The San Francisco Art Fairs

                                                                                                            Entry, SF Fine Art Fair

    Of the twin art fairs at Fort Mason last week I vastly preferred the San Francisco Art Institute MFA show to the San Francisco Fine Art Fair. The MFA show was less predictable and in some ways better curated. There were no lines to the food and drink at the opening; the art fair was a madhouse by contrast. And the one-artist per booth rule at SFAI made the whole thing more digestible than the flea market/salon vibe that accrued next door.

Everyone I talked to said the art fair, which debuted this year despite a chorus of negative predictions from local galleries, was better than expected, but still pretty cheesy. Here’s what they mean by cheesy. At the Frieze Art Fair in London in 07 Richard Prince was invited to install a vintage muscle car on a rotating platform complete with busty biker chick. Low comedy and high art were effortlessly combined. In front of the pier at Fort Mason the SF Fine Art Fair organizers allowed a Maserati with sticker price to be parked: no irony, just another expensive plaything for sale. Not even Ray Beldner's pornographically punned letter sculpture, “Nobodys Coming,” could offset that kind of camp.

                                                                                                    Nobodys Coming, Ray Beldner

        By better than they expected, people were referring to the large crowds and the presence of Gallery Paule Anglim, Braunstein Quay Gallery, Catherine Clark Gallery, Lincart, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Baer Ridgeway, Swarm and Johansson Projects, each of whom put together a credible contemporary booth. Unfortunately those were canceled by the visual noise of the schlock and the 20^th century pictures. Even the good ones, such as the John McLaughlins at Louis Stern and the Jacob Lawrence at DC Moore, didn’t gel; there was too much going on to orchestrate an interesting conversation between them. In an age where we want art to be just like wrenches, blouses and patio furniture, it turns out you need to baby it a little more or it won't sing. Who cares, you say? It’s just about selling. And I did see stuff selling. Unfortunately, to make a fair like this work you’ve got to manufacture a real art experience. Otherwise you end up with this:

 

                                                                                            A booth at the S.F. Fine Art Fair

There was a satisfying wholeness at the MFA graduation show, where everyone broadcast on the same wavelength. As a big room full of art it made sense. The work was consistently good, unlike most MFA shows, and a number of ambitious projects were successfully resolved.

                                                                                                                                                Ambition

                                                                                                                            Ambition

Eric Petitti’s “dreadnought saga” Remember the Pearl stood out for its masterful synthesis of text and image. In Petitti's imagined history science fiction masquerades as documentary narrative, drawing as printing, and personal testimony as historical knowledge. He’s a great draughtsman and he inhabits the absurd role of historian of the future with the kind of sincerity you rarely find outside the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

                                                                                                                        Eric Petitti

    Stephanie Dodes video Everything for Nothing is an eerie narrative involving a futuristic coven of young girls who seem to have synchronized everything down to their body clocks. Dodes' high production values provide genuine relief from the hours of bad video done in the name of conceptual art that often turn up in MFA shows. With a nod to Vanessa Beecroft she explores beauty, design and dominance through a language of gestures and symbols that never completely give up their secrets. The whole thing hums along on a pervasive feeling of dread and you never get bored.

                                                                                       Stephanie Dodes, stills from Everything for Nothing

Christopher Hood’s playful attacks upon the authority of the photograph succeed because they're so simple, ridiculous. He photographs solemn black and white photos after spraying them with silly string, mounts them on plexi-glass and then sprays them again with silly string. It sounds like something out of the frat boy’s guide to art critique, but he has a very light touch.

                                                                                                                            Christopher Hood

Crystal Nelson produced my favorite image in the show: a smiling self-portrait with a group of happy youths as they hold up the confederate flag. She’s black, they're white. A Northener by birth, the image was inspired by her encounter with a southern racism she thought had become extinct. But hanging at the Art Institute MFA show, where Nelson was perhaps the only African American present, and where so many artists innocently flew the flag of a white imperial aesthetic tradition, the image read as a deft stab at her peers. Nothing that cool next door at the art fair.

                                                                                                                                   Crystal Nelson

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