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With our necks craned to absorb understanding of the 20thc., curious to know what it is -- if anything -- we can take with us for good use into the cyber-crannies of the next age, and full of a self-conscious but sincere parody of milennarian zeitgeist -- a group of friends welcomed a myriad of exhibits and performances into San Francisco in 1996. Exhibits devoted to reassessing the contributions of mid-century art movements. Art movements central to our own instinct to continue explorations into what is unknown. IN a series of related exhibits and performances featuring the works of Bay Area Abstract Expressionists, Beat poets and painters -- we witness the maturing of critical understanding re: these artists. An appreciation for their practical brilliance emerged, where we had formerly learned to take them for granted. Take for granted perhaps because their efforts were too near us, and too ephemeral in their narrow passages or in some sense that thwarts seriousness. Artists whose brilliance and vision has now leaped to life in the Whitney's "The Beats..," (on exhibit at San Francisco's de Young), "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism" (also available as a book by Susan Landauer) at the SF Museum of Modern Art, and at the ongoing Re-Beat Festival, an exhibit and virtual cafe at the SOMAR in SF, sponsored by the National Poetry Association. Beat visual arts (was there such a thing? you wonder) often ignored or omitted in the myriad assessments of the Beat movement, seen too often merely as a rhetorical stance in opposition to the excessive American nationalism and conformism of the 1940s and 50s -- energize and re-inform our opinions about the Beat movement as a source of relevant energy today. Anchored by the photographic, paintings, and mixed media works of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Wallace Berman, Jess, and the supreme Jay DeFeo, the brilliantly conceived and executed Whitney show appearing at the San Francisco de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park (through November, 1996) casts out the backhanded dismissal of a whole generation. No longer should one assume that the Beats' ephemeral concerns can be dismissed as "mere vignettes" of the Artiste of no specific use to us. Embrace of the ephemeral aesthetic impulse by Los Angeles-based Wallace Berman in his mail art montage in a box, "Semina," conveys courage and commitment -- but most importantly, reveals the "res potentia" of imagination itself within us and as a gift belonging to every person. In formalizing the concept of "private revolution," the cascading sub-cultures known as "Beat" grasped the essential transformation, pratfalls, and opportunity for innovation represented by the collapse of industrial culture. The liner notes for DeFeo's painting "The Rose" describe it as "anti-bomb." (Incidentally, according to The SF Chronicle the Whitney paid $100k to acquire and restore the languishing masterpiece that has become more than slightly iconic.) Like constellations bound for infinity -- the arenas for personal exploration diverge from a single point in the one-ton painting where all light is held briefly then flung outward from architectonic paints with astonishing force. Ecstatic force comes to mind as that which enriches our lives and holds forth against the monumental dangers of our age -- the accumulation of corporate power, the paralysis of our democratic system, and the delicate moral antagonisms that shadow our every move. These are all reflected in the struggle against the Bomb's affects as much as its potential effect, defense of free thought and speech, and against smothering conformity, that mark the initial Beat impulses.
Impulses driven, not by fancy, but by necessity. As Dan Barth remarked to
me about Ginsberg, and the experience of being sometimes discomfited by his words and
too-honest themes: Deep in the shadows of some urban enclave on a Friday night, on a found canvas of discarded wood, rounded off for who knows what in its upper-left corner, Jess' "Boy Party" promises a macomba-stomp, a bit of calypso, a waft perhaps of reefer, while the malcontented sub-denizens of blackmail and avarice hover threateningly just off camera. And under glass, the very canvases of William Lee, with scrawls on the manuscripts for just that shadow of a doubt. In Jackson Pollock's "Number 27," the link to the MOMA show becomes apparent, (if not already made apparent by DeFeo's inclusion in both shows) even if the painting was included "because the Whitney holds it." The primary impulse of mining sub-conscious forces as a leveling against conformism is shared, of course, by Brion Gysin and subsequetly by sidekick Wm. S. Burroughs in their cut-up method. An effective demonstration of said method is under glass at the de Young exhibit -- papers crossed and cut by a Jeffersonian grid yield most divine nonsense and extra-textual meanings. More impressive than his collages such as "Mother of God" are Rauschenberg's devotedly inspired paintings. Just as with Abstract Expressionist works, modernism is seen as an extension of the ultimate humanism. As Susan Landauer conveys in her book of the same title as the San Francisco Abstract Expressionist show, the same distrust of establishment and its co-ercive ideology in the late 1940s and early 1950s drove the San Francisco artists to distrust nationalist rhetoric and adopt a globalist perspective. The event at SOMAR forcefully melds these disparate influences to bring poetic performance into the realm of the ecstatic. A tour de force of living legends in poetry has lined up to read, including Harold Norse (unfortunately Mr. Norse was taken ill and was unable to appear the night I was there to see him), Bob Kaufman, Neeli Cherkovsky and others. As I wandered about the SOMAR site, I was also quite pleased to find that several obscure DeFeo works were on hand in this impressive post-industrial warehouse near 9th & Brannan.
Related sources:
The Gate |