“The Big Ideas” at YBCA (9/13/08)

It was a nice sunny day on Saturday, and I hopped on my bike and headed out to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to check out their current show “The Big Ideas.” I had originally gone down there with the hope of going on “Everything is Better Now,” described as “a bus tour of locations of public and private emotional crisis.” Unfortunately, the bus tour was already overbooked, so after lingering around the waiting crowd for a short time and hoping that a sudden illness would strike someone, I gave up and went into the museum.

This was a free open house day for the YBCA, showcasing their “Bay Area Now” exhibit. I’d heard about this show mostly that it wasn’t amazingly great – in particular from this review by Tonya Warner in the art review site Shotgun Review, which called it “underwhelming” and “fractured and indecisive.”

Overall the show didn’t blow me away, and I agree with Warner’s assessment that it didn’t seem terribly cohesive, but there were definitely things there which piqued my interest, and it was pleasant to be out at a museum on a nice day and to see it packed full of people looking at art. I think my favorite artwork there was an installation which was simply a big dark room. The artist had installed some sort of filter-looking things above the room, and the walls were sort of sketchily painted, but it was a very stygian situation in there and the pattern was hard to make out. It rather looked as though the paint had been made with house-painting brushes on white against a black background. In any event, it evoked a definite feeling of reduced sight which was interesting to experience. At the same time I wondered to myself whether a dark room constituted art, even located as it was in a museum. I didn’t take the time to read the gloss, which I regret a bit now. The room would have been a good place to lie in wait and then jump out and scare someone, but although I was wearing muted colors I decided against doing so. You never know who might be a secret black belt in karate.

There were also a few performance pieces that I happened to stumble across. One consisted of a woman dressed in a vaguely Burning-Man outfit with spangles and big sunglasses who walked around the gallery I was in, occasionally dancing, followed closely by a man in a suit and tie who was wearing a sort of clock getup around his shoulders and head. The clock man would periodically shout out “BONG!” at the top of his lungs, not unlike a clock striking the hour. My feelings toward this pair veered rapidly between annoyance and amusement, but I eventually got over my desire to pay attention to art that wasn’t whatever they were doing at the moment and wound up being fairly engaged by their antics. I’m quite certain that YouTube footage of this event is about to come into being, and if I can track it down I will link it from here.

Shortly before I left I talked to a docent for a while who is involved with something called pharaoh maybelline’s sound trough, which seems to be a venue for noise shows and may be the subject of a future post if I am able to make it to their next show on the 28th. I told her about going to see the audio tour of Golden Gate Park “If you consider…,” which is also a good candidate for future review. In general I am extremely interested in art which focuses on psychic geography, if you will, and on overlaying a new meaning on the existing physical world. This was one of the things I liked about the tree tour; seeing the city from the point of view of which trees were planted where sort of forced a new perspective on me.

There is much more to say about this geography idea, which has only formulated itself into a coherent thing in my mind over the past few weeks, but it will need to await another day for me to delve into it farther. I will say that I was encouraged to see that the YBCA exhibit includes a good deal of tour-related performance pieces under the (cryptic) name “Ground Scores,” and I hope to try to attend some of the remaining ones if I can, because the aesthetic direction they lean in is one that really appeals to me.