Picturing Disaster: The 1906 Earthquake - Exhibit, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art
This is a haunting show! Put together by Corey Keller, the Museum's
assistant curator, the photographs - some amateur, some commercial, some for
insurance companies - envelop, or are enveloped in smoke and ruin of
magical, clearly tragic proportions.
At a hundred years remove from the present, it is is a show that -
superficially - will draw in crowds of people, as was true Saturday. In
reality, the likelihood of another devastating earthquake is as ever
present, and certainly a looming threat that no doubt penetrates and sits
in the psychic well of any resident in this part of California.
As art - one without the ego of the artist present - just the wonderful
orchestration, practically rhapsodic hand of the curator, deftly locating
and positioning the photographs - the aesthetic experience of being within
the parameters of this show is akin to walking around within an elaborate
mausoleum - one in which one witnesses the borders between the dead and
the living, including the initial fiery transformation of one element (wood)
into another (smoke) - incredible, various shades of black, gray and white
billowing plumes of it rising from the insides and outsides of both small
and major buildings. The living, the refugees are in tents, in various
states of awe and shock, looking down across the town or setting up
temporary coffee shops and construction sites on cracked, divided and
buckled streets that lie between the ghostly, skeletal building facades and
flattened foundations of burnt out ruins.
Indeed, walking through the three distinct spaces within the gallery, is as
if a visit to a tomb whose history and ghosts are still very much alive
below the City's psychic and collective surface. Geologically, with one
monstrous shake, what the photographs provide is evidence of what
undoubtedly fated to happen once again!
It's a timely show. Not only the anniversary of '06, but in parallel with
the aftermath of Katrina, and life in the middle of a Presidential
Administration, one whose moves seem implicitly and often explicitly
apocalyptic: as if fundamentally possessed with a vision of smoke and ruins
in which 'good' American souls will arise. etc. It's a keynote show that
speaks to our collective edges.
In context of the museum's parallel Richard Long exhibit, it is also
interesting in the ways in which this show juxtaposes with the geometric
shapes and classical confidence of Long's walks, sculptures and photographs
- a work that, ironically, beautifully thrives the more for its reliance on
working with stones and other elements in the landscape, ones overtime that
are constantly at the mercy of geological eruption, including, no doubt,
major earthquakes.
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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