Pleasant, quirky, but not exactly world class: that could have described San Francisco a few decades ago, and could describe the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, too. But as the city by the bay has grown into a hard-charging hub of tech wealth and class resentment, SFMOMA is changing too, into a much grander sort of museum. After closing for three years, the museum has re-emerged in a massive new building, at a scale outstripping even New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and houses a substantially beefed up collection of art after 1945 – albeit one funded more by Bay Area titans of retail and finance than the notoriously stingy millionaires of Silicon Valley.
Welcome to winner-take-all art history, and to the new SFMOMA: an often impressive, occasionally flabbergasting procession of big names and high prices. It’s a mutated museum for a mutated city, and the old institution has been flayed open to make way for hefty new spaces. (This being San Francisco, other new additions include a hipster coffee joint and an SFMOMA app that will use your phone’s GPS to find the nearest bathroom, each of which is saturated with color for ideal selfie-snapping.) My colleague Oliver Wainwright has more to say about the new building, which is now the largest museum in America devoted to modern and contemporary art. Inside Snøhetta’s new crimped tower, the story starts with the recent acquisitions, and how SFMOMA developed a core as blue-chip as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The catalyst for SFMOMA’s growth, and the heart of its inaugural presentation, is the unusual bequest of the collection of Doris and Donald Fisher. (They founded the Gap.) The couple have not exactly donated their art to SFMOMA, but instead have loaned their collection for 100 years, and underwritten the construction of a new wing of the museum to house it. The terms of the agreement require that SFMOMA mount a show exclusively of the Fisher collection every 10 years. Beyond that, the museum is free to mix up Fisher works and other collection materials; they can also loan them out. But three-quarters of the art in the galleries the couple endowed in Snøhetta’s competent, somewhat joyless museum extension must have a Fisher label on the back.
The Fishers collected in depth, often buying dozens of works by a single artist, and for this first presentation the curators have opted for concentrated displays of individual painters, sculptors and photographers. There are, in the Fisher galleries, old-fashioned monographic displays as good as any in the world of the biggest names of the last century. Ellsworth Kelly, who died last Christmas at 92, is eulogized here in a flawlessly installed, deeply moving presentation of 26 paintings, reliefs and drawings. All-white constructions of cardboard and string, done in France in the early 1950s, give way to thrumming spectra of solid color and massive fan-shaped expanses of steel or wood. One bronze relief of two half-ovals – modeled after a mandorla, the almond-shaped cartouche reserved for Christ on medieval friezes – is so august as to be almost literally divine.
Kelly’s good friend Agnes Martin is represented by seven serene, whispering paintings of wheat and pink lines, on view in an octagonal shrine of a gallery that seems on course to become a pilgrimage site. Andy Warhol merits numerous one-man displays, which feature a clutch of silver silkscreened works of the 1960s: Elvis times three, Brando times two, mugshots, Mao.
And SFMOMA now has the deepest collection anywhere of the paintings of Gerhard Richter – nearly two dozen from the Fishers, plus the same again already in SFMOMA’s collection. Three whole galleries are given over to Richter’s blurred, history-haunted portraits in black-and-white; to his squeegee-executed abstractions, poised between faith and doubt in the future of painting; to color charts, seascapes and blotchy aerial maps. And to Lesende (1994), one of the truly great artworks of the 20th-century, which is one of the rare non-Fisher works brought into the monographic suites. Lesende depicts Richter’s wife Sabine reading the newspaper. She looks like a woman in a Dutch Old Master, holding an artifact of mass media rather than a love letter. Her face and skin are rendered with crystalline exactitude. A scrunchie holds back her ponytail, and a wispy blonde forelock flutters by her ear. But her left hand: it’s gone, blurred into the newspaper in a haze of white. Even as tender a painting as Lesende is shot through with skepticism; even love is a no-knowledge zone.
Other monographic galleries feature Dan Flavin, Philip Guston, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Brice Marden and Chuck Close. In other words, the champions league. SFMOMA has made a show of force for this first presentation in the new building, and depending on your mood it can inspire either awe or exhaustion. No woman except Martin gets her own room in the Fisher galleries, and there are almost no artists of color – though a tar-slathered wire mesh sculpture by Martin Puryear is one of the finest works here. The museum’s holdings of artists from the Bay Area get scant attention, too, pushed aside in favor of the bombastic Holocaust kitsch of Anselm Kiefer, plus some Andreas Gursky mega-photographs that have aged very poorly. It’s just a first outing, but SFMOMA’s curators seem to have opted for the bow-down-bitches school of exhibition making; we’ll have to wait and see if they’ll get more inventive later, or whether they stick with brand-name extravagance.
Elsewhere there is a ring of galleries devoted to photography, as well as a design collection that stretches from mid-century Helvetica-lettered posters to the defunct Google Glass. And SFMOMA is also making a big show of new acquisitions from donors not named Fisher, part of what it calls a Campaign for Art. These acquisitions include, along with yet more Richters, some important works of 1970s new media art – such as Lynn Hershman Leeson’s pioneering video works documenting herself as a fictional avatar, or a utopian slideshow from the Bay Area collective known as Ant Farm.
Yet the Campaign for Art’s contemporary section, capping the building on the seventh floor, is a calamity; it in places feels more like an art fair display than a show at a major American museum. A shallow presentation of 80s all-stars, from a Jeff Koons equilibrium tank to a Christopher Wool circuit of squiggles, gives onto an offensive “minorities room” – in which David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Mark Bradford, and other African American artists, plus the Cuban-born Félix González-Torres, are shunted together in a half-hearted and market-approved look at identity and opposition. (As for the bewildering decision to prefix the “minorities room” with Charles Ray’s sculpture of a homeless woman, we are going to advance without comment.) There is much anemic painting familiar to any Basel day-tripper. There is next to nothing from artists beyond the US and Europe, and then only of the most approved class: Doris Salcedo’s cement-clogged furniture, Ai Weiwei’s paint-soaked urns. One can understand, given that these works are new donations (or, frequently, “promised gifts”), that they come from the more commercial side of art’s current domain. Yet SFMOMA director Neil Benezra, in an interview with the Guardian, explained: “we tried to be as specific as possible with our requests”; they wanted bloodlessness, and their board was happy to oblige.
What does it all add up to? And who is it even for? In SFMOMA’s notable new photography wing, in a display devoted to images of California and the American west, you will find a series of portraits from the early 1980s, shot by the artist Jim Goldberg. The series is called Rich and Poor, and the photos depict destitute San Franciscans in moldy flophouses, whom Goldberg invited to add handwritten captions. “I don’t have nothing, only $10,” writes one subject; “NO MONEY MEANS LIVING IN THE PITS,” shouts another. Beside them are portraits of wealthier people, surrounded by fine furniture and, in more than one case, modern art. It’s a rare jolt of economic reality in this imposing new museum, and a reminder that its curators already have one eye on the yawning economic chasm outside Snøhetta’s white fortress – a chasm that has grown wider still than in Goldberg’s day. Soon SFMOMA will have to decide how much it wants to represent and even counter that chasm, or whether, in this city’s battle over inequality, it has already picked its side.
0 评论:
Post a Comment