you get free, unlimited entry to all exhibits at the De Young and Legion of Honor. And since Heather and I have about an hour attention span for the museum, after which we get that traveler's glaze that you see on people down at Pier 39, it makes museum visiting actually attractive. So we get to walk over any time, through the park and to the museum, stay as long as we like, and know we don't have to take in the whole buffet because we only paid once. James and I went the other day just to see Thiebaud's Gumballs, which this picture here cannot really represent. It's a stunning image when you're standing in front of it, with deep grooves in the paint, very subtle gradations of color and huge brush strokes. I've fallen in love with his paintings since seeing his San Francisco city scapes on first entering the rebuild De Young, and am still impressed and captivated by his work.The membership also gives you opportunity to attend special "members only" events, like the opening of the Claude Lorrain exhibit a few months ago. That was a sweet evening, getting to play Patrons in slight dress up garb, in a museum that was about a quarter full of the usual crowds. There was a jazz band of old cusses rocking out just outside the exhibit space, and later I showed James the room at the very end of the museum, which I stumbled on after missing, by a day, the ending of the Monet show. We got to stand a hand's width away from a couple Monet paintings, and a Picasso work and sculpture. Totally alone in the room with these greats.
Then today we made a morning date to have breakfast over here--oatmeal, nuts, and "hemp hearts," imported hemp seeds from Canada, where, apparently, they have sane drug laws--then walked over on a gorgeous clear day to visit the Ruth Asawa exhibit (we'd seen and thoroughly interpreted the California Impressionists some time ago).
What a magnificent building! (Some architects got a stack of good karma from d
esigning this place, and, in heaven, will be sipping wine from the cleavage of nymphs while their glass-box colleagues, in hell, are giving rat-juice enemas to Satan.) Everything about it works: the exquisite openness of the main foyer, the increasingly subtle patina on the copper facades, the surprising touches you find after a dozen visits (for me, today, it was the wall of fragmented reflections you see when descending the stairs to the basement). And best of all, it's a public building and only there in order to serve the public good. They did this one completely right, in my view. Of course there are other opinions. Heather thinks it's a bit shy of a copper plated turd. Well, we can't all be connoisseurs.The Asawa exhibit was something I would not have paid for, frankly, not because it wasn't well done--it was, as virtually all of the De Young's exhibits have been so far. But because it's not, on the face of it, my cup of tea. There is a "coolness" throughout her work represented there, which didn't dawn on me until I had the association to a particular branch of one of her bent wire pieces, of a couple of arms and hands outstretched in joy. My emotional reaction made me realize that with the previous pieces, I hadn't experienced anything like an emotional stirring.
Overtly, the artist is not really working with emotion. Someone like Monet, you'd have to have been recently lobotomized not to have some kind of emotional hit; but Asawa seems not only uninterested, but unaware of emotion within the context of her art. These pieces seem to fall in the realm of "studies," what happens when the artist simply looks and reproduces, without filtering the seen through their own persona or biases. Ostensibly, because in the accompanying video documentary of her work, that's how she described her work, as a parent standing in the background while the child takes center stage. That is her contention.To my eye, though, her work seems that of a very focused child. Which is not to say it is childish, or that I'm condemning it. But it has a curious lack of self-consciousness that in this post-modern age, struck me as antiquated and overly simple. I could imagine work along similar lines coming across as more pure, but Asawa's struck me as a bit naive about the role of perspective in art, especially the way art does not have a privileged perspective, a standpoint which has an superior claim to authority. (Not that I'd go so far as claiming that all interpretations are equally valid--in fact, I find such a stance about as appealing as the aforementioned rat-juice enemas, because it conflates absolute value with relative value, and arrogates to itself a narcissistic authority that's the adult version of, "cause I wanna!")
The idea that she was simply channeling what she saw in the organic lines and curves of her garden is, as James unequivocally put it, "So false." It's curiously pre-Freudian, lacking
an awareness of the unconscious and how behavior and belief are impossibly multi-determined. I had a strange vertigo looking at her work, as when James and I traced the wire embroidery sculpture's surface, as it became the inside and outside of itself a number of times. It struck us as both as incredibly simple and amazingly ostentatious. My word was "wacky." The coolness of the forms and material--usually steel or copper wire--sets off against what James noted as its self-indulgence. Yet there's no visible indication of the artist's awareness of this tension or juxtaposition. Again, it feels distinctly pre-Freudian.But the experience itself--this is why I love having the museum so accessible. I had to struggle to find a relationship with Asawa and her work, and that was a good workout for me. My own tendency to sum up and move on was challenged, and the complexities of the work and its context, once James and I began parsing them, was enlivening. Even if the work is not particularly evocative, a Monet-level experience as it were, the process of coming to terms with the work faces me with certain of my own biases and weaknesses. I get to see the places that I'm trying to reject in myself, and since I see my work these days very much in Wilberian terms, basically, of not rejecting anything, not splitting myself off from anything, I get to go a little further in expanding my sense of self. It's the opposite of my English literature days, of the endeavor to either dominate or reject art. Instead of reinforcing judgementalism, this process at the De Young cracks me open a bit and lets a little more air in.
