Science and math entwined with art
Tauba Auerbach comes home for SFMOMA survey show they thought was too early
Looking back at the roots of their practice, multidisciplinary artist Tauba Auerbach sees several recurring themes that extend back to their childhood in San Francisco. In addition to painting, sculpture and installation, bookmaking is a longtime passion of the artist, who established the Diagonal Press in 2013. They’ve also had an ongoing fascination with the spiral shape of the helix.
Those interests — as well as the artist’s explorations of visual perception, structure, and concepts related to geometry and physics — come into vivid focus in “Tauba Auerbach — S v Z,” their first survey show that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, Dec. 18, and is on view through May 1.
At the Marina district house they grew up in while preparing the show, Auerbach, who now lives in New York with partner Lele Saveri, discovered an early creation that foretold some of the work now at the museum.
“My mom had pulled out a bunch of artwork and photos and stuff from when I was a kid — one of the things she pulled out was a book,” says Auerbach. “It’s a book that’s bound with repurposed jewelry, these rings that are little helixes. And then it’s made with one of those pens that has a motor in it so it vibrates when you’re drawing. It’s just a bunch of little coil drawings.”
The recipient of SFMOMA’s 2008 SECA Award, which honors emerging Bay Area artists, Auerbach has been acclaimed for their interdisciplinary approach; critics sometimes admit to being “sent down a rabbit’s hole of unfamiliar mathematical and scientific terms,” as Rachel Churner wrote in a March 2016 review in Artforum. Auerbach attributes some of these interests to growing up near the old Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts, as well as a fundamental curiosity about how things are made.
But in spite of the works’ connections to math, science and advanced concepts of dimensionality, Auerbach believes that a background in those subjects is not a prerequisite.
“I don’t want to present people with equations,” says the 40-yearold, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Stanford University after a year studying mechanical engineering. “I want to present them with something that’s maybe like a relationship between two colors that vibrates in a particular way.”
For exhibition co-curators Joseph Becker, SFMOMA’s associate curator of architecture and design, and Jenny Gheith, assistant curator of painting and sculpture, the confluence of ideas seen in “S v Z” has not just touched on their areas of focus, but broadened their research.
“I think Tauba’s curiosity is really infectious,” says Gheith. “They’re very, very generous with breaking down very complicated theories and methods and have this way of opening up them up and making them available.”
New York musician Cameron Mesirow (a.k.a. Glasser), the artist’s friend and collaborator on an interactive piece called the Auerglass organ, says Auerbach is “a very deeply principled person who is constantly looking for a truer, deeper path.”
Auerbach has been highly involved in the design of the San Francisco exhibit, which includes black walls that are positioned in “rotational symmetry,” says Becker, as well as the typeface of the exhibition’s text. Auerbach admits to initially finding the prospect of a survey show at such a young age “both amazing and bizarre.”
“Originally, when this was planned (in 2020), I really felt, ‘Oh, I’m not quite ready for this.’ I actually resisted it for a number of years because I felt like it was too early to look back,” they recall. “It’s also been so educational to have to just to be prompted to give a shape to the whole thing, the entire whatever.”
With the show’s completion, Auerbach is now looking forward to what they see as the next stage of their career. One hope is that people can move beyond being concerned about the need for background knowledge in relation to their work.
“I think I started out from a really analytical kind of place, and now I’m in a more feeling place,” says Auerbach. “I don’t just want the artwork to hit you in the mind, I want it to kind of hit you in the body and all over.”
Here are a few of the concepts and individual works in the exhibition. The helix: The spiral shape is a form that recurs in Auerbach’s paintings, weavings and sculptures.
“We’re familiar with the shape, and I would even say that I think that we sense this shape a lot, even if not consciously,” says Auerbach.
Becker points out that the shapes of the letters S and Z in the show’s title are reminiscent of the form. “The connection with the helix (in Auerbach’s work) also connects to fascia, which are the connective tissue,” says Gheith.
Throughout the show, viewers will find iterations of the form, making the helix a metaphorical connective tissue to the 17 years of Auerbach’s work on view.
‘7S, 7Z, 1S, 2Z’: This kinetic sculpture installation is made from steel cables comprised of seven groups of seven strands twisted into a helix, then twisted around each other in the opposite direction. The structure is then pulled open and closed by motors that allow the formation of a
circular film of soap, like a bubble, between the cables. That comes from a mixture continuously pumped through the structure, with the liquid collecting at the bottom and pumping back to the top.
Auerbach says the idea for the work was prompted by thinking about “what makes something alive?” Auerbach says.
The piece continues to evolve as the curators learn how it responds over time and what the best soap mixture is for the desired results.
“There’s daily maintenance to maintain the most elasticity and iridescence in the soap,” says Becker.
Typography: Auerbach’s interest in lettering and symbols is something that traces back to a fascination with handwriting going back to childhood. All the typography used in the exhibition and catalog is of Auerbach’s design.
While living in San Francisco, Auerbach
notably worked as a painter at New Bohemian Signs. Studying graffiti was also a component of their education, Auerbach says, in terms of “what the most important structures are to each letter. In graffiti, they’re pushed to the very edge of legibility.”
Auerglass organ: The Auerglass is a pump organ created by Auerbach and Mesirow in 2009 that cannot be played by one person. Two players each have a keyboard with alternating notes of a four-octave scale, and each is dependent on the other to pump the wind needed to enable the other’s notes.
“The organ really followed the concept that we wanted to make an interdependent instrument,” says Auerbach. “However, there’s a third character in the equation, and it’s the organ. It feels nonlinear, the pitches bend and are not totally consistent, and it has little creaks and cracks and whistles and certain notes that sound like a different color than others.”
Performances of the organ are planned throughout the exhibition, with a special program to be announced for Feb. 3.