Thorsten Brinkmann, excerpt from video Gut Ding well es so. Turn the sound off to get the proper silent-movie effect.

Silent film is sort of the key word here. The video, Gut Ding will es so, by German artist Thorsten Brinkmann, has a Chaplinesque physical comedy to it. The artist/performer has a jaunty air as he carries in front of a static camera ordinary objects. He interacts with each in an unexpected way, and then carries the object off. Among the things he interacts with are a folding beach chaise, a large cardboard box, a dolly, an office-like arm chair, and a night stand. With the beach chaise, for instance, he sticks his arm into the support rungs and flaps the back and legs portion of the chair open and shut, looking like a butterfly).

For each new object, we waited with anticipation to see just how he would use it. Some of the actions were so simple that it seemed just plain dumb. Others were totally surprising. We were delighted by it all. The artist becomes a sort of Everyman, a bit misguided and lost as he explores the world of objects unmoored from their ordinary uses. He also takes on the objects as a piece of himself and vice versa.

By the way, that’s a lot of standing still. How about some chairs or a bench for viewing video???

Mickalene Thomas's portrait of Michael Jackson in black sequins

The video is part of the Remix exhibit up until August 15, which also includes work by Mickalene Thomas, Amir H.Fallah, Nicole Cherubini, Hilary Pecis and Carmen McCloud.

The largest of Mickalene Thomas' photo collages

The Thomas photo collages insert unexpected images of African Americans  in the gallery space and in an unexpected picture space. Her large, fractured image of a young Michael Jackson rendered in black sequins on white ground is more interesting as a concept than as an object that engages the eye.

Amir H. Fallah blends menace with playful fantasy. The whole thing drips with irony.

The Amir H. Fallah paintings and installation depict a cheery play-world at war. The warriors, heads wrapped in black, infiltrate either a backyard play house or maybe levels of a video game. The protest here is either anti-war or anti-profiling–equal opportunity criticism all around.

Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet, The 99 Names of God, airport drawings detail from one in the series

A preview of the gallery’s next exhibit makes me wish I could get there. It’s work by Sandow Birk. The American Qur’an series is gouache and ink on paper illuminated manuscripts (in English) with images of destruction. A couple of enormous drawings, The 99 Names of God, airport drawings by Birk and Elyse Pignolet, are spectacular aerial perspective maps with words, in English and Arabic. I just found some commentary by Roberta about other work by Birk and Pignolet comparing airports to Dante’s Inferno. (My mom used to compare the New York Port Authority to Dante’s Inferno! ) I think they are all on to something here.

Anthony Discenza street sign, a taste of an exhibit to come at Catherine Clark Gallery

Outside the gallery, a “street sign” by Anthony Discenza caught our attention. (Thanks to that eagle-eyed Timothy Buckwalter for IDing the artist for me on my Flickr site). Discenza has a show coming up at Catherine Clark in December.

Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock at 111 Minna Gallery

We also stopped at the 111 Minna Gallery, partly because Minna was with us. The watery fantasy drawings are collaborations by husband and wife team Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock.They have a turn-of-the-20th-century air, with mermaids, monsters and fish that look like airplanes and torpedoes, and wobbly sci-fi-fantasy structures like submarine skyscrapers and bathyscaphes amid the bubbles and kitshy girlies. They are lovely and engaging, with lots of texture and colors, coming in a variety of media and scale, including some reverse glass paintings on old windows.

Robert Frank, from his book The Americans. (c) Robert Frank. image from http://www.americanethnography.com/january2009.php

Last major stop for our day of art (by now Murray had dropped out) was the Robert Frank exhibit soon to close (Aug. 23) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Looking in: Robert Frank’s”The Americans” celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book The Americans with all 83 photos in the order of the book, plus a bunch of related photos and documents. Since I presume you all know the book, I won’t go on about it except to say we spent a long time there with the work, with its mix of politics and timeliness–an archive of a particular time and place. I especially wanted to visit this exhibit because of the wonderful Alec Soth talk I heard at Penn. Soth spent quite a bit of time discussing Frank’s influence on him. I would have bought a catalog, but I couldn’t bear the thought of carrying home the giant tome.

At the end of the exhibit was a small show of contemporary artists who were influenced by Frank. I didn’t see a Soth or a Zoe Strauss, to name just a couple of today’s important contemporary photographers he influenced. The photographers shown were all working in black and white, but that decision unfairly limited the true breadth of the influence Frank has had, and so it was a disappointment.

By now, Minna and I had had quite enough of art, so even though we did stop by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Odili Donald Odita has a mural up there), I was too tired to take it in, and Minna was champing at the bit. Sorry, no pictures. Not allowed.

Mom drank a lot, a stencil on the sidewalk in San Francisco. I love the tail and the duck feet.

One more thing. The sidewalks of the city sported a variety of stenciled images–the people’s public art. Some of them were great. I have included a snap of my favorite.

Robert Frank, U.S. 285, New Mexico (1955) gelatin silver print, image: 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in., Mark Kelman, New York, photograph © Robert Frank

It emphasized the necessity of art to present a complex and unresolved picture in place of the one-line pitch provided by the commercial world.  In Cold War America of the 50s and well into the 60s everyone was blond, smiling  and beautiful; it seemed the entire country, as in Lake Woebegon, was above average.

The National Gallery of Art is showing Looking In; Robert Frank’s “The Americans” through April 26, before it moves to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 17-August 23) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 22-December 27, 2009). The exhibition traces the background of The Americans in Frank’s previous books and series of images as well as books of photographs by his mentors and contemporaries.  It includes numerous contact sheets from the 767 rolls of film Frank shot and then culled to the 83 images in The Americans, mock-ups of his collages of images that were part of his editing process and correspondence with the Guggenheim Foundation (which funded his photographic project), Jack Kerouac (whom Frank asked to write an introduction to the book) and others connected with the project. The exhibition makes plain the enormous work and calculation behind The Americans’s seeming artlessness.

Robert Frank Elevator - Miami Beach (1955) gelatin silver print, image: 12 3/8 x 18 3/16 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969, photograph © Robert Frank

Indeed it may be hard for younger viewers to realize the novelty of Frank’s work, so thoroughly have his lessons been assimilated.  Frank went for the ordinary and avoided the picturesque or photogenic. He retained the homely details that were cropped or air-brushed out of commercial photographs: a woman’s chipped and dirty fingernails, the tangle of cords in a television studio, a clutter of signs in the landscape. He included both over and under-lit images and odd camera angles to imply the un-studiedness, and hence truthfulness, of his work.

Robert Frank, Los Angeles (1955-56) gelatin silver print, image and sheet: 18 7/8 x 12 1/2 in., Susan and Peter MacGill, photograph © Robert Frank

Frank was a poet of the nocturnal, both outdoors and under harsh, indoor lighting. He enjoyed scenes that were unlikely, as well as unknown in his European experience: a cowboy in Western hat and boots in New York City, drive-in movies, religious expressions on the rear windshields and bumpers of cars, racial segregation, the prevalence of commercial signage and automobiles, lots of automobiles. If Frank was ever invited into an American home he left his camera behind. He showed Americans in public, both alone and in crowds. And Frank was a self-conscious witness; in San Francisco he showed a couple from behind, relaxing on the grass, the man looking over his shoulder and glowering at the photographer whose presence impinges on them.

Robert Frank, San Francisco (1956) gelatin silver print, image: 13 3/4 x 10 1/16 in., private collection, photograph © Robert Frank, from "The Americans"

The Americans was a product of one of the mid-century’s classic road trips, but Frank’s roads lead to death (Car Accident – U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, 1955, Crosses on scene of highway accident – U.S. 91, Idaho, 1956), desolation (Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1955)  and religion (St. Francis, gas station, and City Hall – Los Angeles, 1956) as well as discovery and escape; it was as conscious a narrative as the various books and films of the genre.  The work was first published in France in 1959 (with texts that were not of Frank’s choosing) then in 1960 by Grove Press, with Kerouac’s introduction, and multiple times since; numerous editions are included in the exhibition.  The curator, Sarah Greenough, is clear that she is showing rarely exhibited vintage prints – an imposition of market and museum values on a series of photographs that were intended for reproduction.  I could distinguism more variation among the printed editions  (the 1969 MoMA edition pushed the contrast so that the pictures have an entirely different impression) than I could between the earlier and later prints of the photographs. The National Gallery’s reproductions in its catalog are tritones and certainly superior to all previous versions.  The comprehensive catalog (ISBN 978-3-86521748-6) is available in an expanded, hardcover edition (ISBN 978-3-86521-806-3 – distributed by D.A.P.) that includes all of Frank’s contact sheets for The Americans, a comparative sequencing for published editions, further correspondence, a map and chronology. Both versions are extraordinarily beautifully designed by Margaret Bauer. The catalog gives this body of work the documentation and anaylsis it certainly deserves.