Satirical Magazines at SFPL

While at the Main Branch Library on Tuesday, I got sidetracked by an exhibit of "subversive humor magazines" on the top floor. It does a good job putting Charlie Hebdo in context, & I actually learned something.

The story begins with Le Charivari, an illustrated Parisian newspaper founded in 1832. Its political & social satire ran afoul of government censors, & it shutdown within a few years. It was the direct inspiration for London's Punch magazine, among others.

If nothing else, the exhibit shows that dumb humor is nothing new.

These magazines clearly reached an artistic peak in the decades around 1900.

This sensitive drawing by Käthe Kollwitz appeared in Simplicissimus, the famous German satirical paper.

It was interesting to learn about Krokodil, the Soviet Union's official satire magazine. Judging by the pages on display, the United Sates & Britain were major targets. The collector Nat Schmulowitz obtained these by subscribing to the magazine directly. When it turned out the U.S. Postal Service was seizing them instead, he sued them to get his missing issues.

I also liked seeing issues of Tarantula, a 50's-style anti-Communist magazine smuggled into East Berlin from the West.

San Francisco is represented by The Nose, which published 25 issues in the 1st half of the 1990s. It seems to have aged well.

§ Mad World
Subversive Humor Magazines from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor
April 1 - May 31 2015
Skylight Gallery
Main Library

Geoff Vasile at CAM

Last Thursday evening, goaded by a timely tweet from MariNaomi, I jogged from a history talk at the Mechanics' Institute straight to the Cartoon Art Museum, where I arrived for the tail end of a reception for cartoonist Geoff Vasile, whose work is being featured in the museum. There was time to have a beer, watch Mr. Vasile draw a dinosaur & hear him hold forth on Erik Larson's drawing skills. I also heard attendees trade improper stories about strip clubs.

Mr. Vasile's own drawings are on display at the back of the museum, on the wall next to the restrooms. I liked seeing pages from his latest autobiographical story "My Mom Just Died!" Its content is characteristically inappropriate yet entirely sincere. It was interesting to see the fastidiously clean lines of his originals.

§ Small Press Spotlight on Geoff Vasile
Thursday, April 16, 2015 from 5:00 to 8:00pm
Cartoon Art Museum

Trevor Paglen at Altman Siegel

This week I checked out the handful of works by conceptual artist Trevor Paglen at the Altman Seigel gallery at 49 Geary. Mr. Paglen investigates secrecy, communications technology & government surveillance, & though his art is part documentary, it is not self-explanatory. Code Names of the Surveillance State is a video scroll of the nerdy, boastful & funny names of NSA spying programs. Large photographs of people at the beach are paired with annotated maps revealing that these are also landing sites & choke points for the undersea cables carrying the world's Internet traffic.

Inside a curtained room, a projected video gives us a long, continuous shot of the GCHQ's UFO-like headquarters, filmed from an aerial camera that circles the building & occasional zooms in on cars & employees.

This sculpture of computer parts sealed in a plexiglass container looks like a skinned Power Mac G4 Cube, but it's a functioning wi-fi hotspot which communicates with Websites through the Tor network, a protocol designed to disguise a Web user's location. It is difficult to give concrete, visual form to subjects that are by nature hidden & recondite, but I found the exhibit a bit spooky nonetheless.

§ Trevor Paglen
March 5 – May 2, 2015
Altman Siegel
49 Geary Street, San Francisco

Movement in Paper

The small art gallery in the Student Center on the SF State campus currently has an exhibition of origami models, & it's one of the best organized origami exhibits I've seen. The selections posit origami as a sculptural art form, & the models are displayed so that you can walk completely around them.

The works fall into 3 categories. Tessellations are represented by Goran Konjevod's rippling, pleated forms.

Some of the animals figures are arranged in charmingly animated poses. Their detail is simply astonishing.

The modular examples cover a variety of designs & techniques.

The labels helpfully indicate the designer, the folder & the type of paper. I would also like to know the dimensions of the unfolded sheet of paper, information always omitted in these shows.

§ Movement in Paper: The Evolving form of Origami
May 1st - July 15th, 2014
CCSC Art Gallery, SF State

49 Geary Round-Up

Vivian Maier
Wilmette, Illinois
Girl In Clown Costume
circa 1967-1968

Tuesday lunchtime I peeked into a couple of galleries at 49 Geary. The Scott Nichols Gallery has a selection of photographs by the enigmatic Vivian Maier, a prolific & posthumously discovered street photographer who worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago in the 1950's & 60's while creating an archive of 100,000 negatives. Her work has only been known since 2009, but she is already the subject of news reports, exhibitions, books & 2 documentaries. The whole thing sounds like a post-modern stunt, but the pictures on display have an immediacy that is often arresting. There's a sense that the photographer saw something meaningful each time she snapped a picture. The images would not be out of place next to Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson.

John Chiara    
155 Somerset, 2014
Camera Obscura Ilfochrome Photograph, Unique
34 x 28 inches
HG12266

In the Haines Gallery, I enjoyed the washed-out colors & ghostly atmosphere of pictures of homes in the Excelsior district, taken in series by John Chiara with a camera obscura. There are no negatives, & the images were developed directly on photographic paper about a yard high. Unfortunately the exhibit does not show the camera obscura itself, which must be huge.

David Sokosh
Mike's Arm, Brooklyn
tintype

The Robert Tat Gallery is also featuring photography without negatives. David Sokosh's contemporary tintypes are made using 19th century processes & lenses, so each photograph is a unique object. The subjects look like they could have come from the 19th century as well. The dusky images have a potent presence & feel vaguely fetishistic.

§ Vivian Maier
Out Of The Shadows
Scott Nichols Gallery
February 6 – June 14

§ John Chiara
de • tached
Haines Gallery
March 6 - April 26, 2014

§ David Sokosh
American Tintypes
Robert Tat Gallery
March 6, 2014 - May 31, 2014

Cristobal Valecillos: American Family

Yesterday at lunchtime I visited the McLoughlin Gallery in 49 Geary to see an installation of life-size objects cunningly constructed out of recycled cardboard by Cristobal Valecillos. This child's bicycle looks like it could actually work. I like its DIY woven basket.

Objects such as a country mailbox, a lawnmower, & this surveillance camera evoke suburban home life. The largest piece is a one-room house, completely made of used cardboard & large enough to walk inside. It is a grand version of those forts kids make out of an empty cardboard box, & I felt secure being inside it.

The cardboard objects also appear in accompanying photographs of models posing as a multiracial family. I had a nice chat with the gallery proprietor, who shared her thoughts on the social context of the work. She also let me sit in the exhibit's cardboard armchair.

On my way back to the elevator, I was surprised to notice a door opening into an antiquarian bookstore. 2 steps in & I felt like I was in a small London bookshop. Their specialty is William Blake & illustrated books, but I was too intimidated to take any of the volumes off the shelves. I had a brief but delightfully pithy conversation with the bookseller, who averred that the next generation is growing up without physical books.

§ The McLoughlin Gallery
American Family
Cristobal Valecillos
Exhibition runs until April 27th

§ John Windle 
Antiquarian Bookseller

Muni History & Children's Books at SFPL

It's pretty amazing to see this die cut, Halloween-themed Muni fast pass from 1977. That's something you can't do with a Clipper card. It's in a small exhibit about Muni, crammed into a few cases on the 5th floor of the main library. A 1931 map shows a trolley line on my street, so my neighborhood was probably better served back then than it is now. One can easily read the entries in a hand-written accident log, & I really liked seeing an employee publication containing cartoons lampooning Muni riders & workers. They are nicely drawn & actually funny.

Also on the same floor is an exhibit of children's book illustrations, displaying both original art & printed books. The selection favors refined artwork. Drawings by Charles Feiffer, Maurice Sendak, & one of the 1st illustrators of Harry Potter are included.

§ Cussed and Discussed: 100 Years of the Municipal Railway in San Francisco
San Francisco History Center
San Francisco Main Library
November 2, 2012 - January 24, 2013

§ Draw Me a Story: A Century of Children’s Book Illustration
Skylight Gallery
San Francisco Main Library
September 15, 2012 - December 2, 2012

Ceramics Annual of America 2012

Esther Shimazu, Dragon / 2011, stoneware	When I bought a book at the used book store at Fort Mason last Friday, the cashier gave me a pass for the Ceramics Annual of America. This turned out to be a large 3-day exhibit of ceramic sculptures, with works mostly by Bay Area artists. 2 flamboyant lithographs by Robert Arneson are at the entrance, & I learned that many of the sculptors in the show are Arneson's direct artistic progeny.
Carmen Lang, Trophies at play / 2011, white stoneware, glazes	Pieces ranged from these small, uninhibited figurines...
Lisa Reinertson, River / 1989, ceramic	...to this larger-than-life reclining figure.
Claudia Tarantino, Collections / 2011, porcelain	There were abundant displays of virtuosity. When I told the artist that I couldn't tell which items in this assemblage were real, she explained that everything but the marbles & the jacks is porcelain.
Evan Hobart, Away we go / 2010, Stoneware ceramic, steel	It was hard to stop looking at Evan Hobart's City Skulls sculptures, overbuilt cityscapes in the shape of dinosaur skulls.
	I love their traffic jams, inspired by matchbox cars.
Avery Palmer, Posterity / 2011, ceramic	This sleeping head in Avery Palmer's surreal construction almost seemed to be breathing.
Shalene Valenzuela, Proper/Improper pumps / 2001	Many pieces were amusingly anti-classical, like Shalene Valenzuela's ceramic versions of a housewife's accessories ...
Belinda Berger, Country Life, "The Big Piggery" / 2012, earthenware	... & Belinda Berger's pile-up of pigs.
	The pavilion's open space never felt crowded. There seemed to be a lot of art students checking out the show during my visit late Saturday afternoon. Many of the artists were present. Some were chatty & informative. Others silently watched over the people viewing their work. Sadly, I missed the pottery wheel demonstrations.

§ Ceramics Annual of America 2012
September 14 - 16, 2012
Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason

Ansel Adams: The Manzanar Project

At lunchtime I visited the Scott Nichols Gallery at 49 Geary to see a show of 50 Ansel Adams photographs of the World War II Manzanar relocation camp. Many photos emphasize Manzanar's natural surroundings, but there are also portraits & scenes of everyday life, imagery not typically associated with Ansel Adams. I liked the fleeting moment he caught of a woman, in a long handmade scarf, perhaps saying good-bye to the unseen occupant of an automobile. The pictures are not overtly political in the way that Dorothea Lange's photos of the same subject are. A staff member at the gallery told me that on opening night people commented on how happy the internees look, but the images need to be read with the appropriate cultural & political subtext. The prints on display were made from the original negatives in 1985 by the Fresno Metropolitan Museum. This institution has since gone bankrupt, & its 6 sets of these photos are now in various hands.

§ Ansel Adams
The Manzanar Project
September 6 – October 27, 2012
Scott Nichols Gallery