Hosfelt
Gallery show suggests we're blinded by information
by Kenneth Baker
San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, July 10, 2004
Two exhibitions, both organized by artists, stand out in the annual round
of summer group shows at city galleries: "Troy Story" at Hosfelt
and "Finesse" at Catharine Clark.
"Troy Story," put together by Marco Maggi, focuses on the problem
of excess information blotting out knowledge.
Jesse Amado's wall piece "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BABY PLEASE DON'T
GO I LOVE YOU SO" (2004) packs sideways the letters that spell its
title, cut out of wood and painted silver, so deciphering them involves
relearning to read. It also looks a little like an early Donald Judd.
Jim Campbell's "Accumulated Psycho" (2004) marks the far end of
the spectrum of techniques represented here. He projects Alfred Hitchcock's
"Psycho" full length (except for the credits) with one amazing
difference. After the first tracking shots, Campbell let the information
in his digitized version pile up onscreen. So the projected image changes
only gradually, evolving an internal visual suspense completely disengaged
from Hitchcock's. "Accumulated Psycho" shows us how much cinematic
experience -- and implicitly all experience -- depends on our selective
capacity to forget what came before.
Back to back with Campbell hangs the analog version of his digital feat:
Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Metropolitan Los Angeles, Los Angeles" (1993),
a movie palace interior shot by the reflected light from the screen. Like
Campbell, but by different means, Sugimoto's long exposure collected the
projected light of an entire film.
Other remarkable things here include Jean Shin's sprawling, site-specific
house of Rolodex cards, with its sidelong tribute to Sol LeWitt, and Kenny
Solomon's DVD "10 Hours on the First Car of the L Train" (2003)
Like Walker Evans almost 75 years before, Solomon trained his camera on
riders across a New York subway car and caught their attitudes of brightness
and fatigue, readiness and resignation. Abbreviating with dissolves every
time a rider entered or left, Solomon compressed his day's ride to 7 1/2
minutes. Accompanied by lightly rolling music by Lolly Molly, "10 Hours
..." turns surveillance into a compelling candid portrait of everyday
society.
'Finesse' at Clark: The contemporary art world is currently delighting in
its own rediscovery of drawing, after the supposed long eclipse of such
traditional skill by new media, conceptual art and performance.
The countless unrecognized artists who have sustained themselves by drawing
all along may take encouragement -- if only a little -- from Catharine Clark's
summer group show "Finesse," organized by Phil Knoll, who included
himself in it.
"Finesse" demonstrates, among other things, how the vogue for
conceptual art and new technology expanded the sense of "drawing" and complicated the question of appreciation. Drawing as a process, even
a mindless one, connects the very different things made by Daniel Zeller,
Erick Johnson, Cary Smith and Warren Isensee.
Smith's graphite improvisations on Bristol board have the formal eccentricity
and edge-to-edge congestion common to much so-called "outsider art."
They bring to mind the obsessive inventions of the Swiss lunatic Adolf Wölffli
(1864-1930).
Isensee similarly appears to decide in advance to fill an entire page, aligning
his nested colored pencil rectangles with its edges. Zeller avoids right
angles as consistently as Isensee keeps to them as he develops intricate
organic traceries of ink lines suggestive of coral formations or aerial
relief maps.
Josephine Taylor's "Fat Pig, Garbage and Other Epithets" (2004)
describes an unnerving and puzzling moment of family drama with a stylized
but highly skilled realism. Nothing else on view carries anything like the
psychic charge of this work. It reminds us that the sustained attention
drawing entails may involve an artist reawakening highly uncomfortable emotions
in herself.
Laura Splan induces a different sort of disquiet
by drawing with blood, presumably her own.
Comic strips play a large part -- as format and inspiration -- in "Finesse,"
most obviously in pieces by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and Knoll. But the
most memorable example, not part of "Finesse" proper, belongs
to Chicagoan Scott Roberts.
Visitors hear Roberts' piece before they see it. From behind the curtain
of the Video Project Room a repeated "puck, puck, puck, puck ..." sounds, like drips from a leaking roof hitting a bucket.
The sounds mark the footfalls of Roberts' "Devil Cat." A dour
cousin to Felix, he paces endlessly in a circle, hands -- hands? -- behind
his back, in a DVD projection into a corner of the darkened room.
Roberts may intend a reference to Bruce Nauman's famous pacing piece "Slow
Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)" (1968). But "Devil Cat" plays
brilliantly into our current paranoid sense of passing time as a countdown
to the next exploit of insomniac evil schemers.
Bay Area sculptor Walter Robinson also startles with an ensemble of sculptures
called "Quench."
Three standing, vaguely animal forms studded with nubs of color vacillate
between looking like giant sweets and bizarre lawn ornaments.
A fourth element, a black blob on the floor, dotted with the same pellets
of color, suggests the unhappy aftermath of an overdose of sweets, or metaphorically,
of an overdose of literalness. Look again, and you see camels and oil --
light, sweet, crude political art.
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Troy Story: Works in various media by 14 artists. Through Aug.
21. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina St., San Francisco. (415) 495- 5454,
www.hosfeltgallery.com.
Finesse: An Exhibition About Drawing: Works in various media by
many artists, including guest curator Phil Knoll. Through July 31. Catharine
Clark Gallery, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 399-1439, www.cclarkgallery.com
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com
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