the de Young.  It’s up until April 1^st and worth seeing.  They are running a brief film, as I wandered into the screening room the first thing I saw was Hokianga Harbour.  It is one of my favorite places on the planet.  I have been a few times in the winter.  I stayed in a swell motel where I was able to watch the water, the clouds and intermittent rain sweep in all day off the Tasman.  I can’t believe it has been over 20 years. 

And then there was something new from New Zealand waiting for me in my P.O. Box.  The latest in a series of incredible mail art from Robin Sparrow.  This postcard arrived safely in a cellophane envelope protecting the hand-embroidered San Francisco scene on the back.  I love it, including the Year of the Dog postage stamp.

Revelations at the de Young

 I was in Golden Gate Park the other day and decided to pop in for a look.  The de Young, like so many art museums nowadays, feels their mission is to have mega-hyped up blockbuster shows as way to earn revenue and draw in the crowds.  Currently they have installed a massive Haight Street gift shop for the Summer of Love.  But that does not interest me.  I was just planning on a wander into the permanent collection.  Instead I found a fantastic, big show that is given scant attention by the museum’s PR-machine.  I often find that the shows to see, at any museum, are the under-promoted ones that, I guess, museums assume have less appeal. 
Upon entering the museum the first thing you encounter is Leonardo Drew’s huge installation Number 197.  A floor to ceiling (very high ceiling) grid of his assemblages fill the lobby it what also could be called a maximalist collage.  

Where the permanent collection begins on the first floor, a major rearrange has happened and a new show titled Revelations: Art from the African American South has taken over the better part of the exhibition space on the floor.  The exhibition (see link for details) includes 62 newly acquired works by contemporary African American artists from the U.S. South.  I am always happy to see more of the quilts from Gee’s Bend and then explored galleries of sculpture including Lonnie Holley’s Him and Her Hold the Root an assemblage including his-and-hers rocking chairs exploring family, memory and loss.  Ralph Griffin’s sculptures, including Panama Jack (shown here), is one of his just slightly frightening pieces.  I really like them.  
The pieces are part of the permanent collection and the current show is up to April 2018 – giving many opportunities to pop in again when I am in Golden Gate Park.

Welcome back to San Francisco

Stable at Cuenca, John Singer Sargent

It’s been a busy year for history buffs in the Bay Area.  2015 marks the 100th Anniversary of San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE).  There is the ongoing exhibit at the Palace of Fine Arts. City Rising at the California Historical Society is not to be missed.  Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California connects the Bay Area to Pacific Island Nations and highlights their role in the PPIE.  The San Francisco History Expo this year at the old Mint on 5th Street was heavily focused on the PPIE (and was great).  Now it’s the de Young’s turn.

Last night I visited the de Young for the member’s preview of Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.   The de Young has installed a collection of art that was originally displayed in San Francisco in 1915.  It’s been an amazing effort to bring back art from all over the world for this exhibit.  It is an opportunity to see work in person that would require you to do a lot of travelling otherwise.  Some of it is still in the hands of private collectors.   There are a number of important pieces on loan from the Musée d’Orsay but paintings are borrowed from all over, museums like Rochester, Portland and Buffalo just to name a few.  And there is work that has ended up in the Smithsonian like the John Singer Sargent shown above.

As much as I thought I knew about of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, I did not realize just how much art was originally shown.  In 1915 there were over 11,000 pieces including paintings, prints, sculpture and photography.  And of course things never change – California artists had to fight to get their work shown unless they had been validated by the New Yorkeratti – even back in 1915.

This show is up until January 17, 2016 and it’s the sort of show that I will need to return to many times. 

Comfortable with Keith Haring’s Cocks

Not wanting to wait a moment longer, I went to see the member’s preview of Keith Haring: the Political Line at the de Young yesterday.  It’s the first major museum exhibit of his work in 20 years and it’s marvelous.  Seeing Haring’s work big and bold and in person has much more impact than the ubiquitous greeting cards and calendars we have known for the past two decades.  The show also reminds us that Haring’s work went beyond the “safe” pieces we are familiar with (see greeting cards and calendars).  His work was political, leftist, sexual and queer.  Currently the de Young is filled with room after room of cocks.  There is even some cock sucking right at baby stroller level – and note, it is not fellatio, it’s good ole all American cock sucking!  I can imagine the “Liberal” mommy blogger crowd in San Francisco will be expressing their outrage as soon as they see it. 

Now to be fair, the de Young website does warn us: 

“Please note that the exhibition contains certain artworks that are adult in nature; images included on this site may be violent, sexual, and/or political in content.”

It’s curious that we have to be warned in San Francisco about political content.  I was perplexed when the de Young’s curator Julian Cox wrote in the companion book and is quoted in the information panel on the wall as saying:

 “Haring had an uncomfortable relationship to the politics of Reagan-era America.”  

Really?  I don’t imagine Keith Haring was uncomfortable – I am sure he knew right where he stood.  I suppose, like so many of us, Haring hated Ronald Reagan and the cabal that put him in power.  Hating the devastating economic policies that still cripple our country today, hating the murderous foreign policy killing thousands of innocent people in Central America, hating the pandering to religious fanatics and hating the ambivalence and criminal negligence when dealing with the AIDS pandemic.  Keith Haring’s blood is on Ronald Reagan’s hands.  If anyone feels uncomfortable here, it might be the rich who control our art museums with their hand picked curatorial staff.  Not all of us have forgotten and acquiesce to historical revisionism surrounding Ronald Reagan.  Many of will never forget or forgive.

But back to happy thoughts – the show is amazing and beautiful and needs to be seen again and again.  Of course you will exit through the gift shop, which I have to say, disappoints.  It’s back to a world of Haring’s safest images commoditized on coffee mugs, greeting cards and refrigerator magnets.  What I really wanted was a magnet version of The Great White Way (seen above), the original is 14 feet tall, but I’d be comfortable with an 8” magnet version on my refrigerator door.