San Francisco - Alison Bing [21]
Today’s smart, craft-conscious contemporary Bay Area art owes equal debts of gratitude to the detail orientation of early-20th-century California Arts and Crafts and the discipline of late-1960s painting. But David Hockney–style pristine, poolside Southern Californian aesthetics never quite worked in San Francisco, with its love of rough-and-readymade ’50s Beat collage, ’60s psychedelic Fillmore posters, earthy ’70s funk and beautiful-mess punk and ’80s graffiti culture.
Despite all these competing influences, many standout Bay Area artworks don’t seem labored at all. Anna Von Mertens covers army-cot-like beds with gorgeously discomfiting quilts, stitched with abstract patterns drawn from mushroom cloud explosions, WWII bombing raids and September 11 radar-screen readings. Substituting urban myth with urban truth, Felipe Dulzaides has replaced Nike billboards with blown-up photos of the tattered-chain basketball hoops seen in the streets below. Artists Ann Chamberlain and Ann Hamilton coordinated 200 volunteers to collage an entire wall at the San Francisco Main Library with 50,000 cards from the old card catalog, each card with commentary handwritten in one of a dozen locally spoken languages. Works by these and other rising art stars can be spotted at Jack Hanley Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery and the SF Arts Commission Gallery.
Street Smarts
Like atoms in a radioactive substance, California DIY craftiness, skate culture and art-schooled finesse combined and collided in the late ’90s in a distinctly San Francisco style. It’s now known as ‘Mission School’ for its storytelling muralista sensibilities and graffiti-tag urgency. The Mission School professor emeritus was the late Margaret Kilgallen, whose closely observed character studies blended hand-painted street signage, comic-book pathos and a miniaturist’s attention to detail. Clare Rojas expanded on these principles with splashy wall paintings, featuring looming, clueless California grizzly bears and tiny, fierce figures.
Other Mission School work is rougher around the edges: Chris Johansen’s crowds of shy hipsters are drawn in endearingly awkward style, and Barry McGee’s assemblages include piles of found bottles painted with freckled, feckless characters and jumpy animations shown on beat-up TVs. Some Mission School art is fairly derided as the faux-naive work of stoned MFAs, but when its earnestness works, it hits you where it counts. Mission School artists make the scene at Luggage Store Gallery, Eleanor Harwood Gallery and Jack Hanley Gallery.
New Media
The technological expertise of the Bay Area is hard to match, and it’s no surprise that local artists are putting it to creative use. But some of the most compelling new media artists don’t show off with lots of bells and whistles, as in Rebecca Bollinger’s grouped sketches of images found through a single keyword search on the web. Frame by frame, using specially modified software, Kota Ezawa turned the OJ Simpson trial into the multi-channel cartoon animation it actually was.
There’s a new strain of anti-interactive art, too. Since the early ’80s, Silicon Valley artist Jim Campbell has been building motherboards to misbehave – in one case, a running figure freezes as soon as it senses the slightest motion in the gallery, and like a frightened doe will resume activity only if you stay stock still. There’s a certain silent-movie slapstick humor to Scott Snibbe’s projections: it’s a plain square on the wall until