Art I'm Looking At: Art at Stanford

I recently spent a day at Stanford University. I went to see the Art-o-Mat® that's supposed to be on campus, but, despite two hours of looking—questioning telephone operators, librarians, and people in the art building and at the Cantor Arts Center—I had to give up. I imagine it's there somewhere, but apparently its exact location is a guarded secret. The Art-o-Mat website mentions "Residential Services." Their officers were closed. A subsequent phone enquiry so far has been ignored.

After giving up, I went into the Cantor Arts Center thinking I'd look at the permanent collection quickly,  but immediately I got sidetracked by a show of mannerists prints. Prints and paintings of this period usually aren't my sort of thing—but I was quickly drawn into the show (Myth, Allegory, and Faith) and ended up seeing it all, in detail.

Detail is the right word. Myth, Allegory, and Faith includes etchings, woodcuts, chiaroscuro woodcuts, and engravings, but most of the prints on show were the latter—and engravings often of astonishing precision. Magnifying glasses, tethered to the walls, were provided to facilitate seeing the finest of lines, a nice touch. It's hard to imagine the time and effort required to produce this kind of work. I enjoyed nearly every piece there was to see, but favorites included: David Beheading Goliath (1540), an engraving by Giovanni Battista Scultori (1503-1575), shown below; Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Grows Cold (1600), by Jan Saenredam (Dutch, 1565-1607), shown left; Saturn (c. 1540, printed 1604), a four-block chiaroscuro woodcut by Giuseppe Niccolo Vicentino (Italian, active 1540s), after Pordenone; Neptune and Thetis (after 1551 to 1580), an engraving by René Boyvin (French, 1530-1598) after Léonard Thiry; The Three Fates (1538-1540), an engraving by Pierre Milan (French, active 1540 to around 1557); The Rest on the Return from Egypt (1575), an engraving by Cornelis Cort (Dutch, 1533 to before 1578), after Federico Barocci; and Venus and Cupid (1505-1536), an etching by Daniel Hopfer (German, 1470-1536), among many others. The luminous quality achieved in the engravings in particular was startling. Nearly every print included the human form—notoriously difficult to capture accurately in any medium, particularly when foreshortened. These artists have succeeded, using overlapping engraved lines that in some instances wrap themselves around contours with such natural grace and rightness that they beggar belief. Well worth the time. Through June 20, 2016.


I also saw an interesting group of drawings of the Battle of The Little Bighorn by one of its participants, one Chief Red Horse of the Minneconjou Lakota Sioux, who fought against Custer there, and a small (one-room) exhibition called Speed and Power, a rather disparate grouping of photographs from the Cantor Art Center's permanent collection. While the theme seemed a little forced, there were a few gems among them. I particularly enjoyed Mechanical Form 003 (2004) by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948- ), shown here, and Satiric Dancer (1926), by André Kertész (1894-1985).

I had intended to look at the new Hopper and the Diebenkorn sketchbooks again at the Cantor Arts Center, but, with time running short and having seen them back in December, I headed next door to The Anderson Collection, in a low, modern building that looks closed even when it's not. I wanted to get a taste of the place to see if it was worth coming back to for a more leisurely look. Worth it? Yes.

The building (itself very interesting) houses only a portion of the personal collection of the Andersons (whoever they are—I didn't have time to find out*), who must be in the upper 1% of the 1%. Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Diebenkorn, Pollock, Guston, De Kooning, Nevelson, Rothko, Morris Louis, Wayne Thiebaud—many more. Just what's on display here would make a very fine museum of post-war modern art for a fairly large city, yet this is only one part of a much larger collection in the possession of a single family. I particularly enjoyed a black Louise Nevelson sculpture positioned directly across a passageway from a large set of black metal elevator doors—creating a pair of bookends—with an uncharacteristically dull De Kooning visible between them (the De Kooning one of the very few duds in the place.) Definitely worth another visit. Below is Wall Painting No. IV (1954), by Robert Motherwell (1915-1991).


*Following my visit, I looked at the website for The Anderson Collection.

Places I'm Visiting: Art-o-Mat® at the San Carlos Public Library

On a trip into San Francisco to see the Bonnard show now on at The Legion of Honor , I took a quick detour down to San Carlos to see the Art-o-Mat® in the San Carlos Public Library. This one is very similar to the one at the Exploratorium, which I visited last week, but it's a different color (brownish-orange rather than red). It has an added box on the side that accepts $5 bills, again like the Exploratorium example.

This time I chose a small flipbook made from barcodes. The subject of the piece I got turned out to be Bruce Lee, the work of Scott Blake, who seems to like to make images out of barcodes. The little flip book zooms in on Barcode Bruce Lee, "a digital mosaic made entirely of barcodes from movie DVDs the Chinese martial artist appeared in."

This is the fourth Art-o-Mat® I've seen so far. There are eleven in California, 142 or so nationwide. I hope to visit the one on the Stanford University campus next. An Art-o-Mat® is a vintage cigarette machine converted to dispensing art rather than cigarettes. For more about the Art-o-Mat®, see this post.

Places I'm Visiting: The Art-o-Mat® at San Francisco's Exploratorium

The Exploratorium moved from its old location at the Palace of Fine Arts to Pier 15 on the Embarcadero a couple years back. I hadn't visited the new site before. The display area has been greatly expanded, it seems. Short on time, I decided to go in another time, when it wouldn't be necessary to rush. Mainly, I had wanted to see the Art-o-Mat® there, anyway.

The art vending machine at The Exploratorium turned out to be in the Exploratorium shop, which is accessible without paying the entry fee. I bought a piece of art (as well as a T-shirt showing the periodic table of elements and a little electric robot kit that draws random patterns with pens).

An Art-o-Mat® is a vintage cigarette machine converted to dispensing art rather than cigarettes. This is the third one I've visited of 11 in California. For more about the Art-o-Mat®, see this post.

Places I'm Visiting/Art I'm Looking At: Aline Smithson at The Rayko Photo Center

I visited the Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco yesterday for the first time, a place I've known about for a couple of years but never quite made it to. I wanted to see the current show, but also wanted to see the Art-o-Mat® at Rayko, one of several in the Bay Area, and one of 11 in California. I've long had a vague idea it would be fun to visit them all. This is the second I've seen in person. (An Art-o-Mat® is a vintage cigarette machine converted to dispensing art rather than cigarettes. For more about the Art-o-Mat®, see this post.)

The Photo Center has camera displays (some for show, some for sale), formal gallery space, some informal space that was showing student work, a large selection of the work of local photographers for sale, and rental studio space and darkrooms (both digital and analog), as well as work areas for mounting and matting prints. The center has a regular schedule of classes. Virtually everything to do with photography is here. There is even a vintage photo booth in the space.

Among the photographs for sale, I particularly liked work by Ryuten Paul Rosenblum, Cherie Mayman, and Nicolo Sertorio. I was impressed by Ella Dean among the student photographers. Cherie Mayman's piece was a blurry, dreamy platinum print of what looked like bottles suspended in the air.

The main show was Self and Others, work by Aline Smithson from a number of different series. A few of the images are black and white. Most are large color prints. The various series—portraiture broadly defined for the most part—seemed united by a fondness for large, mostly unarticulated areas of bold color and an isolated subject, often looking right at the camera or just off camera, although a series entitled Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother is a set of 21 plays on Whistler's famous portrait of his mother, all imitating that work by using the photographer's mother seated sideways to the picture plane against a plain background (pale green and black in this case) with a painting hanging on the wall behind. The subject is flamboyantly dressed, the attire very different from the drab colors Whistler's mother wears. The paintings on the wall are likewise a sharp departure from the grey and palest beige of the print on the wall in Whistler's painting, yet each of Smithson's hand-colered images is anchored by the strength of Whistler's simple composition.

Selections from the series Hollywood at Home included one of my favorite pieces in the show Red Nails and Daisies (left). In this series, Smithson, who grew up in Hollwood, has posed models in allusion to the staged photos of Hollywood stars in their homes that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s. In her blurb about the series, Smithson says "In a reality-TV society where celebrity and stardom is possible without talent or reason, the idea that anyone can become a star has indeed become a reality." The song "Hooray for Hollywood" comes to mind. Although my reproduction here fails to capture the subtlety of the lavender of the plastic flowers in the bathing cap, it should give some sense of how well Smithson has captured the color of the photography of the period.

Most of the photos in the show, however, are from a series called Revisiting Beauty, portraits of young women between the age of 14 and 17 "on the cusp of womanhood and not  fully aware of their own loveliness," as Smithson puts it (a detail of one image is shown at left). Each of the young women is photographed against a strongly colored backdrop enhanced with landscape images from California or China, although these landscape elements are so subtly integrated that it's easy to miss them altogether. There are allusions here to the entire history of formal portraiture, particularly painted portraiture. Beside the beauty of the women themselves, the most striking element in Revisiting Beauty is the use of color. There is an alluring simplicity and directness of color that goes very well with the simple dignity of the sitters and a not-quite-acknowledged hint of their sexual appeal. According to the wall tags, Smithson sees her portraiture as collaborative and her portrait series taken together as a kind of autobiography. Well worth a look. Self and Others runs through February 29, 2016.

The next show at Rayko Photo Center will be The Ninth Annual Plastic Camera Show, opening March 9 and running through April 29. Opening reception on the first day of the show, March 9, 2016.

Art I'm Looking At: The Art-o-Mat

This post was prompted by a post I happened to see today on Hyperallergic, following an old link to an article about the Art-o-mat®.

What is an Art-o-mat® you ask? If the name suggests some connection with the culture of automation (and naming) of the 1950s and 1960s, you're right on track. A group called Artists in Cellophane, the brain child of artist Clark Whittington, operates a fleet of old cigarette vending machines from the period that now dispense art rather than cigarettes--machines Whittington has dubbed Art-o-mats®.

I first encountered an Art-o-mat® in the entrance lobby of the Crocker Museum of Art, in Sacramento, in the summer of 2012 on my first visit to that museum. A $5 bill and a pull on a lever dispensed a cigarette pack-sized art object of my choice (eventually--the machines are old, finicky, and not tolerant of much deviation from the size and weight of a cigarette pack; my choice got stuck and a staff member had to open the machine with a key to retrieve it). If you're old enough to remember cigarette machines, the idea makes instant sense. I had to buy something, just to support the whimsy. Sitting on my bookshelf now is a small (very small) painting of a Laysan Duck by artist Alice Dean. I had misplaced the little painting right after buying it, until yesterday, when looking through a small travel bag I had used that day two years ago, I finally found the purchase again. The finding of my little duck portrait and seeing the article about the Art-o-mat® coming a day apart was the serendipity that prompted this post.

This being the start of a new year--another bit of serendipity--and the start of new years being the traditional time for starting new projects, I went to the Art-o-mat® website (well worth a visit) after reading the Hyperallergic post, suddenly curious about the location of other Art-o-mat® machines that might be near me. I see that there are seven in the Bay Area, four in San Francisco, the one at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, one at the San Carlos Public Library, and one on the Stanford campus, in Palo Alto. In San Francisco, there's an Art-o-mat® at the Exploratorium (Pier 15), one each at two locations of The American Conservatory Theater (415 Geary St. and 1119 Market St.), and one at the RayKo Photo Center (428 3rd St.). According to the Art-o-mat® site, there are more than 100 working Art-o-mat® machines around the United States. You can find them all on a map on the site. Pictured at top is the Art-o-mat® at The Exploratorium (photo from the Art-o-mat® website). Perhaps I will attempt to make a collection of artworks from all the Bay Area Art-o-mat® machines in 2015. If you're an artist and willing to meet the stringent dimensional requirements that allow the machines to work, Artists in Cellophane is looking for contributors.