di Suvero wins!

Today President Obama awarded the National Medal for the Arts to Mark di Suvero.

In a stiff and awkward ceremony, Obama made an absolutely painful speech trying to justify the arts and humanities. One can only hope that the Ford mentality which demands efficient and practical purpose for all things would loosen its grip on the American sensibility, but I suppose it is what makes us Americans... and "making things better" is the refrain of politicians everywhere.

Nonetheless, some wise one somewhere made the recommendation and the award was given and a great artist honored. Hooray! Massive soaring art wins!



di Suvero was in good company - Philip Roth, Wendell Berry, Sonny Rollins also received medals (and some 16 others too.)

Photo of The Calling courtesy of Milwaukee, WI City Data.

Beams of Light 2009

Close the door on 2009, but before it is forgotten I remember these moments of brightness.

1. The year began and ended with really fine group shows at David Cunningham Projects, SF. Trying to Cope with Things that Aren't Human(Part One) I wrote about here. Jigsawmentalama was just as good, a kitchen-sink (as in everything but) of a show turning on the idea of transformation, mutation, things being not what they seem. Best-in-show had to go to the prolific Skye Thorstenson whose Entheogen films (a set of six) were candy-colored, candy-coated, in a word ravolicious.




Packaged in Neo-Shaman Medicine Bundles of sequins and beads, these are light-dances of the New (techno) Age. A blessing indeed.

2. The video and installation, A Self Made House, by Lydia Greer, in the Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition, UC Berkeley.






"A kaleidoscope telling, dismembering, and retelling of a strange American folk tale" which includes narrative, puppetry, and lots of wonderfully inventive stop-motion. I loved it so much. You can see it here.

3. Black and white. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Did I say black and white? The pen and ink drawings of D Young V at Gallery Three, SF just about knocked me out.


From some fantasy of the world made different after socio-economic collapse,
militaristic images are re-created, localized...


and the children take over. We'll see where this goes...

4. Odd One Out, the videos and painting installation, by Julia Oschatz at Haines Gallery, SF was so intriguing I had to see it twice.



The video in a box of her alter-ego, the gray eyeless dog-mouse, sawing off its ears to paint from the wounds is part Paul McCarthy, part Fischli & Weiss, but mostly other-worldly and I don't mean just because it's jumping off Venus, or maybe because it is.


This animal-soul-KA is often depicted way out in vast landscapes, a speck in the great unknown, lonely and completely endearing.



5. Speaking of endearing... The twenty-five screens of ordinary people simultaneously singing tribute to John Lennon (Working Class Hero: A Portrait of John Lennon, 2005) was just that, endearing. This was one of two video installations by the brilliant Candice Breitz showing at SFMOMA.



The other could have been called Mommie Dearest, but was simply Mother and I loved every thing about it — the pacing, the repeated small gestures, the overlapping dialog, how it conjured myself, my mother, and every melt-down I've been witness to. Fantastic.



She had great material to work with (no ordinary performers these, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Faye Dunnaway...) but the edit worked the diabolical charm. In a perfect world, its matching pair, Father, another 6-channel installation (with Harvey Keitel), would have been playing in the next room.

6. In the Art of Two Germanys exhibit at LACMA, along with the best of the West, the art-gods Beuys, Keifer, Richter, Baselitz, there was a table-top display of the constructions of a GDR artist, Hermann Glöckner.


Cardboard box, cut in two. A teapot torn asunder.

Heidegger said when an object fails to function as it is, we catch a glimpse of ourselves. What I catch is a glimpse of a world upended and remade all in a simple gesture.

7. The Franz West retrospective, To Build a House You Start with the Roof, also at LACMA, was fantastic.


This one you wear.

This one is huge.
The materiality: plaster, cardboard, paint and glue. The best is paper and flour about which he says, "I have been working in papier-mâché for many years. I came to this material because it's cheap and easy to use. You can make it at home without too many complications. It doesn't bleed. It doesn't stink. And you can live with it without being afraid."*

8. Little art hidden in a bigger show. Called Stowaways there was, among others, a line of graphite low on a wall (by Zachary Royer Scholz), a soundscape in the elevator (Carolina Caycedo), and grease, bar of soap, banana on the floor (Wilfredo Pietro).



The bigger show was The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers at CCA Wattis Institute. Small, but certainly beams of light. Huh. Funny, nobody did that.

9. Meeting the bright light Mark Di Suvero himself at his show of small sculptures at John Berggruen Gallery, SF — I was completely charmed.



His whirligig steel and stainless sculptures were mighty fine too.

10. But the kicker, the all time high of the year was repeated viewings of the compelling, impressive work of William Kentridge at SFMOMA.



This is work that does not translate to text — especially this exhibition which included mechanical puppet-film theaters, full-wall 8-channel videos, projections, reflections, etchings, sculptures, animations... I had no idea how involved I would be in the fantastic theatrics of his world. Youtube has a sampling (animation and small theater) that gives some flavor of it, but only a taste of the immensity of his achievement. His work is as awesome, moving, and meaningful as art can get.



Weighing and Watching is a beautiful, evocative film and a perfect example of how he dissolves the boundaries between the personal and political, dream and reality. He says, "I think that one draws knowing what they are, and one has a tendency to be predictable. And a lot of the artwork is trying to find strategies to avoid that predictability, to surprise oneself."** The man is full of surprises. He is a powerhouse.


William Kentridge takes the cake.


*From the catalog, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008.
**From a short by Associação Cultural Videobrasil.

At the de Young

Dropping in at the de Young to see prints by Martin Puryear...

I came across an early assemblage by Mark di Suvero. So here's another of his works to add to the list.



Oh my. The room seemed barely wide enough for this piece, I couldn't back up far enough to get the whole thing in the picture. It's a baby sculpture compared to his later works, but still big—a conglomerate of tree trunk, phone pole, 2x4, and tire. The space certainly couldn't contain the energetics of this unwieldy, yet strangely balanced almost anthropomorphic work. It needs far more space around it and nothing—no Sam Francis nor Diebenkorn—on the walls. And yet, despite the cramped quarters, or maybe even because of them, the parts seemed especially heavy and the the magic of the work even more mysterious. How does it hold up? I mean the tree trunk is massive.

One of the parts I loved best was the 2x4 joined to the telephone pole with steel plate and rivets.



About those rivets...

What is so stark about the piece is that there is all of the work that happened with riveting—that was a special way of joining steel before welding was invented. People built beautiful things then that mostly ended up in the scrap pile. Riveting was a way of handling the hot iron, the rivets themselves, and I find the pieces beautiful because of that. Those forms are part of an industrial landscape that had been dismissed.

He's talking about another work, Yes! For Lady Day, which is all steel, but the rivets are the same.

Di Suvero elsewhere talks about wood joints.

...I started using the wood that they tore out of these hundred-year-old buildings and they made giant fires out of them down on Water Street. I could see the skyscrapers dancing through the fire. I used the wood because I knew how to join it together. All of those structures in the first show I did in less than six months, and then my back got broken because I was doing a job that paid the rent. The real part of the work is the joinery, which is invisible, and a lot of that hasn’t survived because they’ve been taken apart and put together too often, and they weren’t made for that. Since then I’ve developed a more complicated kind of joinery, which allows for many parts coming together and yet looks very simple. But part of the beauty of learning and loving the technique is that you make something very difficult look easy, like Bach. (Laughs)

.


Well, this work does not look simple to me. How the parts balance is very strange—like a hidden power is streaming in the steel—an animal power, brute strength. I think of the Hulk. I'm waiting for the parts to be flung through the air.



What I love about di Suvero is his engagement with the materials and tools—the craftsmanship of working with iron, steel, wood. And he is hands-on, especially with his early works like this one at the de Young. You can imagine him constructing the base and then hoisting the wood, cranking it up by hand even.

You know, if you stop being explorative, you may as well stop making art altogether. I had to change from working in wood, where you need your body to work through, to steel where there is equipment. By moving into that, the constructive part of my work became much more dominate. I ended up learning how to run a crane, and buying one with a grant that the National Humanities for the Arts gave me. Manuel [Neri] bought a church, I bought a dead crane, and learned how to fix cranes. But then you change, you change once you have a different set of tools, and the tools really determine how far you can go.

How far, how big, how grand. Yes.

Another unexpected sighting at the de Young was a sculpture by Bruce Conner which I wrote about in my remembrance of him in July. Encased in a pristine vitrine is Snore, his homage to the dump truck made of wood boards and cloth remnants wrapped in nylons and hung with testicular bags of cotton stuffing. It was great to see it in the flesh, as it were. It is fleshy. Fleshy and soft, and how like all things fleshy and soft (except for art encased in museum glass cases) eventually ending up on the dump heap. Not melancholic, nor morbid, I think Connor was truly honoring the ending-up of things. So there it is, the end-up, an icon in the church of art. How right. Just so.





And then, after all, there were the etchings by Martin Puryear.





I look at Puryear's sculptural forms—dark shapes or these see-through vessels—and I think of Richard Serra's massive slab prints. I'm not sure why, but sculptural ideas seem to translate more readily into prints than painting or drawing. Perhaps it is the machine intermediary. These prints are sculptures on paper.

These two, Untitled, State I, State II are 35 x 28 inches large. Not only do they resemble alchemical vessels, but the act of producing them is alchemical. Besides the chemicals and tar, there are the calculated steps to the procedure leading to stages of transformation, states of being. Spare and mysterious, they are forms which point to something else unnamed, hermetic yet resonant. Really beautiful.


First quote from interview with Jan Garden Castro inSculpture Magazine.
Other quotes from interview with John Yau of the Brooklyn Rail.
Puryear pics courtesy of Barbara Krakow Gallery.

di Suvero

In San Francisco there is also di Suvero.
This is not meant as a travel guide - I am just saying: In San Francisco there is also di Suvero. And like Richard Serra, his work is worth making pilgrimage to see. If not to big art, then to big trees. And mountains. For now I recommend making way to the waterfront and gazing upwards at the di Suvero planted there where he and his family first landed refugees from China. The wrapped ship shape wobbles slightly as if on unseen waves, and above a compass-like turns round the anchoring four legs extending down to the earth - or conversly lifting the rotating complex high.
Like Serra, di Suvero grew up around the shipyards and got the notion that men could make big things. Di Suvero's story is amazing. For though he made big things - out of huge planks of wood initially - he was crushed in an elevator accident and thereafter made huge things from a wheelchair, single-handedly, from a wheelchair. Leverage, he says, is what it takes. It is something else besides.




The piece on the Embarcadero is somewhat pressed by the stadium and street nearby. But in Venice (CA) the di Suvero on the beach has the air and space to breathe and soar. It is a delicious angular construction of enormous i-beams that lifts you up and out of the small human busyness of the boardwalk. I love it, pointedly above the small knolls of lawn, the palms, the sand and sea beyond. It is grand to stand in and under and near, and on this stretch of public space you can get space and get close.






This last, the just-so image for the Solstice. Amen.