Garth Weiser. 2010. WIN4. Acrylic and Tempera on Canvas. 90"x79"

I left my apartment around six.  A bit early to head out, yeah, but it’s First Thursday, you gottsta move early to avoid the horde o’ shitheads that populate the galleries on such celebratory evenings.  Removing myself from a haze of smoke, booze (PBR, about six cans of) & paint thinner, amongst whatever other toxins pollute the oxygen of my trashed studio, stepping out into this chilly San Francisco night I felt ambitious, optimistic even.  At this very moment a protest was taking place at the Civic Center (in regards to the education cuts, those fuckin bastards), and I was hoping the artists of this city, premiering their work on this night, would deliver a parallel statement, a reflection of the current political and economic climate, a vicious attack on the fucked up status quo (is it fucked up? It’s so hard to tell when I’m busy shopping all the time.).  Anyways, like I said, it’s First Thursday, meaning Art Walk, meaning almost every gallery downtown graciously offer their open doors, their free wine, and their shmarmy sales pitches to the public (well,  not so much the latter, as they wouldn’t waste a second of their precious time on us broke ass students when they could be hammin it up wit SF’s most “elite” patron’s of the arts [daft cunt’s]).  So once a month we all gather in awe, contemplation, shame, disgust, whatever (usually shame and disgust) of the freshest and most cutting edge (what?) art squeezed out (like a shit) in San Francisco.  It’s an attempt to produce some sense of community in a scene which is anything but, unless you have an MFA with an emphasis in sucking dick…hard.  Which I do not.  Which I will not.  Which will force me to remain on the fringe and continue to feed this disillusionment I have with the entire production and the game involved, so my apologies if I at times sound like a bitter old dickhead with nothing positive to say about any of this nonsense or if I tend to cast a shadow of doubt upon all of SF art, but fuck you I’m gonna say whatever I want whether I believe it or not and whether it makes sense or not.

I have a list of stops to make tonight, a list gathered from the trusty Fecal Face SF events calendar, the first being 49 Geary.  49 Geary always goes first because as the night progresses the building is increasingly full of pretentious art cunts, so full that you sometimes can’t even move.  It’s like being in a car jam with a bunch of rich fuck’s sipping wine and talking about the rebirth of bay area figuration and the impact of climate change (fuck’s sake).  You think road-rage is bad?  Take the elevator to the top, work your way down to the bottom.  I pressed the “5” button when I got in the elevator.  Following me was a handful of goons, a really haggard looking old man and his gussied up wife (she was hideous and no amount of make up or perfume could hide it), some middle aged art fuck’s who looked like they worked in computer programming and didn’t fuck a girl til they were like 24, and some other’s, I don’t wanna give anymore descriptions.

Walking out of the elevator I enter the first gallery I see and go straight to the wine bar.  Charles Shaw (hey, times are tough all over, even for these blue chip motherfuckers).  The girl serving the wine was dead sexy and offered me something of a suppressed smile along with my booze.  Great start.  I forget the name of this gallery, but every opening I attend there amuses me to some extent.  Last time I was here they had featured a solo show of SF based artist Kota Ezawa, which was good.  He does reproductions of mostly film stills presenting images of social unrest and other stuff in a very reductive, minimal style, all black and white.  It kinda looked like Julian Opie, but not as commercial, more obviously made by hand, and the imagery is much more exciting, and, oh, I don’t know, socially relevant? (whatever).  Much better than Opie.  Perhaps that’s the wrong reference to draw upon, forget I said anything.  Tonight, however, they had mounted an exhibition of some Japanese photographer (I don’t remember the name, sorry, this is like the worst art review ever).  All of the photo’s were large, some color, mostly black and white though.  The show presented some striking images, high contrast black and white portraits with blood, or shit, or mud, or tomato sauce or whatever smeared on faces, dead pigs stacked on one another with some kind of calligraphic inscription on them, a couple of oriental hipsters looking as if they had just stepped out of the Silver Factory, and, as with any Japanese photographer, men dressed as women.  What’s up with male Japanese photographers always doing self-portraits in women’s underwear?  There’s some fucked up shit going on there, or at least the artist wants you to think that.  Or maybe the governors of the art world only see relevance in Japanese photographers that address gay identity?  I guess it wouldn’t feel right without it though.  It seemed to be some exploration of both social and personal identity, perhaps the contrast of the two, perhaps not.  It doesn’t matter, it was a lot of Japanese people doing weird shit.   This is insightful stuff, huh?

Moving along the drawn out display of shit, I made it a point to have a glass of wine in each gallery.  There are like 20 galleries open here tonight, so I was expecting to be smashed by the time I left the building.  There was so much crap.  And I guess it’s not all that bad in a broader scope, but in the posh spaces that fill the elegant 49 Geary building (it’s not elegant at all) we expect the showcased work to adhere to some sort of standard, which most of them don’t.  But when you stumble across one that does, as I did when I stumbled (literally stumbled) into the Altman Siegel gallery, it’s as if you’ve been sitting in a windowless room with a family of chain-smokers and someone finally turns a fan on.  Garth Weiser.  I’ve never heard of him before, and I don’t expect you have either, but his work was just what I needed to see.  Upon entering the gallery I was confronted with the sweet smell of tempera.  This is a type of paint typically reserved for kindergarten students due to its water solubility, not appropriate for the serious artist, although it was a type I frequently used some years back when I couldn’t afford better shit, and apparently a type used by this seemingly successful artist, so kudo’s to Garth for choosing the economic route when it isn’t necessary (or is it, Garth? We are coming out of an economic disaster after all).  I walked eagerly to the back of the gallery where one of his large abstract paintings stood before me in all its glory.  It was nearly a perfect square, hinting toward the vertical, a white-washed textured surface whose space was divided and dissected by clean sections of parallel diagonal lines in hot red.  The opposing directions created an intense visual friction, slightly disorienting my vision (that could have been the booze) and creating a play between fuzziness and clarity that skipped across the canvas as my eyes wandered.  Moving closer to the piece I could see where the paint bled through the tape offering evidence of the fact that this was handmade, which is becoming more and more important in my opinion.  I think it’s a beautiful thing when an artist can produce a work that looks mechanic, only to discover upon further investigation that it is a product of the hand at work.  That’s not to say that we’re losing value in hard work, or talent, or skill.  This is no “geezer-rant”, to borrow Jerry Saltz’s term.  But there seems to be a deeper satisfaction in viewing work that I know the artist himself produced.  The color choice was brilliant (hot red on white, one of my all-time faves), the size, commanding, and composition, clean.  Brilliant, commanding, and clean.  That says it all for Garth Weiser.

More crap.  Staggering through the mob of assholes, the booze began to take hold.  When you take me, add plenty of alcohol and a pathetic display of the “cultured elite” making “insightful” comments on a  buncha work still grieving the death of Abstract Expressionism, you get one bitter motherfucker.  I put my headphones on and played the Clash for the remainder of my time there.  Joe Strummer lets me know that I’m not alone.  It seemed as though Garth Weiser would be the only one to offer some satisfaction during 49 Geary’s March 2010 effort.  That was until I met the work of Bernardo Roman Palau.  His solo show at the Jack Fischer Gallery presented a series of works that played with the realm of the spiritual but maintained their distance through his use of paint.  Images of burning animals (deers, rabbits, etc.) were painted with such deadpan expressions that you were unable to believe anything your eyes told you.  This seems typical of any legitimate attempt at surrealism, making the absurdity of the situation presented as unbelievable to the figures and creatures inhabiting the painting as it is to the viewer.  To take it even further, the artist interrupts the space physically by placing large, bold, brightly colored spots across the canvas plane, allowing no opportunity to get sucked into illusion.  I appreciate an artist who sticks to facts.  Images of pale blue Christ-like figures rendered so smoothly they look like cgi pitted against drips and splatters of earth-tones furthered this one-two punch of blatant falsity and blunt reality.  Appearing retardedly (is that a word? No, it’s not) mystical upon first glance, after minimal effort I was able to see that Palau’s work was anything but.

Next.  George Lawson Gallery, second floor.  This was great, I, for the first time ever in 49 Geary, entered an empty gallery.  Not a single person in there, except for the gallery operator.  And it’s a good thing too, because my patience was running thin, and if the room had been occupied by a circle of art pricks, I would have turned around, walked out, and missed the charming works of Ward Schumaker.  I don’t want to get into description here, because I’m tired of writing and I didn’t spend too much time there, but his works featured a muted palette and sporadic gestural brush strokes, reminiscent of early Guston, and a subtle use of text, kinda like Johns.  There’s also some Schnabel in there.  I’m sorry to make all the comparison’s, I know artists hate living in the shadow of other artists, but it’s inevitable when your work is being talked about by someone engrossed in art history.

I had finally made my way to the last floor, and having had drank so much wine, seen so much disappointing work, lusted after so many art coug’s, I decided to skip the rest of the galleries, get some fresh air, and have a fuckin cigarette.  Cause I fuckin needed it.

All the cool adults were gathered in their circles outside, smoking, laughing, sharing all their unique opinions on art and world affairs.  Buncha pricks.  Dolby Chadwick and some other blue chippin galleries on Post had some openings, but I wasn’t up for it.  I’ve had my fill of bitches all glammed up in Chanel, socialite d-bags with their Kenneth Cole wing tips and horn-rimmed glasses.  I started to make my way toward Ever Gold, the TL’s premier ghetto-chic art space.  I had to stop off at my place and change my shoes as I had spilled vomit (my own) on the ones I had been wearing.  But not before a quick stop for a tall can of the good ol’ Blue Ribbon.  Shoes changed, tall can empty, I met up with Tyler, a buddy of mine, who suggested we go to 111 Minna before Ever Gold.  Which we did.  A pleasant surprise, I must say.  This was the first time I entered the space and was shocked at not only the vast size of the place, but at the low cost of Tecate’s as well ($2.  I was expecting to have to pay like $5.).   This was a duo show, two artists, I think both from CCA, painting in a photorealist manner.  There were mountainous landscapes drenched in psychedelic hues,  vulnerable nudes splayed across lush velvety mattresses, reminiscent of the voyeuristic scenario’s of an Eric Fischl, some slightly abstracted, washed over and muddy caves (or whatever they were, I didn’t really like those ones), and some smaller photorealist pieces, one of which looked like a piece from Kippenberger’s Uno di voi… series.  The paint was so glossy, so caked on, like a van Gogh, and the detail so precise that everything else in the gallery seemed so lack-luster.  But all in all it was a good show.

Trying to get into Ever Gold on an opening night is like riding the 38 at rush hour, sans the elderly orientals (and they’re always sleeping, what the fuck?).  And if you’ve ever tried to do so, you know how frustrating it is.  Ever Gold is a great space, but it’s small, and it seems like every hipster in San Francisco is there on First Thursdays.  After arriving and seeing the crowd, we decided to forgo our attempt to check out the new show and detour up the alley for a pop-in at Public, where they were featuring a solo show (her first) of , oh, fuck I don’t remember her name, but she’s an SFAI student, tall, and hot.  There was also free PBR (one thing to love about Public, they always have a PBR for you, even during business hours).  The work was good.  It was all over the place, but nowadays that doesn’t remove anything from the quality of the work.  It’s much more common today to see artists traverse media and still maintain their oeuvre, or whatever (I try not to make a habit of using words like “oeuvre”).  All of the work was black and white, and all seemed to revolve around the same, or similar subject, save for the weird tribal masks displayed in the window. I was instantly drawn to one work, which looked like the center-piece of the whole show.  It was a complex web (and I mean that literally. It looked like a spider’s web) of images, I think hand drawn (I’m constructing this all from memory, so forgive me if I fudge any details.  I was hammered at the time.) watercolors?  I’m unsure about the medium, but they looked like self portraits, and they probably were, because hot women artists almost always use themselves as a subject in everything they do (that’s not true).  What struck me was the size of the piece, as well as the intricacy of the weaving of the yarn.  It didn’t seem to have much else to offer, but the sheer magnitude and ambition of it deserve some praise.  To the right of the spider-web piece were a few blown up black and white photographs.  Easily the strongest work here.  One in particular featured a woman obscured by a plume of smoke.  The image was so sharp, so seductive, so glamorous you felt as if you were flipping through a magazine and came across a feature of a photo shoot for some new hipyouungsexy indie-folk singer or some shit.  Anyways, the show was enjoyable, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more, and been able to talk about it in more depth, had I not been shitfaced.

After wandering through some gallery on Leavenworth and Geary I ended up at Edinburgh.  The night was coming to an end, and as I was sipping what would be my last beer, I had another moment of optimism.  Wait. No, no no I didn’t.  NO fuck that, San Francisco has nothing to offer and just because there were a few enjoyable moments doesn’t change the fact that the Bay Area is the art world’s septic tank.  We’re the swarming shit, piss, blood and vomit of whatever is fresh on the face, and it will always be like that and always has.  Get me out of here.

Nah, it ain’t that bad.  I’ll always rebel against the status quo.