San Francisco - Alison Bing [19]
But San Francisco’s literary tradition doesn’t just hang out on book shelves. Allen Ginsberg’s ecstatic readings of Howl continue to inspire slam poets at Litquake and spoken-word nights at Edinburgh Castle, and Beat authors like Kerouac freed up generations of monologuists at the Marsh and Make-Out Room from the tyranny of tales with morals and punctuation.
The local zine scene has been the underground mother lode of riveting reading since the ’70s brought punk, a DIY ethic and V Vale’s groundbreaking RE/Search to San Francisco. The San Francisco Main Library has amassed a collection of ’zines, but to see the latest check out the Alternative Press Expo and Needles & Pens. The most successful local ’zine of all, McSweeney’s, is the doing of Dave Eggers, who achieved first-person fame with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and generously sunk the proceeds into 826 Valencia, a nonprofit publisher and writing program for teens. McSweeney’s also publishes an excellent map of literary San Francisco so you can walk the talk.
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VISUAL ARTS
If you usually think of art as painting and sculpture, San Francisco will come as a visual shock. The streets vibrate with murals, graffiti and political protest that flows right into galleries. Besides stellar traditional photography shows, most sights you’ll see in San Francisco galleries and museums defy easy categorization, and wall tags often unhelpfully describe works as ‘mixed media’ or ‘new media.’ What does this mean, exactly? Could be some combination of video, performance art, installations, interactive art, and other media too novel and/or weird to be named yet. Take for example an interactive work by San Francisco artist John Slepian shown at Catharine Clark Gallery: a hairy rubber nub swaddled in blankets, programmed to sob disconsolately until you pick it up and pat its posterior. Forget admiring Old Masters from afar: here you’re invited to burp the art.
Photography
Of all the visual art forms, photography is the one that punched San Francisco’s ticket to art stardom. Back when photography was still a new medium and widely dismissed by most museums and galleries as too literal and commercial to have artistic value, Bay Area photographers ignored the naysayers and occupied themselves with masterworks that put photography on the art-world map. Always fascinated by technical novelty and willing to take a gamble, San Franciscans started collecting photographs avidly in the 19th century. As a result of local interest and key donations from private collectors, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA; ) has amassed one of the world’s best photography collections, and frequently exhibits the work of local artists past and present.
Pioneering 19th-century photographer Pirkel Jones saw expressive potential in California landscape photography, but it was SF native Ansel Adams’ photos of Northern California’s sublime wilds and his accounts of photography in Yosemite in the 1940s that would draw legions of camera-clutching visitors to San Francisco. Adams founded Group f/64 with Seattle-based Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, who also kept a studio in SF and made frequent visits from his permanent base in nearby Carmel. Instead of using the 19th-century tricks of soft focus and tinting, f/64 favored ‘straight’ photography – pictures that were matter-of-fact yet evocative, like Weston’s famous shot of a single green pepper that looks like two lovers entwined.
Dorothea Lange spent many of her most productive years based in San Francisco, photographing Californians grappling with the hardship of the Great Depression and WWII. While she is best known for her searing photographs of desperate Dust Bowl farmers, such as Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1935, her images of Japanese Americans forced to leave their San Francisco homes for WWII internment camps have the aching impact of a body blow. This legacy of cultural critique is kept alive today in the full-color suburban dystopias of Larry Sultan and Todd Hido. Hido