I Found My Art in San Francisco
The Sony Metreon dominates the view around the Yerba Buena Gardens from whatever angle you try to sneak up on it. It’s monstrous: A huge, blocky, cruise ship-sized blob colored plastic-looking greyish-green, the IMAX screen a prow cutting through the best-laid redevelopment plans of architects and artists.
Yet, squatting on the edge of 4th street between Mission and Howard and staring down San Francisco’s much more understated Museum of Modern Art across the gardens on 3rd street, it’s hard not to wonder which place is more entitled to the term Modern.
The SFMOMA’s current fourth floor exhibit, “Art in Technological Times,” from March 3 until July 8, explores the ways in which new tools and processes shape the making of art in the 21st century, questions the ways in which newer, smarter, faster, more capable equipment blurs our sense of reality, and, ultimately, begs the question, “Why aren’t you across the street at the Metreon doing the same thing but having more fun?”
From the moment you enter the Metreon, you’re immersed in the sound of loud pumping techno music. The soft edges and constant curves and ramps you walk on between and among stores disorients you quickly, making it hard to remember which direction you’re pointed in and sometimes which floor you’re on. In one store, people recline on big stuffed couches and armchairs and watch high definition televisions play the Matrix or the Mummy or 101 Dalmatians. In another, they interact with a variety of elaborate video games.
At the SFMOMA, you can watch high definition television mounted on the walls display pretty colors and shapes, shifting slowly, as in the pieces “Liquid Villa” and “Guccinam.” Or, you can watch a short film of an orange, computer-animated figure among a white computer created, soft-edged landscape, projected twice on a wall in front of a real plastic, orange, soft-edged landscape. Inside a pitch black room, Rodney Graham’s “Edge of the Wood,” immerses you in the sounds of a helicopter coming and going while you watch the image of a spotlight play along the face of a forest, over and over again.
Apparently the difference between art and entertainment in technological times is that art is quieter, more dull, and viewed on uncomfortable wooden benches.
Except we expect art to force us to think. We consume entertainment, but we process art.
Like Euan McDonald’s “Two Planes” forces you to think about the “nowness of everything,” the way technology manipulates perception, the way perceptions lie.
Against a blue sky, two seemingly-real, jumbo jet-sized planes appear to be flying together, like lovers, constantly touching as they move through the sky.
Interesting… Pretty… Uh-huh… Clever how the artist put that impossible image together but made it look documentary. Yup… Computer imaging is really something… OK… What else? Can I trust my own eyes? Is this really impossible? Why am I standing watching television in a museum when I used to come to museums to look at paintings? Ha! That’s something about art in technological times… Uh-huh… Right?
Do we contemplate our relationship to the object because the object offers me a new perspective or do I contemplate a new perspective on the object because my current perspective bores me to tears?
Just walk through the Metreon with a new perspective.
In the middle of the Playstation store the carpet disappears and you’re suddenly standing on transparent glass, five inches above grey concrete. You might hesitate before your first step because you’re not sure the floor is a floor.
The short, 3-D film, “The Way Things Work” may be cuter than a 3-year-old and twice as cloying, but if Marshall McLuhan could see it, he might get epileptic in excitement about the message that is the media and its various modes of expression: Three screens present three different images simultaneously. Cartoons, colors, text and real people interact across what are mostly distinct presentation areas. Random facts appear on one screen while the narrative continues without a hiccup on another. Plus, its three-dimensional. They give you glasses for new vision when you enter and let you keep them when you leave.
The most exciting piece in the SFMOMA’s current exhibit is Brian Eno’s untitled installation. You enter a room where at first you can’t see anything but the seemingly unhelpful ropes of dim light hanging from the ceiling. Ambient sounds seem to swim randomly together and apart. The experience is both intellectual and emotional. The sounds are soothing but weird. As your eyes grow accustomed to the space you’ll notice the shapes of a man in one corner and other surprises all around you. The tools that create the experience are out in the open. The light source is both practical and integral to the space. You’ll notice eight small stereos hanging from the walls.
You might want to buy all this equipment at the Metreon and build it or something like it in your own home.
In 1995, when the new Museum of Modern Art was completed, magazines, newspapers, and city officials lauded the near completion of the Yerba Buena development project. Only-in-San Francisco live-work lofts helped convert abandoned warehouses into studio space. The Jewish Museum, the Mexican Museum, and the Cartoon museum were on their way there.
“New symbol for the city,” they cried in 1990 when construction was announced. “Museum adds to SoMa’s sizzle,” wrote the Chronicle in 1995.
The building itself looks classy from the outside and serves its purpose incredibly well inside. The galleries are spacious, well-lit and well-laid out. The museum’s permanent collection has enough of the twentieth century’s finest to inspire an understanding of modern art in even the most culturally stuck-in-the-mud. Five years after its glorious birth, however, it sits in the shadow of the Metreon like a shy cousin.
And perhaps this is as it should be in this city today.
Considering the way in which technology and the business of technology have jacked up the cost of living, exploited the live-work zoning exceptions, grown seemingly out of control, then the most articulate expression of the city’s current character is the vision made by how the Metreon and the SFMOMA sit together on that block south of Market that before art and before technology was home to a hundred years of the city’s working poor.
Admission to SFMOMA is free to the public the first Tuesday of every month, otherwise it’s $9. Admission to Medtreon is always free — unless you buy that video equipment.
Five ways to see modern art without going to a museum:
DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION. A video game in the Airtight Garage in the Sony Metreon. Don’t play it. You won’t be able to. Marvel at the way in which the next generation can read cryptic symbols on a constantly changing display and translate that into physical expression. Cost: Approximately $4 for a bottle of Tylenol. All those flashing colors and loud sounds will give you a migraine.
NAME OF HIGH CLASS FASHION BOUTIQUE HERE. Before the MOMA charges you ten dollars to see a new exhibit on “Art in design” featuring the clothing line (and generous sponsorship) of Gianni Versace and the furniture of Name Another Italian, head down to Union Square and browse through the racks. Cost: Variable. Window shopping is free but replacing your wardrobe will cost you the price of an addition on your house.
UNITED NATIONS PLAZA. People talking to themselves in the throes of paranoid delusions, fists flying, people making illicit deals, the bare flesh of humanity sunburned and stinking. Get there before a less-believable performance art group brings it to the lobby of your office. Bring a friend. Cost: Whatever change you can spare.
MUNI. Smell is the final frontier of the modern. Nothing will rock your perspective on the world like the unidentifiable smells you encounter while riding the city’s buses. And the combination of fragrances — perfume, fish, smell, cologne, sneakers, animals — gives new meaning to postmodern collage. Close your eyes and abstract through your nose. Cost: $1 gets you up to three sensory experiences.
THE EXAMINER. Hold this newspaper at arm’s length and squint. Don’t read the articles, look at the shapes, the underlying Cubist pattern, the colors, the barely detectable faces. Abstract expressionism doesn’t necessarily have to serve substance. Sometimes substance serves style. Cost: Twenty-five cents (including tax).
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