i love sylvia meyer
March 31, 2009
new work
March 30, 2009
by crystal liu. one of the things i love about my work is seeing artistic process. this is an image from an idea crystal liu is exploring…
i want this painting
March 27, 2009
it’s by baseera khan. a painting on paper, ink and acrylic and graphite on paper, that’ll be in her show – “reductive histories” - that will open in my san francisco gallery tomorrow, 28 march. it’s 44×46 inches.
regarding the fisher museum in the presidio,
March 24, 2009
louis says:
In John King’s 1 March 2009 article on the proposed art museum in the Presidio, John Jarvis, director of the National Park Service Western Region is quoted. “They’ve come a long way improving the design and the way it sits within our historic landmark.”
The Presidio deserves more than something sitting comfortably in our historic landmark. The Presidio is a unique place defined by history, geography, climate, demographics and culture found nowhere else. A new building in this environment has an obligation to honor place, and to provide a legacy for future generations to enjoy.
The Bay Area is known for the bold and controversial actions of our forefathers. The Alcatraz we know was formed in the 1850’s by blasting the rocky shoreline to create steep prisonlike walls. The Golden Gate Bridge harnessed the best of 1930’s engineering to span the strait thereby treating 1,825 million cars to one of the most beautiful views in the world. Innovative thinking has formed the Presidio too. In 1996, Congress created a unique management and funding model designed to preserve the Presidio and make it financially self-sufficient.
As 21st century citizens we are obligated to leave examples of our creativity, technology and optimism. Are the Xerox-enlarged barracks of the Letterman site the best we can do? An art museum in the Presidio is an opportunity not to be squandered demurely emulating the past, but asserting confidence in our own abilities to address the future. The WRNS proposal for the Fisher museum is a thoughtful response to a difficult set of parameters. It sits firmly in contemporary design AND is sensitive to its physical, historical, and cultural context. It deserves more enthusiastic support.
San Francisco is a thought leader. We can be design leaders too.
he’s right. i’d add that not only should good design be our legacy, but a beautifully-designed fisher museum makes sense for the current economic development of our city. think about this: in 2008, the guggenheim bilbao contributed 231,788,989 euros to the economy of the basque region.
san francisco is beginning to have some really noteworthy contemporary architecture – the de young, the academy of sciences, the new federal building. the fisher museum should be equally forward-looking. every time i cross the bay bridge i become apoplectic at the lost opportunity of cal trans designing the bay bridge rather calatrava…
stefan kürten
March 19, 2009
the paintings for stefan kürten’s show arrived today. from our press release about the show:
Stefan Kürten’s subject matter comes from his own photographs of the places he grew up or has traveled to: the familiar, prosaic settings of public gardens & sculptures, shopping malls, and suburban architecture. His use of gold, silver, and copper under-painting creates a warm glow that enhances the nostalgic mood of the work, as though the scene were tarnished with age. It also lends a majestic or religious sensibility to otherwise mundane scenes. The compositions remove any sense of time or place, engendering a feeling of familiarity, of recognition, through the unavoidable association with one’s own memories.
Memory and its loss are pervasive themes. In Kürten’s paintings, sculptures and memorials seem to fade into the surrounding vegetation. “I believe I’m beginning to disappear,” says Fiona in the movie Away From Her, in reference to her growing awareness of the onset of Alzheimer’s. The timelessness of the settings – their lack of specificity – indicates a blurring of past and present. Who are we without memory? As memory fades, so does identity.
Some paintings intermingle wallpaper patterns of interior spaces with the exterior world. This merging of inside/outside, nature/artifice parallels the unreliability and decay of memory – the disappearance of self, the confusion between real/present and memory/past – where ultimately such distinctions no longer matter – or even exist.
i first showed stefan in my gallery on federal street (above capp street project) in 1998. this is his 6th show with me. one of the best things about being a gallerist who works with contemporary art is representing artists. ok, so there’s a kind of “dad” aspect that can get tiring at times. but it’s really rewarding being intimately involved in the development of a really talented artist’s work. you come to understand the creative process in a way that no one else does. i love it when an artist makes something that at first completely surprises me, but then immediately makes sense. the feeling that “wow, i would have never thought of that, but now that you’ve done it, it is clearly the next place you had to go…”
teresita fernandez at the blanton museum
March 14, 2009
the jack s. blanton museum of art at the university of texas, austin has a first rate curatorial team, a terrific exhibition program and a very good collection. it’s the largest university art museum in the u.s., housed in a new 155,000 square foot museum. while nearly every museum built since (including) frank gehry’s 1997 guggenheim bilbao has focused on making a statement with the exterior architecture and the public interiors of the building at the expense of the galleries, the blanton, completed in 2006, is the exact opposite. the gallery spaces are generally well-proportioned, logically laid out and not trashed-up with distracting architecture. the atrium through which you enter, however, is the ugliest space i have ever seen in a museum. referring to the architecture of the campus (first mistake), it’s a sadly unselfconscious post-modern train wreck. something between gruppo 7’s italian fascist architecture and an upscale shopping mall.
“stacked waters” 2009 cast acrylic.
enter teresita fernandez, a brooklyn-based artist born in miami in 1968. she designed a wall-covering of glossy cast acrylic laminate that wraps around the atrium. bands of shimmering blue transform the space from something fit to be mussolini’s crypt into a place both calming and exciting. it’s particularly a pleasure to walk up the “grand” staircase and feel as if you’re emerging from deep water into the light.
richard once called the floor to ceiling drapes in our house that camouflage horribly-proportioned windows an “architectural sin.” but man, fernandez and the curatorial insight that led to this project salvage this building.
carbon footprint
March 13, 2009
we’re trying to do the right thing… but i do too much air travel. check out this link to calculate your (negative) impact on the globe…
http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/?src=f1
“33 variations” written and directed by moisés kaufman
March 8, 2009
starring jane fonda will open at the eugene o’neill theatre on monday night. i went to a press preview the night before last.
moisés kaufman wrote and directed the play about a musicologist, dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (lou gehrig’s disease), her obsession with understanding beethoven’s “33 variations on a waltz by anton diabelli” and her (not good) relationship with her grown daughter.
background: in 1819, anton diabelli, a struggling music publisher, had the idea of inviting the 50 best-known composers in vienna to write variations on a simple waltz he’d composed. he’d then compile the variations and have a best-seller. 49 composers submitted a variation. beethoven submitted 33… what about a mediocre piece of music written by an amateur composer prompted such an amazing creative response from a genius? that question is the framework for the character studies that make this play.
“33 variations” slides back and forth (with a few collisions) between the present and the early 19th century. fonda is musicologist, dr. katherine brandt, an emotionally repressed woman who relates better to manuscripts than people. zack grenier is fantastic as beethoven. samantha mathis is clara, the daughter who can’t please her mother. and colin hanks (tom’s son) is clara’s love interest. pianist diane walsh’s live performance of bits of the variations from just off stage is inspired.
banks of floor to ceiling shelving units (that continue beyond the proscenium) stacked with archive boxes provide a framework for simple sets. beautiful and effective.
though jane fonda is meant to be the draw for this production, i found her to be the least compelling actor. she fumbled around her part at the beginning of the first act and even as she warmed into it, couldn’t keep herself from using unconvincing arm waving to portray excitement. by the end of the first act she was in the part and she was (mostly) working for me. the second act was much better. possibly because by that point in the story, due to the progression of her disease, her hands were clenched and hung at the end of her limp arms. what a relief not to have to watch the flailing.
the script isn’t perfect, but it’s quite good. kaufman goes for some easy laughs and his dailogue can be stilted. but as the relationships between the different stories (beethoven’s & dr. brant’s) develop, the play coalesces into an interesting meditation on the artistic process. for me, the most interesting aspect was something i’d been talking to friends about earlier in the day. an artist creates something and may or may not understand completely what it “means.” critics and historians develop complex interpretations for the work of art. in my experience, frequently, those readings of the artwork can be pretty far from what the artist intended. the meaning they find is more about who they are and where they are in their lives than about the artist’s intent. but i think that good art comes to life when it has an audience. that means that it’s different things to different people. and even contains different meaning for the same person at different points of their life.
good play. oh, and jane fonda, at 71, looks fabulous.
infidel by ayaan hirsi ali
March 6, 2009
there is no pleasure in reading this book. it is completely depressing and horribly disturbing. that said, if you have the emotional strength, you should read it.
ayaan hirsi ali was born in somalia in 1969 and lived in saudi arabia, ethiopia and kenya before immigrating to holland. the beginning of the book describes her life in what appears to be a relatively liberal muslim household. her father, who had been educated abroad, opposed female genital cutting, but while he was imprisoned for political reasons, hirsi ali’s grandmother had the traditional procedure done to her and her younger sister. let’s be clear, it’s done at home, without anesthesia. unimaginably barbaric. she survived the war in somalia, frequent beatings from her mother and a severe beating from a quran instructor. as a young woman she was a supporter of the conservative islamist muslim brotherhood and chose to wear a hijab. as her life progressed, she began to chafe under the strictures she saw as being designed to subjugate women. when she was 23 her father arranged for her to marry a man she thought was a “bigot” and an “idiot.” en route to canada to join him, she ran away and hid from her family in the netherlands where she was eventually granted political asylum. there she was exposed to political and social ideas that caused her to seriously question islam and she became a well-known critic of the way muslim women and children are treated.
i found myself thinking that the quran is not a holy document. it is a historical record, written by humans. it is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the prophet muhammad died and it is a very tribal and arab version of events. it spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.
in 2003 she was elected a member of the lower house of the dutch parliament. in 2004, theo van gough, with whom she collaborated on the film “submission” was brutally assassinated. a letter condemning hirsi ali to death was stabbed into van gough’s chest with a knife. she now lives in hiding in the netherlands.
her descriptions of genital mutilation, frequent beatings, war and starvation are horrifying. but the most disturbing aspect of the book are her insights into islam. here are a few examples:
muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. by adhering to his rules of what is permitted and forbidden, we muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. we froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the arab desert in the seventh century.
. . .
most muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the quran; we are taught it in arabic, which most muslims can’t speak. as a result, most people think that islam is about peace it is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that islam is peaceful and tolerant.
the september 11th terrorist attacks were a turning point for her.
i could no longer avoid seeing the totalitarianism, the pure moral framework that is islam. it regulates every detail of life and subjugates free will. true islam, as a rigid belief system and a moral framework, leads to cruelty. the inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers was the logical outcome of their detailed system for regulating human behavior. their world is divided between “us” and “them” – if you don’t accept islam you should perish.
heavy stuff. how does a secularist who believes above all in tolerance square their belief system to hirsi ali’s fairly convincing case that islam is evil and dangerous?
my central, motivating concern is that women in islam are oppressed. that oppression of women causes muslim women and muslim men, too, to lag behind the west. it creates a cuture that genterates more backwardness with every genereation, it would be better for everyone — for muslims , above all – if this situation could change.
her writing is plodding and clunky. she is inflammatory. one of her central motivating factors seems to be attracting attention to herself (making up for the lack of attention from her father?). she may be self-destructive. certainly she is exceedingly brave. and certainly her views about what it means to be muslim and how muslims and non-muslims co-exist will shape political dialogue for a long time.
the armory show
March 4, 2009
my grandmother always said “if you can’t say anything nice…” so i guess i don’t have much to say. billing itself as the “international fair of new art,” it’s at pier 94 from the 5th to 8th. the energy level was low and i saw nothing that looked like a sale going on. but then, i didn’t see anything i’d buy. or even anything new, for that matter. depressing.
