Art: MoMA/SFMoMA

I went to MoMA last weekend, and here I am in San Francisco not a week later, so the SFMoMA, of course, is a necessity. Simply walking into the lobby, it's clear that San Francisco's version of the white cube franchise has been pulled down from it's high horse, and I don't think it's because I grew up at the SFMoMA that I like it much better. Compared to it's big sister institution, of course, it's a half-pint, bite-sized, but that's part of what makes it so good. The galleries follow a logical progression, two tangent loops on five stories, wrapping around a central staircase. It's basically impossible to get lost. It's like running a track. The New York version, of course, is a gigantic cube broken into smaller cubes (the galleries, it must be said, are on the whole larger than the ones in San Francisco). Like the Met, if it has a logic to its layout, that logic is lost on me, despite countless visits. The difference is that I like getting lost at the Met--the antiquity of its collections suits the exploratory mood. At the MoMA, with it's giant, blank white walls, bright lights, and endless galleries, I feel like a ping pong ball, bouncing back and forth from masterpiece to masterpiece, completely unable to focus on anything.

That said, at the SFMoMA last night, I said, "I feel like I'm in hell," and my compatriot agreed. This was on the fourth floor, whose entirety was taken up by a Brice Marden exhibition. Let it be known that I hate Brice Marden, or at least, to be a bit less vehement, I think his art sucks. Not only is it a total sham (and that's not because I only like figurative painting or some such; there is many a minimalist that I like, and even a few color-field painters). His work, though, is beyond banal, and to see an entire floor of it (one-half large color-field canvasses, one half tangly colored net paintings) was an insult to my intelligence. The fifth floor, which usually showcases the largest and most fun contemporary art was given over to the Picasso and the Americans show that I missed when it was at the Whitney. I didn't miss much; I've always considered Picasso to be completely over-rated (excepting his blue period), and this show did little to change my mind. It did, however, include a fantastic Lichtenstein that I'd never seen before, of naked girls tossing a beach ball--well worth the trip--and also a great Wesselman: a kind of kitchen interior with a painted background, a real refrigerator door attached in relief, and collaged images of 1960s food pasted onto the table. Those two pictures made the trip, because the entire third floor, which always has great photography (I think I really do prefer photography to painting) was closed for installation, as was the part of the second floor that shows more contemporary art from the permanent collection. There were also a few great posters and things (a couch constructed from White Pages phone books) in the design section (I think I prefer design to painting, too, now, or at least, contemporary designers do more interesting work than contemporary "artists," for the most part).

MoMA back in New York had a bit more to offer this time around, if only because of the Jeff Wall show. I don't much like Jeff Wall, but maybe because my expectations were so low, I liked this show much more than I thought I would. There were, of course, plenty of weird, bad, stilted pictures--Mimic has always been one of my least favorites--but Picture for Women was better than I had imagined it could be after studying it books for so long, and the picture crafted after Invisible Man, an interior with the ceiling covered in light bulbs, is pretty spectacular. I also liked Diagonal Composition, a smaller picture of a dirty bar of soap on the ledge of a dirty sink (I'd always liked that one), and saw another few riffs on the theme, including a great shot of a dirty floor and a dirty mop, in which the structure of the spots of dirt on floor proved that Wall does have an aesthetic sensibility, even if he doesn't always use it. I also noticed that every picture that had an artificial light source (there's a great one of a 1950s interior filled with balloons reflecting the light from a jaundiced shaded lamp) worked better than the naturally, brightly-lit outdoor shots.

The rest of (NY)MoMA was tedious as usual--the ping-pong effect in the permanent collection, and a showcase of comic-related art, which was awful (and a waste of a theme. If they had done a showcase of work by graphic artists, the work would have been far superior). There were, again, a few goodies in the design section, which I had luckily heard about before and therefore sought out, including a wall of awesome Emigre covers and little corner of Helvetica memorabilia. The high-ceilinged central atrium was being installed with comical wall drawings containing socio-politico-artistic jokes--the jokes were good, but I didn't much care for his drawing style, though I guess that's less important. It's fascinating enough that it keeps the crowds all standing in the atrium, staring up with open mouths--which is good, because then the Jeff Wall show isn't too crowded.