My old friend Michael Ramage has a hand in this installation in the Yerba Buena Center for Art’s Sculpture Garden. He’s designing and building a pair of domes, made from layers of bricks and mortar and styled on ancient techniques. The artist behind it is Jewlia Eisenberg & Charming Hostess, and the vision is that the domes will be an outdoor venue for music, contemplation, and mind-expanding activities throughout the summer. I visited on Tuesday, and I was struck by the ways that each dome’s oculus (fancy word for the open, circular window at the top of the dome) framed the surrounding sky and buildings. That perspective actually kind of made the generic buildings at 3rd and Howard appear to be somewhat cool. Didn’t think that would be possible.

Can’t imagine that it could get much better than this. Via amassblog.

Saul Steinberg’s cover for the first edition The Americans by Robert Frank. Publisher Robert Delpire: “The only point of disagreement was the cover. I insisted right away on using a drawing by Saul Steinberg, whom I had met and whose work I liked. Frank said, ‘It’s a book of photos, we could use a photo.’ I told him, ‘You can use a photo for the American edition, but let me use a Steinberg drawing.’ But when I reprinted the book in 1986, I used a photograph because I had discovered, basically, that he was right.”

Photographer Robert Frank is known for a few things, primarily The Americans, a ground-breaking book of photography published in the late 50’s. He is also known for avant-garde film-making, e.g., Pull My Daisy, and his never-released Rolling Stones documentary with an unprintable name.

We checked out SFMOMA’s 50th anniversary retrospective of The Americans today, and I was astonished at another of Frank’s skills: Grant-writing. In order to fund the gathering of the photos that became The Americans, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I’ve pasted his clear, simple, two-part essay below.

Part 1: Frank’s brief summary of the proposal

To photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively. The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present. This project is essentially the visual study of a civilization and will include caption notes; but it is only partly documentary in nature: one of its aims is more artistic than the word documentary implies.

Part 2: The full statement of intent

I am applying for a Fellowship with a very simple intention: I wish to continue, develop and widen the kind of work I already do, and have been doing for some ten years, and apply it to the American nation in general. I am submitting work that will be seen to be documentation—most broadly speaking. Work of this kind is, I believe, to be found carrying its own visual impact without much work explanation. The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic. The material is there: the practice will be in the photographer’s hand, the vision in his mind. One says this with some embarrassment but one cannot do less than claim vision if one is to ask for consideration.

“The photographing of America” is a large order—read at all literally, the phrase would be an absurdity. What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere. Incidentally, it is fair to assume that when an observant American travels abroad his eye will see freshly; and that the reverse may be true when a European eye looks at the United States. I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none, the farmer and his children, a new house and a warped clapboard house, the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and postoffices and backyards.

The uses of my project would be sociological, historical and aesthetic. My total production will be voluminous, as is usually the case when the photographer works with miniature film. I intend to classify and annotate my work on the spot, as I proceed. Ultimately the file I shall make should be deposited in a collection such as the one in the Library of Congress. A more immediate use I have in mind is both book and magazine publication.

Frank was awarded a fellowship, which amounted to $3,600, and he used this to travel in a long loop around the US in 1955–6. That “more immediate use” that he refers to in the final sentence turned into The Americans, a stunning document that is every bit as interesting 50 years later. The exhibition is captured in an extended version of The Americans, including contact sheets and commentary.

I could use one of these right about now. Via these geniuses.

The New York Times recently ran some photos that were taken from the train carrying Bobby Kennedy’s body between Washington to New York. The photos themselves are amazing documents of a nation in mourning, people from all walks of life lining the tracks, holding signs, saluting or just watching, but they’re also beautiful — saturated and blurred, creating the sensation that things are moving too fast, that something is irresistibly barreling on.

The photographer, Paul Fusco, narrates a slideshow on the New York Times site, and it’s well worth a viewing. He’s nicely describes the experience around the photos, and provides some insight into the mechanics (Kodachrome film, of course). He also mentions that he hadn’t planned on taking pictures while on the train; he was simply traveling along with the coffin to take photos at the funeral.

The first thing I saw were hundreds of people on the platform ... Fortunately, I just reacted. My instinct was: There’s something going on, photograph it ... [The train] was a moving platform. I couldn’t change my view. I couldn’t change my perspective. I had to just ... grab it, when I could.

“Everyone was there. America came out to mourn.” Photos: Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

Fusco has a show that’s currently at Danziger Project in New York, and a book coming out in the fall, too. Looks nice.

things magazine has amassed an incredible index of Pelican book covers from the 1930s through the 80s. The one above is from 1968. Check it.

Last Friday night was just another night in the penthouse of the Fairmont Hotel for Mara and I. We relaxed in seal-skin robes, shuffled around in baby polar bear ear fur slippers, snorted the finest powdered snow leopard pancreas, fed Kobe beef to the pigeons who delivered the New York Times piecemeal in tiny scrolls tied to their feet, and generally killed time. (While enjoying the Cooper holiday party).

When we emerged from a blissful reverie, we noticed that the walls were covered with an unusual world map.

It was painted in 1927, by a guy named Robert Boardman Howard. A little poking around on the Internet reveals that his work is scattered across Northern California — sketches at the Merced post office, a design for the phoenix on Coit Tower, a relief in front of the Livermore post office.

The Smithsonian did an interview with him in 1964, where he talks about another good NorCal project. “Then there was a small theatre up at Guerneville that I decorated. They gave me a free hand. I painted all the natives of Guerneville, their portraits, including the village dog. That was quite interesting. Good experience.” Amen, brother.

I was in Philadelphia last Thursday evening, and I discovered that I was staying near Space 1026, a studio/gallery near downtown. Some artists from 1026 had some cool work in a show at Yerba Buena a while ago, I walked over and spent a few minutes walking around as the residents were setting up for the place’s 10th anniversary party.

It’s got a pretty great vibe; part punk club, part workshop, part hobo village. Situated above some retail space near the bus station, there’s a nice open space in the front, but the majority is sectioned off into seven or eight (or more) mostly small studios densely packed with art supplies, knick-knacks, bikes, and other crap. I didn’t get to see much, but I took some pictures of the various hallways and spaces so check em out.

Lots of intriguing stuff at Clare Rojas’s opening at Gallery Paule Anglim tonight. Woodland creatures, naked dudes in tai chi poses, an excellent video of Peggy Honeywell playing a slow sad song at a raging frat party filled with beer bongs and keg stands, Amaze, Barry McGee, and much, much more. Worth it.

I call this one “It’s Hard Out Here For a Penguin.”

I think this one is untitled, but it should be called “Untitleable.”

Gallery Paule Anglim is at 14 Geary in downtown San Francisco.

When I was in Washington DC last month, I saw an incredible show at the National Gallery called Foto: Modernity in Central Europe 1918–1945. As you may have guessed by the title, the show is photography-oriented, but it’s more than that: It’s a story about photography craft, and the way that European photographers bent, broke and otherwise manipulated photos to express the social, political and cultural fragmentation (and chaos) in the wake of the First World War. Most of the artists were unknown to me; they’re all introduced and discussed in detail in the excellent exhibition catalogue. It opens at the Guggenheim New York in October.

This is a photomontage by a Polish artist named Janusz Maria Brzeski. It’s called Twentieth-Century Idyll, but the name of the series is even better: A Robot Is Born. Photo: National Gallery of Art.

Another photomontage, this one by Jindrich Strysky, a Czech artist. Photo: National Gallery of Art

A moment from a beautiful, riveting scene in Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.

Killer of Sheep is director Charles Burnett’s account of life in the LA neighborhood of Watts in the early 1970’s. It began life as his senior thesis at UCLA film school and until recently it was never seen outside art houses and museums. Despite all of that, it was among the first 50 films to declared national treasures by the Library of Congress. I saw it earlier this week at the Castro, and it lived up the hype.

Burnett’s account of his motivations in making the film seems like a good place to start unpacking the stuff that makes it so unique:

I wanted to tell a story about a man who was trying to hold on to some values that were constantly being eroded by other forces, by his plight in the community, and the quality of the job that he had. At the same time he wanted to do right by his family. I didn’t want to impose my values on his situation. I just wanted to show his life. And I didn’t want to resolve his situation by imposing artificial solutions like him becoming a doctor or a diplomat, when the reality is that most people don’t get out. I wanted to show that there is a positive element to his life, and that is that he endures, he’s accepted it. [From an excellent interview on Senses of Cinema]

To bring this story to life, he employs a style that seems improvisational, as much documentary as Italian neorealism. But there’s also something very new and genuine and particularly American about it — isolation, crumbling buildings, explosions of cruelty and anger, and the constant, chaotic motion of kids leaping across rooftops and crawling under buildings — combined, these things seem to evoke a very American way of poor, urban life.

More than anything, the movie makes you wonder at its very improbability: How in the world did he make that? Did he actually plan those moments that seem genuinely serendipitous?

Maybe it’s that the actors are untrained. The dialogue seems fresh, surprising and authentic even when it’s forced. Maybe it’s the pacing of the editing. Scenes start abruptly — children emerge from a hole, an entire neighborhood has assembled in a stairwell, kids hide behind a scrap of plywood. Most scenes also tend to end a couple of seconds early, or linger a few seconds longer. Maybe it’s the dialogue — it’s all mumbles or hollers or growls, with jazz and blues tracks adding rhythmic, sometimes hopeful counterpoints to the imagery. Who knows? What’s clear is that it speaks in a true, clear and unique voice. Go see it.

No dialogue. Dog mask. Chain link fence. Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.

Rachell Sumpter, Argonauts. From her collection at the Richard Heller Gallery.

Her stuff reminds me of lots of other artists I like — Evah Fan and some aspects of Julianna Bright, for two. Maybe it’s something about the West Coast, but they’re all simple and light at first glance, but also deeply still, and it’s a stillness that reveals something surprising, impossible, or discomforting, but in an amusing way. Usually. Anyway, there’s lots more Rachell Sumpter prints and stuff at Little Paper Planes, and some drawings, prints, watercolors and more from a 2006 show at Sixspace.

This amazing typographic map, cheekily called “London’s Kerning,” was designed by NB: Studio, a London graphic design concern. It’s a pretty excellent demonstration of type’s ability to communicate size, shape, relationship, the list goes on. I also love the homage (via typeface) to the London A-Z, an indispensable companion, interpreter and guide for any navigator of London. They’re taking orders for them. [Thx, kottke].

I met Phil Collins (the British artist, not the British pop star¹) at a bar in Brooklyn in the mid 90’s. At the time, I didn’t know him as “the British artist,” I knew him only as my friend Tom’s legendary boyfriend. I remember little of the night, but I do remember a hubbub accompanying Phil Collins’s wanderings around the bar; he seemed to create some kind of event wherever he went. At some point, he approached the table with two tall drinks, placed them in front of me, and said something like “These are from an admirer of yours.”

As it turned out, they were from an admirer of his, and this admirer perceived, shall we say, a lack of gratitude when his drinks were given away. There was a confrontation, as I recall, and Phil said something like, “Well, I’m sorry, I never turn down a drink, but you can’t honestly expect me to drink [disbelieving voice] rum & coke?” (Or whatever the drinks were).

All of which serves as background to my reaction to Phil Collins’s piece, The World Won’t Listen, at SFMOMA, which was pretty excellent. The premise is pretty simple: He filmed young Turkish folks singing along to The Smiths best-of compilation “The World Won’t Listen.” The effect, on the other hand, is deep and resonant. The Smiths’ odes to teenagerdom — all vacillating emotions, frustrated inarticulations, piercing moments of understanding, sexual ambiguity — take on a deeper social dimension through the voices of (in many of the cases) non-English speakers. Add to this the fact that the singers are Middle Eastern, and it becomes difficult to avoid a political reading. Songs like “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” sounds less the over-dramatic nihilism of a Western teenager and more like a very real plea from a teenager caught in an increasingly fundamentalist world:

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it’s not my home, it’s their
Home, and I’m welcome no more

Really impressive.

Cool: a web posting for the event that he filmed.

¹ Speaking of the British pop star, here’s a classic: The video for “Sussudio” [YouTube]

Once upon a time, a San Francisco resident strolling around these chilly city streets could brush by Chris Johanson pretty often. Even before I knew who he was, I’d seen him around the Mission a lot; when I finally connected the dots, I realized that he was the guy who had drawn little signs and bits that I’d been loving for years. As I recall, he drew a little guy above the urinal at the Uptown (or somewhere I peed a lot); either way, his simple figures and their cryptically expressed thoughts would be burned into my brain for hours after I saw them. He moved to Portland a while ago, and San Francisco has been a little less visually exciting ever since. For one thing, his beard is an inspiration to any aspiring beardo, and his leadership in this regard will be sorely missed.

More: A cool profile of Chris from Spark, a local PBS art show.

My nomination for All-Time Best Moment In An Art Documentary has to be the “Bullshit!” scene in Concert Of Wills: Making The Getty Center. Abstract-artist-turned-landscape-designer Robert Irwin literally calls bullshit on architect Richard Meier during an important Getty Center planning session. [The object of their disagreement is Irwin’s garden design, pictured at right. Thx, brewbooks.]

Design Observer’s Michael Bierut sums it up nicely in an article called “On (Design) Bullshit:”

The [Getty Foundation], against Meier’s advice, has brought in artist Robert Irwin to create the Center’s central garden. The filmmakers are there to record the unveiling of Irwin’s proposal, and Meier’s distaste is evident. The artist’s bias for whimsical organic forms, his disregard for the architecture’s rigorous orthonography, and perhaps even his Detroit Tigers baseball hat all rub Richard Meier the wrong way, and he and his team of architects begin a reasoned, strongly-felt critique of the proposed plan. Irwin, sensing (correctly, as it turns out) that he has the client in his pocket, listens patiently and then says, “You want my response?”

His response is the worst accusation you can lodge against a designer: “Bullshit.”

If I recall correctly, Meier is speechless, and the mood of the documentary shifts quite significantly. Meier’s personality and viewpoint had dominated (is “domineered” a word?) earlier scenes, he maintains a sort of icy distance in subsequent scenes. (Disclosure: While I respect Meier, I’m not a fan of his work, especially the Getty, and the documentary makes clear that he is, umm, a dick). Irwin, on the other hand, I’ve always loved, especially his dot paintings. I’m currently reading Lawrence Weschsler’s biography of Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it contains some useful background and context to the “Bullshit!” scene. It also complicates it; the more I read, the more Irwin and Meier seem to have quite a lot in common. I’d always assumed that Irwin’s vision was the irrational, organic counterpoint to Meier’s rational, geometric forms. The book makes clear that Irwin has quite a lot of the rational geometry on the brain himself. Perhaps they were just too similar to get along.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to Irwin’s discussion of his own process ... My favorite passage involves Irwin’s explanations of the fits and starts that characterized his output, especially during the dot painting phase:

“Most of the time, I didn’t have any idea where it was going; I had no intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing ... Maybe I was just gradually developing a trust in the act itself, that somehow, if it were pursued legitimately, the questions it would raise would be legitimate and the answers would have to exist somewhere, would be worth pursuing, and would be of consequence.

“Actually, during those years in the midsixties,” he doubled back on his formulation, “the answers seemed to matter less and less: I was becoming much more of a question person than an answer person ... The thing that really struck me as I got into developing my interest in the area of questions,” Irwin continued, “is the degree to which as a culture we are geared for just the opposite. We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, whereas it’s fairly clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time.“

Two winters ago, I traveled to London for work. It was cold as hell, as a witch’s tit, as the blood that runs in Dwyane Wade’s veins during the fourth quarter. The sky was deep gray, hard, heavy and forbidding, and it felt as if it wasn’t more than 10 or 12 feet above my head, ready to come crashing down at any moment.
One afternoon, in a jet-lagged haze, I wandered over to the Tate Modern, where it seems they always have some thought-provoking installation (for instance, Anish Kapoor’s gigantic levitating horn which blew my mind for a while), and as I descended the ramp into the museum, I was struck by the absolute inversion of wintry, outdoor London. I took lots of photos, but none could really communicate the immersive aspect of Olafur Eliasson’s work, called “The Weather Project.” It was all reds and oranges, all warmth and mist, enveloping you in a happy, gauzy glow. Cynthia Zarin recently profiled Eliasson for the New Yorker, and she comments that the Weather Project cemented Eliasson’s reputation in the art world ... (Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the article online, but by all means dig through back issues of the magazine at the laundromat, if you get a chance. The article provides interesting insight into Eliasson’s process, and includes some funny anecdotes relating to his impulse to immerse the viewer in an environment. For instance, in mid-long-distance-phone-conversation with Cynthia Zarin, he places his cell phone on the luggage conveyer belt at the airport, lets it go around the carousel once, then picks it up and asks her what the experience was like. Hmm.).

Outside CIA headquarters, there’s an installation called “Kryptos,” a large metal sheet containing a series of characters that has perplexed puzzlers since it was unveiled 10 years ago. Today, the NYT reports that the artist mistakenly omitted a character.

First Thursdays at 49 Geary can be overwhelming, people-wise, and underwhelming, art-wise, and this month was different only in that the overwhelmingness was crammed into one place: the Fraenkel Gallery. Packed with people, it also displayed a face-melting collection of Richard Misrach photos.

When I first saw Misrach’s photos, I thought immediately of Sebastiao Salgado. Both guys address big themes — civilizations, seasons, landscapes, human endeavors — but they do so in vastly different ways. Salgado frames his work around human action; his subjects are migrants, activitists, laborers. Misrach works with earth, light, space; he works with dunes, strangers, cars, power plants. Salgado’s work is tied to current events, political movements, regimes, definable moments and recognizable things; Misrach works with more anonymous objects and landscapes. There are much more significant differences between them, but they share a social awareness that invests the best of their work with real intrigue and importance.