``I love living in a big city full of all kinds of people from all over the place.'' Doug
``I live in a megapolis too. I like megapoloi. I don't want millions and millions of them.'' Chris
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Hey, guys I had great Saturday in SF. Got on BART, a five short block walk from my place, whizzed over to the Montgomery Street station on Market, came up from the fading futuristic gloom to sit on the stone steps at Post and Market and watch the people streaming by on a brilliant Saturday afternoon---well, to have a cigerette.
Then up a block or so and then down 3rd Street to SFMOMA to see Picasso and the Americans, along with a Bruce Marden retrospective. I had to go through each show backwards to avoid the crowds and tours so I could study the paintings. There were several de Koonings and Gorkys I have never seen before, although I knew them very well from books. It's just great to see the real thing. Also an earily Elain de Kooning when she was following Gorky's lead. And of course the Picassos. There were several masterpieces I had also studied in books and then got to see, live as it were.
Before I went over to the Marden retro, I went back outside and down a block to a Pete's on 3rd and had a Duppio and another cigerette and watch more people, mostly tourists. This is a very small, comfortable and civilized city. Sitting there in the sun outdoors on the sidewalk was just wonderful.
Normally, all I do is deal with the underbelly of the city, the down and out, the desparate, the old, the disabled, the poorest. But not yesterday. Yesterday was a treat to get out of the gloom. What a fucking joy.
The museum crowds were interesting too. They seemed to be the young always dressed in black who were obviously art students. I had been temped to bring my camera but decided I didn't want to leave it at the check-in counter in back pack...meanwhile I ran into a couple of asian kids in their twenties, all dressed in stylish black stuff with a small Hasselblau shooting the architecture of the central atrium which is pretty wild---a five story open drop from skylight to the ground floor lobby. Oh well, maybe another day.
Anyway the crowds were either young or old, and very few in between in their say late-thirties to late-forties something. The older crew were my age or older, and definitely up-scale. I was probably the only guy in his sixties dressed in mostly black. Very funny. My eyes are going so I had switch back and forth between glasses and no glasses. I like to stand about as close as I can to painting so I can feel how they were painted. In other words, about where you have to stand to paint the painting. This is a public annoyance since nobody can see around me. That's why I usually go backward or dodge around to work that doesn't have people in front of it.
I liked the early Marden stuff from the 60s when I remembered it best. The later wiggly line stuff didn't do it for me. I mean, I got it, permutations on linear rhythms---organic tensions and so forth. But his real attention was on the surface and the field and how to obscure the hand made origins. This general tendency in almost all works from the period got so intense by the late 60s it was referred to as the L.A. Finish Fetish (maybe by Peter Plagens)---all that perfection crap. I used to spend days on end polishing cast resin pieces and hand rubbing lacquered surfaces. My scuplture supplies were mostly auto-body shop supplies. One piece I just knew the minute I moved it, I would knock off a corner on the concrete floor and that would be the end of its perfect look. Sure enough, I moved it into an empty area to photograph it and off came a little bottom corner. Shit!
After that I revolted. I decided to make things that were so tough, the floor had to worry. Welded steel. Then when I moved those pieces around the concrete got chipped instead. The difference in materials was absolutely amazing. The super finish work made you want to touch it, feel it, look closely at it for flaws. But the steel work just exhuded hostility and danger. One piece which was balanced against itself was about seven feet tall and over hung in a cantilever. You really didn't want to get too close, since it threatened to fall on you and kill you outright. Very funny.
You can run out of money fast playing around with steel, which I did, so I switched to new or used construction materials. Set up the work, photograph it well, then off to the dump you go sucker. If any gallery was ever interested I could reproduce it exactly since the materials were common, and I kept the designs and plans. Nobody was interested. They liked the plastic stuff and the one guy who saw the steel pieces liked them but worried about his hardwood polished floors. See what I mean? Funny. Also forgot to mention a really good David Smith, The Hero.
So the Marden show was caught in this inner monologue. And sure enough on the older work, the corners and edges were chipped where the emaculate painted surface had flaked off. These wear points didn't really bother anybody but me. The tell tale signs of age, of a long gone era of a lost perfection. Since this gallery was almost empty, I could spend plenty of time by myself there and enjoy my contemplations.
In these contemplations, I was comparing Marden's surface, his fields of bland color, in other words his handling of paint to Picasso, de Kooning, Gorky and those in the other show. I had played around with waxes and encaustic to find that satin quality and managed to get it, but it took a long time and luck to reproduce it over and over as a technique. It was interesting that the big Picasso The Studio) had managed this kind of non-reflective and almost emaculate surface as if with ease. No need to concentrate on that, since there were many other things going on in that painting. By the way this is definitely a 20C masterpiece and it has to be seen in the flesh to get that from it. None of the tour guides mentioned Velasquez, Las Meninas. Maybe the referrence was too obscure. It takes quite awhile to see the connection, most of which has to do with the translation of Velasquez's composed perspective study (which is also a study or narrative on painting composition and perspective) into Picasso's flat panel angles and design---also a study/narrative on perspective, design, color---the conceptual tools of painting. That's why it's a masterpiece, well and the paint too. This conceptual theme has a long history and is not some over-refinement of 20thC. Also see Vermeer's version, The Allegory of Painting, and Raphel's School of Athens.
[In fact, Friday night I went to see Blow-up with Joanna and god damnit, I was inspired, just like I always am with Antonioni. There is a whole subtext narrative---story behind the story--in Blow-up on the visual image and its worlds---which is also why it is a masterpiece---well and the photography too.]
I was learning again at SFMOMA. Kind of a shock. I was learning how to paint. In fact I was probably there to re-learn how to paint. On the way home, more cigerettes and coffee downtown before the fading future ride on BART back to Berkeley.
On the ride home, I was thinking about a friend's daughter who was going to art school and constantly complained about not learning anything. I guess I realized you can't learn how to paint in art school. I didn't. You learn to paint by looking at painting you like, and then you figure out how the painter did that---well, while practicing painting of course. So after dinner a few drinks, I called my buddy to tell him to get his errant daughter's ass over to SFMOMA to see some real painters and learn. Well, turned out she had been to see the shows back in Feburary when they opened. But I am almost certain she didn't see them the way I saw them. She was looking at the image that rarefied design inside the visual rectangle, not the material working thing that many of these paintings also were. The purely visual view of art (rarified rectangle as seen in reproductions) is something like watching Blow-up and trying to figure out the murder and why Hemmings just wondered off into party London to forget it all. Which in turn is like trying to identify the objects in Picasso's The Studio---like the weird triangular shape just right off-center of the composition. The tour guide called it a martinis glass---with the green spot as the olive. Could have been. But I think Picasso was probably a red wine drinker. Maybe not. Don't know. But I never worried about what that triangle shape was, so it never bothered me. Sometimes a weird shape is, well just a weird shape.
CG