A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

BAY AREA NOW 4

YERBA BUENA

CENTER FOR THE ARTS

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA JULY 16 - NOVEMBER 6, 2005

BAY AREA NOW 4

SAN FRANCISCO: YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 132 pp./$25.00 (SB)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is unique in the

San Francisco Bay Area in that it is truly multidisciplinary and experimental, while maintaining a high enough profile to expose downtown audiences to art and artists that they might not otherwise encounter. This year YBCA presents the fourth edition of its signature exhibition "Bay Area Now." Since its inception in 1997, the triennial event has evolved into a year-long festival that celebrates contemporary art of various forms, including performances, film/video screenings, and visual arts exhibitions. The trick with an arts festival such as this is not only to cull the new and notable from the Bay Area's diverse, creative landscape but also to make sense of it.

The visual arts component alone is ambitious in its scope. The curators scoured the Bay Area to find work by both emerging and more established artists representing the wide range of media, approaches, and perspectives that the region has to offer. As Kenneth J. Foster, YBCA's executive director, acknowledges in the exhibition's catalog, this can be a messy and maddening endeavor. Indeed, at times the sheer breadth of material on view makes it difficult to see commonalities and convergences. Nonetheless, a few important questions about consumer culture, western mythology, the significance of historical moments, and regionalism versus global identity rise to the surface.

There is also a striking common concern among artists in the show relating to notions of community. The fact that so much of the work on view acknowledges, either directly or indirectly, the interconnectedness of artist and viewer, individuals and groups, and museums and audiences is perhaps not surprising given YBCA's commitment to community engagement. Still, the curators seem to have identified a common thread among artists in the region, even in spite of the tremendous variety of art production in the area.

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 1

Telecommunity Portrait (2005) by Edie Tsong

The communal spirit of the exhibition is immediately evident in YBGA's upstairs galleries, which showcase interactive, collaborative projects. The most arresting of these is "Cyclops" (2005), an installation of photographs submitted by the creators of Hamburger Eyes Photo Magazine, which seeks to "tell the continuing story of life on earth." Hung from floor to ceiling on two of the gallery's walls, the mostly black-and-white photographs are aggressive in both presentation and subject matter. They document porn shoots, street fights, transvestites, and wrestling matches. The story they tell is at times bawdy, crass, and raw, but even if you don't like what you see, it is difficult to take your eyes off the spectacle. The photographs, most dating from 2003 to 2005 with some submissions from the 1960s and 1970s, were taken by the magazine's founders (brothers Ray and Dave Potes and Stefan Simikich) as well as photographers from around the world. As such, the photographs tell a collective story-one that is clearly shaped by editors who seek gritty and unflinching pictures.

Most of the works featured in the exhibition's upstairs galleries engage the public more gently, taking interactive approaches to communal artmaking. For instance, in the live installation piece "Untitled" (2005) by Margaret Tedesco, the artist sits in a miniature screening room and narrates feature-length films to visitors on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Kate Pocrass's "Mundane Journeys" (2005), a bus tour of San Francisco, presses visitors to consider and share the small details of sites that they would normally ignore. If you miss the bus, you can pick up a map that includes the artist's "mundane" commentary and explore the city on your own. Ted Purves's "Momentary Academy" (2005) transforms a gallery bay into a classroom where museum visitors attend workshops and lectures on such topics as spoken word recordings and minimal paper art. "Momentary Academy" mimics YBCA's own educational programs but transforms the interaction into a performance art piece. In all these examples, the artists challenge us to live more creatively and to reconsider our interactions with one another-to adopt a sense of wonder-that we might bring to our experience of art.

It is, after all, shared experience-as opposed to sameness-that creates a community. This is an idea that Edie Tsong explores in her "Telecommunity Portrait" (2005) project. Gallery visitors and Tsong take turns drawing each other using a video conferencing system that links YBCA with Tong's Oakland, California, studio. By decentralizing and restructuring the artist/model workplace in accord with contemporary business practice, Tsong considers technology's potential to facilitate intimate human contact. Working from home to avoid a long commute or for other lifestyle benefits can be lonely and isolating. Indeed, Tsong spends several hours each day in her studio waiting for visitors to engage her. When they do, she offers friendly conversation before faxing her completed drawing to each visitor as a souvenir; visitors pin their portraits of Tsong on the surrounding gallery walls. The drawings themselves are almost incidental to the exchange of gazes and words, and to the experience of studying a face and of being studied.

While Tsong asks us to consider the factors that determine individual identity, others in "Bay Area Now 4" use individuals to draw portraits of communities. In the downstairs galleries Jim Jocoy's snapshots of punk rockers outside San Francisco and Los Angeles nightclubs in the late 1970s and early 1980s are a bit like class photos of the rebellious set. Selections of Jocoy's photographs from the era (a series totaling more than one thousand images) are arranged in grids inside large frames. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and filmmaker John Waters appear in the portraits along with many less familiar faces. Wearing black leather, dark eye makeup, and dyed hair, the punks stand before grafitti-covered brick walls and inside doorways scowling at the camera. Each punk defiantly announces his or her refusal to conform to mainstream culture, yet the portraits are so uniform that when viewed as a whole they create a consistent pattern of black, red, and white. Jocoy shows us the punks as a cohesive community in which members marked themselves in creative ways to indicate belonging. This uniformity is absent in the Polaroids Jocoy made twenty-five years later of many of the same people. The tribe has drifted apart and its people wear the outward signs of the various post-punk subcultures that they now inhabit.

John Hattori's One Minute Portraits (2005) documents another subculture, but unlike Jocoy's it defies easy definition. The series of short video "portraits" feature Hattori's friends and acquaintances, many of whom he met at the Adobe Bookstore near his home in San Francisco's Mission District. Over the past few decades this traditionally Hispanic neighborhood has become an enclave of the city's hip culture. It was also the site of much conflict during the high-tech boom of the late 1990s when skyrocketing rents began to drive out lower income families and the artists and intellectuals who lived among them. Hattori's friends are creative and quirky-they play music, ride skateboards, sit in coffee houses, growl into the camera, and bake cookies to give away. They are full of life, and yet as viewers use the DVD remote control to flip through the video portraits, there is a sense of melancholy. Hattori's project has the quality of a family photo album, memorializing a group of interconnected people. Just as the character of the Mission District's streets, artist studios, restaurants, and bookstores will eventually change, so too will the people who live there.

There is no doubt that place can be a powerful symbol of community. Testament to this are Apollonia Morrill's ten large-scale, color photographs of San Francisco's beloved Castro Theatre taken in 2004. Devoid of people, Morrill's photographs revel in the low light and opulent interior dcor of this Grand Dame of the city's single-screen movie houses. In the good old days, every neighborhood in San Francisco boasted its own theater with an architectural style as unique as its surrounding community. The influx of multiplexes and the consequent demise of many neighborhood theaters has been a galvanizing force in a city that loves a good cause. Morrill's photographs are saturated and cinematic, suggesting Hollywood drama as well as the sense of loss that these sites so often inspire today. The photographs also record, albeit subtly, the wear that evidences the many people who have gathered together under these gilded ceilings.

The Bay Area is a place that is deeply invested in neighborhoods and in the notion of community. This is evident in the way natives-the gay and lesbian communities, the homeless community, the preservation community, the arts community, and so on-view and think of themselves. Identifying with a group, or several, is important in a region this large, as well as this ethnically, economically, and socially diverse. For the same reason it is imperative to have institutions like YBCA that are ambitious enough to take on the daunting responsibility of surveying what is happening here and now and to present it in a meaningful way. While it is up to visitors to decide if the show is representative enough, or if it presents the best of the best, "Bay Area Now 4" is engaging; it asks relevant questions, and most importantly it shows us what we might be missing.

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

ERIM GARCIA is a curatorial associate in the Photography Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.