New Work: Ranjani Shettar; 21 March – 7 July 2009
Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection; ongoing
Paul Klee: Social Creatures; 7 March – 12 July 2009
Face of Our Time: Four Shows – Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross, Leo Rubinfien; 31 January – 26 April 2009
2008 SECA Art Award: Tauba Auerbach, Desiree Holman, Jordan Kantor, Trevor Paglen; 12 February – 10 May 2009
SFMOMA
San Francisco, CA

By Tonya Warner

Since it has been some time since my last visit to SFMOMA, I forgot how various shows on each floor tend to run into one another without demarcation – since the building is C-shaped, you will inevitably walk through at least one or two shows backwards.  Because of this I have chosen to write a mega-review, made up of micro critiques, of my most recent visit.  An imperfect format, I know, but efficient.

New Work: Ranjani Shettar
Two rooms sandwiched between architecture and the ever-present “Matisse and Beyond” show are given up to new work by Bangalore-based artist Ranjani Shettar.  Her wood block prints and minimalist installations prove to be the kind of works that invite you to get up close, explore, and spend a lot of time milling over the details.  She creates organic forms that are both very human in their hand-made qualities and magical as they seem to float impossibly throughout the space.  Shettar is interested in the process and histories of craft making and employs traditional Indian craft materials, such as tamarind kernel paste and kasimi dye in “Sing Along.”  The piece that takes up most of the room and leaves the most indelible impression, “Sing Along” is made up of steel and muslin molded into lyrical shapes that appear as a shifting myriad of forms, calling to mind clouds, wings, flocks of birds and, more abstractly, fleeting thoughts.
Her works are interactive in that they depend upon the visitor, their perceptions and experiences, to be complete.  Rather than being didactic or polemical, Shettar creates forms in space that simply allude, that draw up associations and memories, generating an experience that entwines the art with the observer.

 

Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection
“Matisse and Beyond” is the obligatory showing off of the permanent collection and even though there are some fine examples of the heavy hitters, I was most interested in the last, most contemporary room.  A nice counterpoint to the history of modern art leading up to it is Arturo Herrera’s piece “I Am Yours.”  The work is deceptively simple: a single large sheet of felt with slashes and holes cut out to create a shape that mimics the carefully-placed messy brushstrokes of abstract painting.  He has created both an homage and a means of appropriating a visual language in a way that throws into question its contemporary viability.
Taking up the middle of the room, and much of the tourists’ attentions, is “Kind mit Pudeln” by German artist Katharina Fritsch.  The work consists of four perfectly concentric rings of black toy poodles surrounding a white baby (Jesus) lying on a golden star.  The wall text states that this is meant to burn a visual pattern into one’s memory, however, next to Shettar’s work in the adjoining room, I can’t help but feel that there’s something more (or less) to it.  The text also states that after producing the work the artist “recalled” some kind of shit that would relate the piece to Goethe’s Faust and the human condition.  This after-the-fact application of “meaning” further points out the lack of substance behind the work.  This is not to say I dislike it, in fact, I appreciate it all the more because of its lack of grand narrative or meaning.

This sculpture was made in 1995 – around the same time as the YBAs – and appears to me as an example of a rejection of conceptual art.  In a reaction to what was seen as pretentious elitist conceptual works (which, in turn were a reaction to the consumerist 1980s), many artists started making works that had no concept.  This was seen more brazenly in the “Sensation” show in 1997 that sought to illicit reactions (mostly outrage) from a wide range of people.  Fritsch, on the other hand, relates to her audience by setting scenes that are surreal, absurd, and yet visually arresting.  “Kind mit Pudeln” is an interesting work in that it appears to be pointing to a larger dialectic, a rather heavy-handed one at that, but is in fact empty – a black hole in which sits just a baby.

 

Paul Klee: Social Creatures
Klee made etchings of grotesque figures meant to serve as social commentaries before he solidified his distinctive style.  What sets these apart from their contemporaries are an expert and delicate execution in an older, more refined style.  These are effectively the (admittedly more serious) Superjail of the turn of the century.

 

Face of Our Time: Four Shows – Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross, Leo Rubinfien
This is an interesting show in that it runs the gamut of approaches to photojournalism and documentation.  The exhibit starts out strong with Yto Barrada, whose photographs of the migration from Tangiers to Southern Spain is less document than a character study of two places.  Refusing to be overtly political, Barrada seeks out beauty in banal scenes that operate more as fine art that could stand on their own as interesting, well made images.  The message of the struggle and desperation to get to the European Union and the chance of a better life is present only when read between the lines.

Guy Tillim is another photographer who rejects the traditional modes of photojournalism, choosing instead to subvert some of the stereotypes created by such approaches.  He captures the complexities of African life in a way that is more than a plea for help.  One arresting print, “Supporters of Jean-Pierre Bemba line the road as he walks to a rally from the airport, Kinshasa, July 2006,” becomes a perfect merging of landscape, atmosphere, politics and people in a way that both informs and obscures.

Judith Joy Ross, on the other hand, chooses to reference such predecessors as August Sander and Diane Arbus but without any real punch or punctum.  Her sterile black and white photographs of attendants at an Iraq War protest in rural Pennsylvania are wholly generic, telling nothing about the place, event, or people.

Leo Rubinfien presents large color candid shots of concerned faces from all over the world.  The images are dramatic and could be arresting if they weren’t so devoid of context.  Taken as a whole, the works are leveled into a multi-culti generalized soup of globalization.

 

2008 SECA Art Award: Tauba Auerbach, Desiree Holman, Jordan Kantor, Trevor Paglen
Every two years, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) gives chosen local artists the chance to exhibit at the museum.  This year it’s Tauba Auerbach, Trevor Paglen, Jordan Kantor, and Desiree Holman.  Auerbach creates works that play with digital versus analog.  Paglen, who supposedly presents secrets of the CIA and US government, I don’t trust necessarily.  Who is to say any of it is real (does it need to be?)  Effectively the X-Files of the art world, he plays off and up our paranoia and suspicions.  Jordan Kantor I find to be the most interesting of the group.  He presents paintings of photos and photos of paintings, and photos of paintings of paintings, and screen prints of paintings of photo negatives.  He manipulates the distance and mediation of reproduction and repetition.  Holman presents drawings and videos of people wearing creepy loose-skinned masks a la Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The video works present two families – one black (The Cosby Show) and one white (Roseanne) – on a sitcom set that shows its edges and artifice.  Disturbing as it is, they come across as an elaborate way to talk about identity and role playing (as well as how “unreal” television really is).

 

http://www.sfmoma.org
http://www.talwargallery.com/
http://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/17435
http://www.ytobarrada.com/
http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/exhibitions/tillim/congo.htm
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/interest_seca
http://www.paglen.com/
http://desireeholman.com/

                                                                                      

 
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