Imin Yeh. Paper Bag Project, 2013; handmade paper bag; 15 x 12 x 6 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Proximities 3: Import/Export is the third and final exhibition in a series at the Asian Art Museum exploring the Bay Area’s perception of, and relationship with, an increasingly globalized Asia. In this last installment, curator Glen Helfand [Full disclosure: Helfand has been an Art Practical contributor] has assembled a formidable group of artists whose work responds to issues around manufacturing, labor, trade, and commodification. The exhibition covers plenty of ground: Amanda Curreri’s works reference her time in South Korea, Byron Peters collaborates with a Shenzhen-based company to create his digital work, Imin Yeh borrows her creative process directly from India, and Rebeca Bollinger displays objects inspired by Japanese culture. Meanwhile, Leslie Shows’ and Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s contributions take a more macro approach to the region, thereby allowing the exhibition to simultaneously hone in on more narrow, context-specific scenarios while still addressing the wider implications of our relationship with Asia as a region. Of primary concern remains our growing reliance on outsourcing, industrial manufacturing, and the mobility of both material and immaterial labor.

On the material side, Imin Yeh’s work Paper Bag Project (2013) reveals the painstaking process of creating a consumer object with a very short lifespan: handmade paper shopping bags. Yeh singlehandedly replicates a production process she witnessed while visiting a factory in India, and documents every step on video, from hand pulping the paper, to screen printing designs, to weaving the rope handles.  The finished objects hang in the exhibition space in a grid against a white wall, their subtle pearlescent texture nearly blending into the background. With the addition of the accompanying video, we become acutely aware of how easily we could (and often do) miss the detailed amount of labor that goes into such disposable objects. Yeh’s piece underlines the wide disparity between labor and the attribution of value in trade and globalized societies.

Read the full article here.

Alison Knowles. Homage to Each Red Thing, 1996. Photo: Glen Helfand.

The kicky collage video presented at the beginning of this Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated, Independent Curators International-distributed exhibition is a condensed introduction to relational aesthetics. But it also makes an intriguing boast: Do It is the longest touring art exhibition, ever. For twenty years, in various variable forms, this cleverly packaged survey of instructional art has been appearing in museums and galleries around the globe. It’s hard to resist placing it in the framework of other world-record-holding cultural artifacts such as, say, long-running Broadway musicals (Cats! Phantom! Les Mis!). But the exhibition’s endurance raises built-in questions about its premise: Do once-challenging conceptual, interactive projects grow stale or more democratic the longer they float through culture?

For those who haven’t encountered the exhibition (its last local appearance was at the Palo Alto Cultural Center back in 1997), the premise and process are self-generating. The presenting institution chooses 25 classic and more recent instructional works from the 250 provided in the exhibition publication—in a sense “branding” these works as Do It pieces—and creates them onsite with locally sourced materials and makers. It’s an economical way for small museums to have major names on their walls, as well as a means to engage audiences in a more direct way through creation of the works on view.

Read the full article here.

Janet Delaney. Bulk Natural Foods, Russ at Howard Street, 1980; archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Artist. © 2014 Janet Delaney.

In San Francisco, in 2015, it’s impossible to avoid conversations about the city’s massive sense of remaking. Depending on your history with the place, these discussions might be nostalgic laments, activist rants about gentrification, visionary business plans, or some combination thereof. There are those who remember what once occupied a site, be it a single-screen movie theater, legendary sex club, SRO, or social-service agency. Others see opportunities for real-estate development, artisanal restaurants, or, hopefully, some kind of visionary new urbanism.

This phenomenon of rapid change comes with rich social, emotional, and aesthetic implications, all of which are evident in Janet Delaney’s South of Market photographs, a series that documents a shift in the South of Market neighborhood during the late 1970s and early 1980s. To show these photographs, which track architectural and demographic change, at the de Young Museum at this moment is a no-brainer. Construction cranes are currently punctuating the same SoMa streets that Delaney shot decades ago, making this the perfect moment for looking at these now-historic images of industrial spaces, gay bars, cheap apartments, and artist studios. SoMa, at that time, was the sister neighborhood to New York’s then-seedy, artist-filled East Village—both have become pricy enclaves in the subsequent decades.

Read the full article here.

David Hevel. Jay Z Killed the Pussycat, 2006; mixed media. Courtesy of Jeffrey Dauber.

Jeff Dauber is a brash, outspoken, and abundantly tattooed collector who also happens to work in tech. He’s been deeply engaged in both sectors for over twenty years and immersed in art since childhood. By trade, he is an electrical engineer who has long worked in Silicon Valley. He manages large production teams, a well-paying position in a flush field. During his career, he’s worked for more than one major company in the South Bay, as he does currently, though when I interviewed him about his collecting practice, his one stipulation was that his current employer remain unstated. It’s corporate policy, he says, and we’re here to talk about his private collection, not one that represents his industry. Collecting art, however, is difficult to separate from the factors that make it possible. More on that later.

I had seen Dauber’s collection before, back in 2006 when I wrote about the renovation of his Potrero Hill home by architect Thom Faulders, who created a stylized, futuristic ceiling because Dauber put a premium on wall space for his art. I recall paintings by Travis Somerville and Chester Arnold, and outlandish, grotesquely oversized fake flower and taxidermy arrangements by David Hevel. In the ensuing eight years, Dauber’s collection has matured and expanded, and he’s moved into a second home around the corner (also spiffed up by Faulders) where he lives with his art. He keeps the original house to display and store his collection; it’s cheaper, he admits, than keeping it in a professional storage facility.

Read the full article here.

Paul Kos, Gargoyle VIII, 1985-2012. Wall installation, performance. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute.

“The temporary” might seem like a neutral concept, but in reality it is ideologically loaded. Depending on the context (and on the social class of the speaker), temporary work and temporary dwelling might mean either insecurity and precarity–or flexibility and dynamism. How are some of San Francisco’s city officials planning to lure young innovators and entrepreneurs, for instance? By allowing developers to build 220-square foot “micro-apartments” for rent, good only for temporary living, unfit for raising a family in. It is assumed that young “creatives” will not mind–they are supposed to be “dynamic and adaptable” by definition, after all.

It is useful to remember that the capitalism we have now, which touts creativity and flexibility as the be-all-end-all, has appropriated its talking points from 1960s anti-capitalism, anti-establishment critique (as the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello point out in their wonderful book, The New Spirit of Capitalism). The tension between monolithic ideologies, established hierarchies and traditions, on the one hand, and the liberating powers of fluidity and impermanence, on the other, was also what animated much of the adventurous art from that period and after. San Francisco Art Institute‘s newest exhibition, Temporary Structures (curated by Glen Helfand and Cydney M. Payton), continues this ongoing dialogue. It explores the concept of “the temporary” in relation to the built environment.

“Open the imaginary. Operate in illusion. Dislodge the immobile.” The architect Claude Parent wrote these words in 2001, but he might have easily had them in mind in 1970, when he transformed his house into an extravagant landscape of slopes. At that time, not only the house, but also the museum and the gallery were being reimagined as spaces for play. A vestige of that tradition at SFAI is Gargoyle VIII, a 1985 work by Paul Kos. It is a wall excision in the shape of a medieval stained-glass window, activated when the artist climbs it (this feat was performed at the opening). Another seminal Bay Area figure, David Ireland, sacrificed the functionality of the space for the sake of a poetic gesture, pouring concrete on the stairs that link the upper and lower galleries (this 1987 piece, Smithsonian Falls, Descending a Staircase for P.K., is presented only as a photograph). Younger artists, such as Amy M. Ho and Mungo Thomson, chose more ephemeral interventions, insisting on the validity of fleeting experiences.

Amy M. Ho, Up/Down, 2012. Video projection. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Instutute.

All those artists treat the gallery as a malleable space, not as a repository of heavyweight ideas destined for eternity. In general, the idea of “eternal values” does not seem appealing to the exhibition participants. Ray McMakin’s piece The bed I bought…¹, 2011, looks like a playful exorcism. The artist’s old bed, which may symbolize tradition and familial comfort, is transformed into an absurd object by having its frame bisected by a mirror. Michael Robinson’s insanely beautiful film Victory over the Sun, 2007, shows modernist structures built for 1960s world fairs, which have become monuments to those fairs’ ideology of internationalism. For that work the artist also appropriated morsels of “a VHS tape on self-hypnosis, laser tag video games, an obscure 1980s science fiction movie (Masters of the Universe, 1987), and text from Ayn Rand’s 1937 novella Anthem.” Most of those “ingredients” allude to “concepts of power and control” (also, the piece was named after a famous Russian avant-garde opera), but the nostalgic look of the film, as well as the humorous use of Masters of the Universe, makes visible our distance from the totalizing “futuristic” ideologies of the 20th century. The piece implies that even the most boisterous of them could not withstand the test of time. Or maybe they’re only dreaming…

David Gissen, The Mound of Vendôme, 2012. Wood, Xerox, Plexiglas, dirt. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute.

David Gissen’s brilliant project, The Mound of Vendôme, 2012, also takes up the theme of ideologies in flux. In 1871 the Vendôme Column in Paris, a symbol of Napoleonic imperialism, was destroyed by the Communards; the monument fell on a mound, build in order to protect the neighborhood from vibration. The column was later restored. Gessen proposes to restore the mound as well, so that it would serve as a monument to  urban care. It would also remind people that the ideology underpinning imperial might was (and is) not eternal.

All the aforementioned artists have one thing in common: they take what is considered static and settled (the art space, the ideological structures) and activate it, show it to be malleable and dynamic. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call this tendency one of the most important ones in the art of the last fifty years. But let’s get back to what I said in the beginning of this text: the values that inform such art–the legitimacy of impermanence and flexibility–became part and parcel of the “new spirit of capitalism” in the age of networks. In other words, those values can be used to exploit people. What about the dark side of the concept of “the temporary”?

Ben Peterson, Ships Wake, 2011. Ink and graphite on paper. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute.

Some works in the show are clearly more paranoid than others. Ben Peterson’s awe-inspiring drawing Ships Wake, 2011, depicts a fantastic structure, part cruise liner, part airport, part resort. It is devoid of people and slightly unsettling, an abomination designed for a population that is doomed to being itinerant forever. Christian Nagler and Azin Seraj’s video Market Fitness, 2012, responds to the widespread anxiety about volatility in the financial markets, as well as the pressure to exercise and always look fit. What surprised me, though, was the lack of artworks about poverty, about a class of people whom global capitalism made “nomadic” and “dynamic” against their will. That class, after all, is probably the world’s largest builder of temporary structures. Not that I am demanding “slum porn,” but paying attention to that aspect of “the temporary” would have made the exhibition awesomely well-rounded, and allow it to pack a bigger emotional punch. Still, the show is subtle and intelligent, and is highly recommended for visit.

Temporary Structures runs at San Francisco Art Institute until December 15. Please check the event calendar for a schedule of special events, including film screenings, lectures by exhibiting artists, and a Guerrilla Café organized by Together We Can Defeat Capitalism.

¹The full title of Ray McMakin’s artwork is The bed I bought when I was a teenager that was later put in the creepy (maybe haunted) room in my parents’ basement where I had to sleep until Mike refused.