Don't you love art?!
It is a beautiful thing.
I saw this artwork by Bill Jenkins at Jancar Jones Gallery (SF), a special set-aside place for having special art moments. You don't need a password to enter the gallery, but you do have to wait at the gate of the building to be let in. The reward is at the end of the meandering hall and up the stairs in a small—no, tiny is the word—space the size of my bathroom. Yes, tiny is the word. But once there, in this demure space, there is work that gives you pause, the way only minimal art can.
A plastic refrigerator jug one third filled with—what are they? pebbles? (paper maché)
A slab, a slab, two plastic pots, and a chunk of concrete.
And hung on the wall, a coated-wire frame with painted styrofoam bricks.
The plastic jug sat on the floor. I bent over to peer in it.
The slab stack was on the floor too, but somehow it seemed less humble, more reverential. I am reminded of Wolfgang Laib, only not the exquisite intensity of pollen or the purity of milk. Here the dusty cast-off stacked just so created the resonant effect.
Making something out of nothing much.
And the gallery, making space. From the website: "The gallery was opened in February 2008, by Eric Renehan Jones and Ava Jancar. The aim was to create a space in which the gestures of the conscious yet slight could be appreciated." Gestures of the conscious yet slight—lovely phrase, that.
I love minimal art. It gets me every time. Especially minimal art made of humble materials. Like a good koan, it takes you out of yourself and the hoo-ha of purposefulness and busyness and pops you right back directly into wonder, where all good things are.
Today, online, searching for Catherine Yass (and her video of the Wall), I came across these:
1970.
1982
Ceramic pieces by Hannah Wilkes. Ceramics is a medium that takes the gestural and freezes it—well, fires it, like taking a photograph of a wave. These are so wonderful, I just had to throw them into the mix.
Over at Haines Gallery I had another zen/art moment. Bill Fontana who works in the visually minimal, invisible medium of sound showed a new work, Silent Echoes, which includes video—albeit a moving picture without movement. Here's the thing: Fontana works with sound, like the Sound Landscape he made with speakers buried in a park in Vienna or Sound Sculptures Through the Golden Gate, a live duet of sounds from the Farallon Islands and the Golden Gate Bridge that was transmitted to the façade of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He finds sound, takes it and relocates it.
At Haines, he brought in the sounds he found resonating within massive bells hanging at various Buddhist temples in Japan.
This is the bell of Chionin, Kyoto.
And Ohara, Kyoto.
The bells reverberate with sound even when not struck. With accelerometers attached to the metal and acoustic microphones suspended in the interior he was able to capture reverberations of the seemingly silent bells. He also filmed them, recording the seemingly still, motionless bells. They appear to be not moving, not responding, and yet they are, and the sonorous waves of reverberation fill and hum around the room. It is the sound of bells breathing. A conscious yet slight meditative work. Graciously the gallery provided a bench to better sit with the experience of it.
Hannah Wilkes photos courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London.
