Real Not Real

A great gift delivered by my brother.

There has been a new addition to the SF skyline, at least from my window… a nice little MetLife blimp. I adore it. It’s like a big, man-made fluffy cloud.

I saw this sign in Brooklyn over the holidays. Not only was the “brown rice” disturbing, but everything else is incorrect on this sign…

Today I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see the Takashi Murakami show. Surely, it was entertaining on a high-level for an hour or so. But the show was literally SuperFlat. Nothing had any real depth for me. After seeing the LV bags for years, the art just seemed almost bland. Oddly, almost childishly naive, yes. But not deep. Had there been some element of craft, or of the hand, it would’ve seemed more intimate. In the end, it just felt flat, superficial, plastic. There was no contrast, no conflict. I’d recommend it… it was worth the admission. But I have to say, the most entertaining part was listening to an LV employee speak French at the LV store in the middle of the exhibition.

I’ve been away from writing for quite some time. I treat this space more like a bulletin board for myself than a blog, per se, so I don’t have a dedication to posting on a regular basis. I just post when something hits me that I want to remember.

Recently I’ve taken on some design-related projects that aren’t graphic design, including a trip to Virginia where I worked on landscaping half of my parents’ yard and redoing one of the guest rooms. I heart this stuff.

The flight from SF to VA looked something like this, somewhere along the way:

I thought the circular pattern in the clouds looked like we were flying over a radar screen for a hurricane. Instead, the flight was pretty smooth sailing.

When I left VA, I took a flight back through bad weather to New York. The flight from Richmond to NYC was one of the most amazing cloud displays I’ve ever seen. Our lowly 17,000′ altitude seemed vast, as these clouds provided unbelievable depth to the sky (that tall center one must’ve been 300′ tall):

A few months ago, here in San Francisco, I went to see the Olafur Eliasson show, “Take Your Time”, at SFMOMA. It is the best show I’ve ever seen in San Francisco, and probably the best one-man show I’ve ever seen, period. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen more review-type shows than one-man shows, especially of contemporary artists, but this thing made me feel so, so good about living in the art world and it gave me hope for art as we know it currently.

This show was so well-designed, so thoughtfully responded to the space of the museum and to the flow of the viewer’s parade through the works, it made me feel like I was being welcomed openly into Eliasson’s process and his state of mind. The show was free of pretense, free of the self-awareness and sarcasm that has pervaded hipster art in the last five-ten years. I’m surely guilty of creating work that’s sarcastic, but I’m trying to move away from that and embrace an open-source philosophy about my work and the world at-large. Eliasson’s show seemed to embody a mentality of openness and interaction (though perhaps controlled, single-channel interaction) without relying solely on technology-based pieces to provoke a viewer-response or interaction.

I highly recommend this show to anyone, now that it’s open again, this time in New York. It’s a playground of serious thought about serious work that is anything but serious.

If you haven’t seen this, you should.

It has taken me awhile to throw up this post, but I wanted to mention two recent dinner parties by artists, one in NYC and the other here in SF.

On March 28, Jerome Waag and Sam White of Chez Panisse created a pop-up restaurant in the New Langton Arts space on Folsom called OPEN. I had been planning to go and unfortunately wasn’t able to make it, but I hope to catch up with these guys soon.

And on Easter Sunday, Agathe Snow did it again in New York (this time with Alex Apparu and Rita Ackermann): an Easter dinner at the Armory that was part feast, part performance.

I am a fan of Chris Johanson. And his work is at the Jack Hanley Gallery in SF through April 12. (15th and Valencia, Tuesday – Saturday: 11a-6p, if you want to check it out).

The last time I was in New York, I went to the New Museum, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. There were a few lovely pieces on the top floor (or was it the second?) that were largely about texture, and decoration, and deterioration, but many of the pieces that worked with a default aesthetic just seemed like they were lacking criticality.

I did, however, pick up a copy of Lawrence Weiner’s Henry the Navigator in a Sea of Sand/Enrique el Navegante en un Mar de Arena which was pretty fun since I’d just seen the Weiner show at the Whitney. I also got a copy of Soft Targets, my friend Dan’s journal.

After visiting the New Museum, I appreciate this bit of street art, courtesy of Wooster Collective:

“…a series of objects that resemble backyard summer projects.”

via RARE, New York

Last Friday, the Campana show opened at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York — a show of selects from the museum’s permanent collection, all centering on the idea of “interwoven ideas and unconventional materials.” The brothers also made a chair for the exhibition, and the process is documented here.

I also recommend checking out the exhibition site … a refreshing site for a museum show.

Longhorn armchair and ottoman

Attributed to Wenzel Friedrich (Bohemian, 1827–1902)
San Antonio, TX, 1880–90
Steer horn, wood, metal, glass, brass, leatherette (not original)
Gift of Jack Lenor Larsen, 1986-39-1,2
Photo: Andrew Garn

photo via nytimes.com

The Murakami billboard (announcing his MOCA show) that Auger and Revok of MSK and Seventh Letter Crew tagged, that was then snatched by Murakami and shipped back to Tokyo because he liked it so much:

via LAWEEKLY

My brother spotted this sign at our local Salvation Army store in Virginia. Hot.