方 璐 FANG LU

Galleries opening and SFMOMA half price entry till 9PM are some art crowd tradition in San Francisco. I rarely follow it because not much happening in the galleries shows and the half price entry price is still too expensive in my opinion. The regular price for SFMOMA is $12.50, of course there are students price, senior price, free for members and all that. But it still means the regular price for the museum is $2.50 more expensive than a regular hollywood movie. First Tuesday of every month is free and first Thursday is half price $6.50. But normally I end up missing them because it’s only once a month. To me the museum entry is unacceptably high. And as an artist I can not justify that people have to pay to see art. When I have my show in SFMOMA, I will try to at least make my part of the show free for all to come in. That’s how I will stay positive and do my part.

Last night during the half price hour we went into SFMOMA to catch up new shows of Jeff Wall, Douglas Gordon and Olafur Eliasson. Walked into the museum lobby, a suspended electric fan was swinging in circle in the center of the space about a few foot right above visitors heads. But my attention immediately caught by the ambient club music and crowd noise came from the other side of the lobby. We were first pleased and thought that finally there were more night public events happening in the museum now. But as we approached, the guard looked at our tickets and politely denied our access. It would cost another $20 to get in to the party (you can get free cocktail).

Luckily three new shows are fairly good and I don’t think anything in the theater right now is more worth of seeing than them.

Douglas Gordon is certainly one of the most interesting video artists. On view is “Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” and if I remember right there are 48 TV monitors showing his video and film in one dark room. They are literally a pile of TVs. But such display is no flaunt of digital effects and flickering (as we might find in Nam June Paik’s TV displays). The installation is simply playing every project on TV one next to another, from video of a large scale installation with elephants “Play Dead”, to video of him kicking a camera in a living room, to video of a fly about to die. All the sound are off on the TV with headphones available. But everyone in the room were intriguingly watching all the monitors in silence. I don’t know if any artists are as gutsy as Gordon, taking away all the magical glare from the device and having all the work compete and be compared like this.

Some quick notes on the other two shows. It seems there are a lot of efforts + much money in Olafur Eliasson part of the show, which is good to see. The environmental construction is very engaging, using fundamental elements like light, temperature, reflection and scale. I think his work is very successful when viewers don’t have to perceive detail of any structure or even the actual object. Meaning the room filled with light as if everyone is being cooked is more an integrity than the frozen race car wrapped in ice spiral in a walk-in freezer. Some how when I find the trace of “man made” I feel less connected and then start to finding things on the crafting.

Perhaps because I have seen too many Jeff Wall’s photography from books already, seeing the actual work in the exhibition did not increase that much experience for me…