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Art

The Dream World and the Real World are the same.

There I was mid- afternoon, back to my old haunts, this time Oaks Bottom. Looking one way, a fall landscape of etherial beauty, separated by a mirror-like body of water, still as can be. Looking the other way, I was surrounded by throngs of people trying to catch the last sun rays before the upcoming storm, getting their runs in, having outdoor school, setting camp for the night, ever deeper in the woods that shelter the unhoused. Busy, noisy, alive, but not exactly a retreat into undisturbed nature.

Made me think of something Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo once said: “The dream world and the real world are the same,” although she, of course referred to the content of her paintings, her art in general, that “alchemically combined traditional techniques, Surrealist methods, and mystical philosophic inquiry into visionary dreamscapes.” (Ref.) It was also the mantra of the surrealist movement – André Breton declared in his essay The Manifesto of Surrealism,”surrealism is a movement that seeks to display the thoughts of the unconscious mind in a conscious manner, linking the dream-world and reality.”

My dream world and my real word yesterday depended on where I pointed my gaze, while hers’ originated with her inner eye. Varo had joined the surrealists when moving from Spain to France in the late 1930s before she fled fascism and emigrated to Mexico in 1941. Her art was a reaction to both the misogyny she experienced in Paris among her fellow painters and the political repression, also squarely directed at women, that made her stay in Mexico during Franco’s rule of Spain after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939.

Having grown up in the 1920s to the achievements of a women’s movement that was espoused in the liberal Second Republic, she saw those rights trampled, including the right to divorce, use contraception, have an abortion or simply have a passport or a job (your husband had to sign.)

In 1934, a very conservative fascist group founded a new branch of government named the Sección Femenina. Franco later redesigned the mission of the Sección Femenina to encourage women and teach them how to be the ideal woman, as described by Franco and the Catholic Church. Women had to take classes at a young age to be “cheerful, supportive, self-sacrificing wives, waiting for the return of their husbands to a spotless home and happy family.” Maybe Lindsey Graham read the instructions. This is what he said at a campaign event beginning of November almost 100 years later: “I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure — that you can go anywhere, young lady.”

Varo became a highly successful painter in Mexico before her death of a heart attack in her mid 50s, although much less known than her male surrealist counterparts. Just think Salvador Dali, her contemporary, attending the same art schools in Spain as she did, and part of the movement that she joined in Paris during late 1930s.

Art critics have often described the two as surrealism’s extremes, representing shock and wonder, respectively.

And yes, there is much wonder to be found in her work, much admiration for nature (birds are ubiquitous, reason alone for me to be enchanted,) and mysticism and magic, but there is much more to it than that. There are clear feminist expressions found in the way women are depicted, strong, self-determined, explorative and intelligent. Equally important, she understands the Orwellian implications of mass movements centered around a snake oil salesman, having sacrificed their personal identity for being members of a cult, yearning for mystical fusion with the conjurer.

Here is The Juggler. (The Magician) (1956)

I think this painting could not be more apt for our times. (A lager version can be seen in the MOMA link attached at the bottom.)

The juggler, on the one hand, seems to represent enlightenment, his face painted on mother-of-pearl, in nature a protective layer, here a mask protecting who from whom? He is painted in the style of Hironymous Bosch (one of Varo’s role models) with red, shimmering robe, and metaphysical objects rather than rings thrown in the air, a light show to distract and/or blind the acolytes in front of him, although sold as enlightenment.

His cart, like a little ship that could sail away any moment when his manipulative task is done (or he lost the election,) contains a woman with closed eyes (no enlightenment here!) and all matter of domesticated critters, tame lion included. That’s what autocratic figures pull off.

The most interesting part is of course, as Varo herself declared, the uniformed mass of beings. “… a kind of unenlightened individuals who were awaiting a transference of enlightenment from the magician so that they can wake up…”

If you look closely, they seem to be wrapped all in the same cloth, a cape that reminded me of those fairy tale invisibility cloaks, about to be triggered. The people are rather androgynous, although upon close inspection you can see still hints of individual expression, some hope or differentiation. Not all is lost. The dystopian future of psychic fusion with the magician might just be averted.

Let them wake up to the real world, not the dream world, and tackle its healing without the help of witch-hat spouting quacks. And have eagle eyes to be on the look-out for the next one….

(Note that the MOMA interpretation of the painting is rather different.)

And here are jugglers at the opera.

Here is the full opera, a master piece.

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Seeking a Model

You surely know those days when everything, even the most innocuous bit, takes on a dark halo, a portent, a trigger for irrational thinking. I am in the middle of one of those days as I write this – hopefully behind me tomorrow when you read this.

Most of the Pentagon leadership fired? Must mean war in the offing, or a coup where the military sides with the ones clinging to power. You get the idea – thoughts so far out of the ordinary that one would laugh at them during normal times, would scold me for even uttering them, and yet here they take on a realistic sheen in my already anxious universe.

Time to look for role models who have survived far worse and risen to live meaningful lives, using art for resistance. None more fitting than Lin Jaldati, an extraordinary Dutch woman who survived Auschwitz when betrayed after years of living in hiding in Amsterdam.

I learned about her in a project researched, written up and at times performed by historian David Shneer, z”l.

Shneer who died a few days ago at age 48 of a brain tumor, held the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado. He was an outstanding intellectual pursuing the history of Yiddish culture, but also a lively performer – some of the videos in the link below (Art is my Weapon) show him together with colleagues, in particular Jewlia Eisenberg, performing music and bringing the history of Jewish resistance to life.

The project is called Art is my Weapon – the radical musical life of Lin Jaldati, and tells the story of the Dutch, communist, Jewish cabaret actress who immigrated to East Germany after liberation from Auschwitz to become a famous singer and political player keeping up the memory of the Holocaust until her death in 1988. I familiarized myself with her on the basis of the incredibly poignant title of Shneer’s biography of the artist: Trümmerfrau der Seele. (Woman who clears the soul from rubble.)

Trümmerfrauen were the women who cleared the rubble, the debris, the ruins of the bombed-out buildings of post-war German cities. To envision that act done to the soul, finding pathways to and clearing away the destruction wrought by persecution or trauma, in her case opening space for the memory of a culture that was not destroyed after all, is for me an image that holds incredible power. Humans can withstand and overcome catastrophe, picking up the pieces, refusing to be forced into oblivion. A timely reminder.

Below are a few samplings of her music. One of the most famous songs, from Yiddishe Lieder, published in 1981, is In Kamf (In Struggle.) I have attached the translation of the lyrics. The song is about justice and persecution in a political domain not just reserved for Jews.

Mir vern gehast un getribn, Mir vern geplogt un farfolgt; Un alts nor derfar vayl mir libn Dos oreme shmaktnde folk.

Mir vern dershosn, gehangen, Men roybt undz dos lebn un rekht; Derfar vayl emes farlangen Un frayhayt far oreme knekht.

Ober undz vet nit dershrekn Gefenkenish un tiranay, Mir muzn di mentshhayt dervekn Un makhn zi gliklekh un fray.

Shmidt undz in ayzerne keytn, Vi blutike khayes undz rayst; Ir kent undzer kerper nor teytn Nor keyn mol undzer heylikn gayst.

Ir kent undz dermordn, tiranen, naye kemfer vet brengen di tsayt; Un mir kemfn, mir kemfn biz vanen Di gantse velt vet vern bafrayt.

Here is the translation

We are hated and ostracised, we are tormented and persecuted and all just because we love the poor people pining away.

We are shot, hanged, you rob us of our life, our rights so because we want truth and freedom for poor slaves

Hated & hunted & driven, turned out & chased from your doors & only because we have given our love to the weak & the poor

We perish by lash & by fire your prisons & armies we fill our bodies alone may expire our spirits you never can kill

You tyrants may murder or beat us new fighters will rise in our place& we’ll fight & you’ll never defeat us we fight for the whole human race

but you will never frighten us prison and tyranny we must wake humanity and make them happy and free and make them happy and free.

And for those particularly interested in how Yiddish fits into teaching about the Holocaust, here is an informative link.

Photographs are from Holland where Lin Jaldati was born.

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Thoughts in Yellow

I figured we’d celebrate the wave of relief felt by more than half of this country with a color that stands for enthusiasm, positivity and enlightenment. Or so the color gurus tell me…. conveniently ignoring that yellow has often had different connotations.

Just think of its association with sickness – yellow-fever, hepatitis, yellow-jack (a flag on a ship that is under quarantine) – or associations with excess – yellow journalism. Then there are yellow-dog contracts which deny workers the right to join unions. And my own yellow-bellied (cowardly) manner towards a personal nemesis: yellow jackets.

Oops, I announced a celebration, so let’s look at the positive side: yellow daffodils are one of the few bulbs that are absolutely resistant to being devoured by critters, and who bring brightness to spring. And yellow is certainly the color in late fall, early winter, that captures, mirrors and reflects the last of the light, reminding us of escape from the darkness.

Yellow mums bring cheer, modeling patience for long winter days given the eternity they last even in a vase or through first frost. The vivid contrast between yellow and the dark surroundings in the fall woods feels energizing, no hiding here, no shyness, a sturdy presence, at least when it comes to mushrooms.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Yellow was van Gogh’s favorite color. Speculations abounded what could account for his “yellow vision.”

It was his abuse of absinthe, the alcoholic drink he favored! No, he suffered from xanthopsia, a state where everything in your sight looks yellowish, the result from exposure to toxins, including poisonous foxglove tinctures prescribed by his doctor in the asylum at St. Remis! It was subacute angle closure glaucoma that accounted for the yellow ‘halos’  in his paintings!

Basically all of these arguments are put to rest here. The use of digitalis from the foxglove plant was well understood in the 19th century, and by the time van Gogh would have reached sufficiently toxic levels (from absinthe as well) to exhibit xanthopsia he would have been unable to paint. Furthermore, he did not display any of the other symptoms associated with the kind of assumed glaucoma (brow ache, blurred vision,) never once mentioned in his otherwise detailed thousands of letters home.

His vision was also tested by his Doctor in 1889, using the kinds of color vision tests available for railroad personnel in safety tests, and found to be normal, as was his short- and long-distance vision. The guy was in his early 30s at the time, remember?

In contrast, we have his own thoughts in letters about his use of color, of his experimentation with color (yellows were almost always off-set with blue and white, a white he could not have distinguished from yellow with xanthopsia) and the fact that the use of yellow was already dominant in his very young years in Holland, before any of the potentially poisonous agents appeared on the scene. (Here is an invaluable source for his letters, searchable by key concepts.)

Last but not least we also have the assessment of his colleague Paul Gaugain:

‘Oh yes, he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland — those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.’

Now why do I bring up so much of this debate, in my view solved by looking at scientific facts with an eye on the whole package of historical data?

I have been thinking of how arguments are flying around in the Democratic party post-mortem of the election, claiming this or that or those being at fault for losses, for gains, on all sides. Often the loudest arguments win, or the ones that jive most with our own closely held beliefs (confirmation bias,) or the ones that are repeated most often. Now more than ever it seems paramount to wade through them all and really test the veracity of claims, not just their plausibility.

This is important because we will not prevail if we do not learn from mistakes. I am all in favor of celebrating today – but the work of tomorrow has to begin with honest assessments of future moves. And a good start is to look at the differing voices. We can contemplate what AOC had to say in an interview with the NYT yesterday, pointing to the fact that we urgently need and utilize the help of marginalized communities, but then tend to drop them and their demands once we’ve won, giving plum political jobs to anyone but progressives. Or we can turn to a thoughtful, intelligent essay in the Atlantic about what it would mean for democracy to simply go back to the status quo ante 2016. (Highly recommended reading.)

We can look at the argument of many that a centrist Biden, or down-stream candidates like him, overall outperformed the more progressives, even if those won in their own districts. We need to ask, if those claimed differences (we don’t even have yet all the numbers!) are based on message content differences (Medicare for All/Defund the Police) or were inherently driven by misogyny or racism (the more progressive candidates also tended to be POC, many of them women.)

There has to be an assessment of the way messages were conveyed – did we match the skillful bite-size narratives of the republicans with our more complicated stories, did we match their community engagement (democrats did not do door to door canvassing because of Covid)? Did top-down regulations and media approaches hamper individual democratic candidates because they were not appropriate for their communities?

Was there a failure to nationalize attacks on Trump for fear of scaring potential republican voters ready to jump ship – a population that did NOT materialize? After all, campaigns that accepted top-down funding were obliged to run under basic strategic maps brought to them by the DCCC/DSCCC/DLCC and this was their strategy.

Was lack of skill or funding or awareness for the need for social media dispersion a factor? There are so many variable to be taken into account beyond the core issues of progressive demands versus centrist calls for reconciliation and moderateness, that it will take time to isolate them and analyze them all. Most of all it will take the will to do that, otherwise we will not stand in 2022.

Reward yourself for due diligence in exploring these issues with a walk in the woods showering you with exuberant yellow. It will lift your soul.

Music today is by Michael Torke who has composed a lot around colors, including bright blue and its opposing color on the wheel: YELLOW. (Yellow Pages are not the only industry to flag that color. Think Nikon, National Geographic, McDonalds, and CAT and Caterpillar…..) Someone knows what they are doing.

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“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time.”

“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)

The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.

Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)

Keith Haring
Van Gogh

The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.

To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?

On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.

The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.

(The red dirt is where usually the pond resides)

As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.

Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.

Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.

THE IMMORTALITY ODE

Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.

And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..

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The De Young Museum (2)

So much for good intentions. I really mean to keep my prejudices in check, but when I learned many months ago that two of the major art institutions in this country, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) of which the de Young is a part, simply swapped their White, male, European-anchored directors, I rolled my eyes. It is even weirder, given that Thomas Campbell left New York for San Francisco with his reputation under attack, his new Board of Directors undergoing major upheaval with fundraising threatened, for an institution that had worn down four directors in less than a decade, the last one lasting only 22 months, and that had no exhibitions planned beyond 6 months – a process usually stretched over years to be successful.

As so often, I should have been more open minded. Looks like Campbell is rising to these challenges and then some. Despite Covid-19 closing the museum for months on end (they just re-opened,) starving the limited endowment institution of ticket sales on which it heavily relies, he managed so far to prevent major staff lay-offs.

Having to delay major traveling exhibitions for now – a full-dress Judy Chicago retrospective that was supposed to open in May has been postponed for a year – he turned his efforts to support of the local artist community.

“In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are hosting The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.

Works of art in The de Young Open are hung “salon-style,” installed edge to edge and floor to ceiling, which enables a maximum number of works to be displayed. The de Young filled the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries with 877 artworks by 762 Bay Area artists in The de Young Open.”

The work can also be sold directly without the usual commission for the museum, a major boost for the hard-hit community of artists.

Community outreach occurred not on that front alone. In June, protesters against racism had pulled down multiple statues in the park’s Music Concourse, which is flanked by the museum on one side, and the Academy of Sciences on the other. Francis Scott Key, national anthem lyric author and slave owner, came down, as did Saint Junípero Serra, founder of California missions and enslaver of Native Americans, and Ulysses S. Grant.

The statue of Key sat right under the flag bearing figure; the ferris wheel has been empty and motionless since its installment this spring.

The day after the protest, Campbell posted and later wrote to the SF major that the newly empty spaces should be filled with art derived from an annual competition and commission a work by a Bay Area artist that might respond to the challenge of, Who should we memorialize?” A conversation about what to do with sculptures of people who have blood on their hands, had already happened within the museum before the June protests took place. The civic spirit displayed by these efforts is a hopeful sign.

Robert Emmet survived the purge. An Irish nationalist and rebel leader, he is famous for his speech from the dock during his trial. I have no clue why he is memorialized in San Francisco.

I am writing about this at length not because I am particularly familiar with the museum, I am not, but because I find examples of constructive leadership important to flag. When I wandered around the Music Concourse, benches and fountains recently restored from the vandalism, I was thinking about how people who understand where the rage is coming from without condoning vandalism, and who are in positions to make choices, can really be agents of change. It is the next steps that count, after the upheaval. San Francisco seems to have gained an effective and welcome voice in the art scene and the civic realm in this regard.

Someone who doesn’t just sit it out.

The other part of FAMSF is the Legion of Honor Fine Art Museum, which is still closed. I walked by the palace yesterday afternoon, with the fog rolling into this unimaginably beautiful setting next to the Pacific,

and communed with the bored lions, Jeanne d’Arc and El Cid by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Don’t ask me how they are related to San Francisco either.

The neo-classicist building itself is impressive, a gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to the city of San Francisco, after she persuaded her sugar magnate husband to build a replica for the French pavilion she had fallen in love with at the 1915 world exposition. Here is the history of the museum’s creation. I left the thinker to himself, maybe he’ll come up with further good plans for the museum world….

Music in honor of the maid of Orleans who is forever exposed to the damp fog of the region.

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Yerba Buena Gardens

In what seems another lifetime, I used to go to San Francisco for psychology conferences, or to attend the opera, or, as you might remember, document some of the climate change-movement protests last year. Whirlwind trips that focussed on the task or pleasure at hand, not leaving much time to explore the city’s history.

I did walk once or twice through Yerba Buena Gardens, to or from a visit to SF Moma or the Contemporary Jewish Museum, mostly engaging in people watching. People who were nowhere to be seen this time around – when I came to photograph the site, I was one of maybe three or four people hanging out there in the middle of a Tuesday morning. We are talking an area comprising a few city blocks! The name means Good Herb in Spanish, referring to Spearmint and other herbs in the mint family. None of those to be seen, either.

The space is organized on several levels, with a pedestrian bridge, meandering pathways, large swaths of lawn, cafés, iceskating rink and bowling alleys, kids’ playgrounds, conference centers and art exhibits. The public art ranges from middling to beautiful, with no real cohesive curation detectable. Or maybe that’s just me, too hot on a mid-October day going on 90 degrees having fought yet another battle for parking, drowning my judgement in sweat.

Playground closed due to Covid-19

There is a kinetic sculpture, Urge by Chico MacMurtrie, a half man half woman who moves when you do, sitting down or standing up on top of the world.

There is a sculpture that reminds too much of a certain Californian actor elected president, The Shaking Man by Terry Allen. Judging by the shininess of his hand(s) people are eager to shake indeed.

Covid-19 related landscape art the has seen better days in the but three weeks or so since installation by artist Tosha Stimage. The social distancing devices are supposed to fade and make room for the next artwork to arrive mid-November, but it is a pity that their original beauty can only be guessed at.

Photograph above from the garden web site

And then there are the walls and reflecting streams by Danish artist Lin Utzon, a compelling area of stillness, movement, pattern and integration of the surrounding cityscape through reflection. The fluted granite walls, perforated with large-scale silver fissures, seem to belong to the sky, the air, the light in all its San Franciscan brightness. Or the light belongs to them – depending on your shift in perspective. A photographer’s pleasure.

By chance I came across a fabulous illustrated history of the area once I started reading up on the site. The historic photographic footage alone is worth checking this document out, compiled as The Memory of Traces by artist Jenny Odell during a residency at the Yerba Buena Art Center 5 years ago. Anybody interested in or from SF should check it out – it is revelatory!

www.jennyodell.com/ybc.pdf

I learned that the area was originally home to Filipino immigrants and hotels for elderly veterans, pawnshops, and small businesses. When developers swooped in, the people formed a citizen group to prevent displacement, with limited success (public housing was erected in other places for the people who had to leave.) After court battles and infighting among developers for the best use of the area, a proposition passed in 1976 that allowed an underground convention center, with a park and cultural facilities above it.

The gardens were finished in the mid 90s. During construction, a lot of burial sites and Native American artifacts ranging back to 6000 (!) years were discovered. A memorial to the indigenous tribe of the Muwekma Ohlone is now part of the gardens.

A huge entertainment center, the Metreon, was erected after the gardens. It did not do well, and has re-emerged, now as a High tech experience, in 2012. Suffice it to say, that Rebeccah Solnit mused “a more obsequious monument to capitalism would be hard to find.” 

I leave it at that. The gardens certainly enrich people who need to stop for a moment in a green oasis when the surrounding intensity of the city starts to grate. If I say so myself.

Music today is by a trio from the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, playing Beethoven and friends in their backyard two weeks ago.

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Antidote

I, for one, find the kind of hedging, waffling, side-stepping, equivocating, prevaricating, stalling and evading we have witnessed in the last few days of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings plainly poisonous. And may I remind all of us, that psychologists consider omissions, restructuring, denial, minimization or exaggeration a form of lying.They do speak to the character of those engaging in these actions, or shall we say the absence thereof, but they bring about malaise nonetheless, given what is at stake and given that the absence of character will not matter one bit when it comes to the votes.

Let me post an antidote – words that are unequivocal, honest, no holds barred, emphatic and firm. Words that were true then and are now.

Photographs are of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Yerba Buena Gardens, right in the center of San Francisco. The selection of his words is printed on glass plaques and placed behind a gorgeous waterfall.

I will report more on the gardens tomorrow, not wanting to dilute the power of the words displayed above today. But here is the blurb about the memorial from the website:

The vision of peace and international unity is enshrined in this memorial featuring a majestic waterfall and shimmering glass panels inscribed with Dr. King’s inspiring words, poems and images from the civil rights movement. Artist and sculptor, Houston Conwill, created this memorial in collaboration with poet Estella Conwill Majoza and architect Joseph De Pace.

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MaestraPeace

The Women’s Building in the Mission district features one of the most frequently visited murals in all of San Francisco.

Panoramic photo fron their website

I walked by there on my way to the pharmacy yesterday, another errand within the two mile radius that I am determined to walk in this city, given that I am on war footing with the parking situation. War footing? Outright war more likely…. although the mural tells me to seek peace.

The building is a community center led by women, a safe space to engage in services and advocacy for women and girls, focussing on immigrant issues as well. They offer a weekly food pantry, finger printing for family reunion, and, pre-Covid 19, also tutoring for job seekers and those trying to figure out technology and provide access to computers and internet. Wellness classes and free consultation with immigration attorneys were slated, as were counseling for domestic violence situations, health care, housing information and job training, also before the virus shut everything down.

In short, an amazing program, in a building that has been chosen as one of the sites for this celebration:

This year, as the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Benjamin Moore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are celebrating this historic milestone with a new program focused on the preservation of sites in the U.S. where women from all walks of life have made history. We are so excited to announce The Women’s Building as one of those sites, and we’re very happy our organization is recognized as trailblazers in the role of women and their impact on U.S. history. Our colorful mural façade depicts the power and contributions of women throughout history and the world. This year-long project will enhance the grand staircase that showcases the building’s colorful mural as it makes its way from outside, into the heart of the building. 

The mural on the outside of the building is called MaestraPeace (Woman Teacher of Peace.) Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez painted the 5 stories high mural in 1992; it was restored to full glory in 2012. When I walked by, on an intensely sunny day, it almost felt like walking the streets of Mexico City again, the colors and motifs familiar from that hispanic context. A trip that now feels like a lifetime ago.

The mural brims with life and encouragement, a celebration of women, their skills, their roles, their courage. And no parking in sight – glad I walked!

Music today are some feminist songs from a variety of musicians.

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Closing the Circle

Yesterday we observed Yom Kippur, a day that always strikes a strange balance between finality and renewal. The end and the beginning of a circle. Much to be pondered, between the call for atonement and the tenet that on this day your fate is sealed for the next year. What happened to the promise that if you try harder, things might change? If the outcome is preordained on this day, why try at all? Can your honest remorse move the outcome, just a little bit?

These are, of course, the naive questions of someone not particularly educated in the interpretations of Judaic commands, but they are questions any person should ask themselves in general. What is the relationship between redemption and effort? How do you motivate yourself to be and do good, regardless of reward that might or might not be dangled in front of you? Why do different religions take such different views of predestination – some as fatalistic as Calvinism, where everything is believed to be immutably preordained?

How do you function if there is no hope for forgiveness or change, no acknowledgment of agency? Is there a connection to the attempts of many religions that appease you with promises for a better time in the after life or during the next one? A successful attempt to square the circle?

I can’t provide satisfactory answers. I can, however, show you why circles were on my mind to begin with.

The recently opened basketball arena for the Golden State Warriors, Chase Center, is a singularly unimaginative building (at least from the outside,) in my opinion a squandered opportunity to build something new and exciting in a marvelous location overlooking the bay, for $500 million no less. Many longtime residents also felt that constructing a new arena for the Warriors is a manifestation of the phenomenon of gentrification. Additionally, many who supported the Warriors throughout their years at Oracle Arena feel betrayed by the team’s decision to relocate to San Francisco. There is also the issue of public costs associated with the new arena, both in San Francisco and Oakland. Or so Wikipedia tells me.

In front of the entrance are huge mirrors, art work by olafur eliasson which consists of five fifteen-and-a-half-feet-tall polished hydro-formed steel spheres that stand in a circle around a central space. Seeing Spheres (2019) double and redouble the reflections around them, making the space look larger than it is and drawing the Instagram crowd and other photographers, your’s truly included.

Associations to Paul Klee’s work with circles were one of the things that came to mind when I looked at myself in those circles with their conic sections, looking not a day under 90 when the skies were colored by fire, aging like the person in his 1922 portrait Senecio (BaldGreis.) The title is believed to refer to a medicinal plant Senecio Vulgaris, also known as Old Man in the Spring, and is also a pun in German, literally translated along the lines of soon to be senile.

The painter has not only done wonders with wit, circles, squares and lines, echoes of which I saw all around me when staring into the Eliasson spheres. He has also left us with a map to understanding the strategies, methods and insights leading to his creative output – his notebooks (Bildnerische Form- und Gestaltungslehre) document 10 years of lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus. They are available in their completeness with transcriptions, drawings and references here (not sure if translated into English, though.)

Gaze, 1922
Gaze, 2020

Now where can we find an equally detailed and instructive map for figuring out how to lead a morally and ethically sound life in the Jewish year 5781 without being inscribed for an immutable outcome? Or any old year?

Music today is an homage to Klee, a concert with pieces that show parallels between his visual art and music. Some educational talk in-between, but worth listening to the pieces!

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Portraits, Doubled

To end this week devoted to portraits I will tell two stories, one of a clever way to create indirect portraits, the other about how to portray someone who portrays you.

The first story is about Matthias Schaller, who has an ongoing project to portray living and deceased artists by photographing their palettes. His website in the link above gives you a good idea of the kinds of palettes he has pursued and portrayed. The work supports his claim that you can often identify the painter by looking at how the palette is arranged, geometrically used, and by the assigned color range. (The website also has one of the strongest warnings about not using any of the materials without permission – so you have to go there yourself, I can’t put up teasers here.)

Alternatively you can peruse the article below,

Photographic Portraits of Famous Artist’s Paint Palettes by Matthias Schaller

or read an interview with images here or enjoy the views on one of his exhibitions two years ago at the Berman Museum of Art. I am always a bit taken aback by excessive proprietary actions when it comes to art on the internet. I probably err in the opposite direction, with art on my ow website being easily snatched – but then again why should people not enjoy what they desire? Nothing you print off a website comes even close to the quality of the real object, with its particular paper and color requirements.

Anyhow, I digress. I like Schaller’s idea, I think he is on to something, and I truly admire when someone pursues a particular passion across many years, hunting down and negotiating with those who hold the palettes of famous artists in their collections, archives, museums, or wherever.

The second story I first told three years ago here. It described the thoughts and feelings of portraying a painter, Henk Pander, at work, while his work was you yourself – a portrait of your scarred body.

The artistic collaboration created some meaningful results, although, as is so often the case, the gorgeous painting got the exposure it deserved in public, while the photography slumbers along in an overly expensive, little book collecting dust on bookshelves. Double portraits, uneven distribution.

In any case, the photographs today are from those sessions, with a focus on Henk’s palette since those tie to story #1, and a few extras to wrap up the theme of portrait.

Music shall be my eternal go-to in hard times, Schuman’s Davidsbündler Tänze. I will resume reporting when I am settled in San Francisco.

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