Fifteen megabytes of fame.

Mary, the woman in my portrait from The Gift, left a comment on my blog today. We made it onto the SFMOMA blog. For an art geek like me, that’s a whole lotta fun.

The gift that keeps on staring back at you.

Just because I’m back from San Francisco doesn’t mean the San Franciscan fun has to come to an end. As part of Jochen Gerz’s work, The Gift, Felix and I received photographs that previously hung in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). You can check out my previous post for more of the story. Our “gift” came with instructions. “The last step is to exhibit your piece of the collection, and document how you display it.”

The Gift was highly interactive with a Web presence that serves up photographs of all the participants on a random basis. You can see it here. I’ve been trying to find my photo on the site but have had no luck. I did find the photos that were given to Felix and me. And they were even next to each other. The project includes mentions on the SFMOMA blog and a Flickr site where participants can post photos of where they’ve shown their “gift.” Since most of the people participating in the gift were from San Francisco, I thought it would be fun to post some photos from snowy Salt Lake City, Utah. So we took our "gifts" on a tour of Salt Lake City’s best parks.

For now, Felix and I have decided to hang the photographs in my office, where they stare creepily at anyone who walks by. And hopefully they’ll encourage discussions about art and community.
One last note, I love the label that appears on the back of each photograph.

San Randomcisco.

Just a few leftovers from my trip to San Francisco. First, Rodin at the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor largely exists because of Alma Spreckles. Not only did she concoct the plan to build the museum, she also convinced her husband to pay for it. She was also an avid collector of the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. She donated it all, the building and her Rodin collection to the City of San Francisco. There are very few places on the planet where you can see this much work by the guy that some call the father of modern sculpture.
There are plenty of known works. In addition to The Thinker, you’ll also find The Age of Bronze (one of my favorite works from a recent UMFA show) and The Kiss, the only work that the BYU Museum of Art refused display when a traveling Rodin exhibit recently stopped in Provo.
I also liked some of the smaller, unknown works, many of which were studies for other sculptures. I particularly liked the hands.Just outside The Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park is this sculpture. I'm pretty sure it’s a copy of something famous. I should probably know what it is but I don’t. Nonetheless, I liked it.
We also spent some time at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. I read the garden is trying to find funds to renovate the current buildings. I suppose it's necessary but I loved the way the buildings in the park are showing their age. And the gardens are beautifully tended. This is definitely a worthwhile stop.
And finally, because it was the big Chinese New Year celebration while we were in San Francisco, we decided to pay a visit to China Town. I hadn’t been to China Town in decades. It was more fun than expected. We stopped in a little dive bar where we met a couple of Canadians whose ideas about Utahans were hilarious. And we spent plenty of time looking for “year of the bull” and other Chinese trinkets. Sometimes it’s fun to just be a tourist.

Is this where the Teletubbies live?

Here’s one more view from the California Academy of Sciences. This is the building’s innovative green roof. The roof is 197,000 square feet of nine native plant species chosen for their ability to survive in the environment. They need no water (although a spray system has been installed in case of severe drought years.)
The living roof is also expected to sustain a variety of life. In fact, a future project is planned that will try to introduce two endangered butterfly species to the habitat.
There's also an amazing view of the De Young from the roof.

We're having a heat wave. A tropical heat wave.

On my last visit to San Francisco I made an impromptu visit to the California Academy of Science based on the recommendation of a cab driver. It was amazing but we didn’t have nearly enough time to do everything we wanted. So this trip we returned. We still didn’t get to see everything. But this trip was even more fun than the first.

The highlight was a trip through the tropical rain forest. This amazing section of the Academy is a giant glass sphere filled with fauna and flora. A ramp circles up around the sphere with informative exhibits throughout. At the end, you take an elevator down to the underground level where you can walk under the “river” that is in the sphere.

The stars of the show are the butterflies—hundreds of them in bright colors flittering and fluttering about the rain forest. They frequently land on visitors, to the point that you’re asked to do a butterfly check before you leave.

But there are other characters that are just as dazzling as the butterflies. Tropical birds zoom throughout the rain forest. And several displays feature tropical frogs—and I love tropical frogs. They’re like little jewels. In fact, they reminded me of the jeweled insects and reptiles created by Faberge and Tiffany that we’d just seen the day before.

Other things I liked at SFMOMA.

Here are few other things I liked at SFMOMA (with minimal commentary—and believe me I could bore you with plenty of commentary).

From Katharina Fritsch comes Kind Mit Pudeln (Child with Poodle). The installation includes 224 poodles surrounding a baby. Fritsch hints that this might be a reaction to the story of Faust, who while walking home sees a black poodle and brings it home, unknowingly inviting Mephistopheles (the devil) into his home. Or maybe the dogs are heroes, guarding the baby. It’s either creepy or heart warming.

Arturo Herrera’s 2000 work I Am Yours is made from cut industrial felt. I don’t know what it means but I like it.
You gotta love Kiki Smith. This work is beautiful and disturbing all at the same time. The photo does not do justice to the haunting glass eyes. Here is a sculpture called Lilith that hangs strangely on the wall.
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this is a sculpture by Jeff Koons. But this predates Koons by at least 60 years. La negresse blonde (The Blond Negress) was created in 1926 by Constantin Brancusi. I love the innovative form that brings to mind so many images. And the sexy, shiny, seductive finish is well ahead of its time.
Finally, (and I’m about to go out on a big limb here) here is the work that changed art more than any other—Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. I love crazy, provocative, outrageous, challenging, silly, emotional, horrifying, kind, happy art. And in my life, all that art starts with this work. Marcel Duchamp definitively answered the question, “what is art.” And then he asked a more provocative question, “what is the artist?” Thanks Marcel.

The artist as ego.

Artist Clifford Still is all over the art-world news these days even though he’s dead. Why? Well Clifford’s attitude toward his art is unique. Still kept almost all of the hundreds of paintings he created, about 95 percent were in his estate when he died in 1980. Stranger still, he allowed almost no one to see these works—he ordered them to be sealed off from the public and from scholars after his death.
Still had a big ego, even by artist standards. He despised galleries (which he called “sordid gift shoppes”) And he wasn’t much kinder to critics, curators, and museums. I don’t even think he liked collectors. I’m not sure he’d be happy about me looking at his paintings. He even refused to give his paintings names because it might encourage deplorable interpretations.

Clifford Still’s will was one sentence: “I give and bequeath all the remaining works of art executed by me in my collection to an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art and assure their physical survival with the explicit requirement that none of these works of art will be sold, given, or exchanged but are to be retained in the place described above exclusively assigned to them in perpetuity for exhibition and study.”

Still’s heirs have had a hard time finding a city to undertake such a demanding requirement. Caring and maintaining for so many paintings is an expensive proposition. But believe it or not, as part of the city’s amazing race to create a serious art presence, Denver, Colorado will be the new home of the Clifford Still Museum, which is currently under construction.

Why am I boring you with all this information? Because one of the few places you can see a significant group of Still’s work is at SFMOMA where an entire gallery is dedicated to the artist, probably because the artist demanded that no other work could be shown in the same space. Or maybe the curators are just afraid that if they included other artists in the gallery, Still would wake from the dead and rip their hearts out. Someday I want to be a crazy artist.