Berkeley show is long on Bay Area art, short on analysis
UC Berkeley retrospective frustratingly short on analysis
“Way Bay” started out as a recipe for chaos.
The exhibition is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through June 3, then continues in modified form June 13-Sept. 2. It gangs nearly 200 works from throughout Bay Area history “engaged with the region’s geographic, social, and cultural landscape” into what is touted as a “contrast to a conventional historical survey.”
Drawn from the museum’s deep storage, mixed with recent acquisitions and salted with objects loaned by the university library and the anthropology museum, it was cooked up by a team of five, led by the museum’s director, Lawrence Rinder.
It’s a mess of a show, tenuously strung together by literary snippets that appear only in a confusing printed checklist, not on the wall. No matter: The exhibition segments have no apparent relationship to the texts anyway.
There are many works that are wonderful to look at in their own right, and I’ll get to that. But as a show it is, if not lazy, then grossly under-resourced. There is no essay that attempts to make sense of the whole affair, to rationalize its disparate inclusions. There is no wall text at all, beyond a barebones introduction.
A salon-style hanging, neces-
“Way Bay”: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Through June 3; Part 2, June 13-Sept. 2. $11-$13, free 18 and under. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley. (510) 6420808. www.bampfa.org
sary to fit it all, puts many works high above viewers’ heads. Tiny numbers, 1 to 175, are keyed to the checklist (32 unnumbered films and videos are also listed), where one can find basic identification of each work and, occasionally, a short paragraph that reads like it came from Wikipedia.
For an exhibition occupying the primary galleries of a major university museum — for the better part of a year — it is woefully short on research or analysis.
That is all the more distressing because the curatorial selections suggest an alternative to what has become a tired recital of too few names and key moments in Bay Area modern art history. No, not all the important painting and sculpture produced here in the 1960s depicts figures in some state of dissipation.
Included are many works by women, artists of color and LGBTQ artists who too often slip through cracks in the historical record. The show does not correct the record, however; we know it only through supposition or because we were already aware of their identities.
Emma Michalitschke’s 1913 “Yosemite Landscape” takes a radically different approach to her subject from that of the blustery artists who first shaped America’s conception of the place. It’s not a great painting, but it’s a startlingly pretty one, rendered in the palette of a hand-colored photograph of its time. Ruth Armer’s “No. 23” (1971), painted at 75 at the end of a long career as an abstract surrealist, channels a transcendental radiance that feels like an entirely honest observation.
Ironies surrounding at least two African American artists go unnoticed by the museum. The great sculptor Sargent Johnson is represented by a solid and fearsome “Owl” (circa 1935), 14½ inches high. Not recorded here: UC Berkeley’s sale of a 22-foot-long, carved wood masterwork by him less than 10 years ago for “$164.63, including tax,” according to the New York Times.
Romare Bearden’s “Study for Berkeley — The City and Its People” (1973) is the only glimpse we can currently get of the artist’s kaleidoscopic vision of the city at a fateful moment in its history. The actual mural was removed to storage from the Berkeley Council Chambers in 2003 to protect it, given the building’s seismic vulnerability. The absence of a public work by an African American artist in a city that has seen a precipitous drop in its black population is not noted in exhibition materials.
Works by Jeremy Anderson, Jay DeFeo, Oliver Lee Jackson, Jess, Clay Spohn, Carlos Villa and Ruth Wall are particular standouts that are not often seen.
For a historical survey, however, the exhibition skews heavily toward the 21st century, with more than a third of the works having been made in the past 17 years. Rinder has been director at BAMPFA for roughly half that time, and worked there for an earlier stint from 1988 to 1998. He currently holds the additional title of chief curator. So, we can assume that his predilections are in evidence here.
Choices like the mural-size “This Is What We Are for and This Is What We’ll Get” (2002) by Xara Thustra and Zarouhie Abdalian’s extraordinary 2013 sculpture “As a Demonstration” — a ringing alarm bell encased in a soundless vacuum chamber — display an admirable breadth. There’s also a clear taste for dreamlike drawings — whether a selection of acid-colored heads by Daniel Higgs and Kyle Ranson or a whispersubtle graphite rubbing by Mary Ijichi.
Virtually all the art, in fact, is strong enough to be included in a major museum collection. That does not mean, I regret to say, that it can be relied upon to prop up an exhibition with no structure of its own.
The curatorial selections suggest an alternative to what has become a tired recital of too few names and key moments in Bay Area modern art history.