Time and Art

Valley of the Wiggle — mixed media photo collage on board, 12”x9”

Five years ago, in the middle of the 2011 Project, I created this photo collage titled Beach Day.  It instantly was one of my favorites of the 365 pieces done back in 2011.  That piece was a key to my latest project, Time Travel Photos.  

The latest work for the series is of a valley that became the Lower Haight.  Where I have lived for over 25 years.  I have seen a lot of changes over time and at some point in the future may even do a series based on the changes I have witnessed in my neighborhood. 

October 18, 2011 – A Map to Meet Your Neighborhood Ghosts

Years ago I discovered the Sanborn Maps. They are detailed maps prepared for fire insurance purposes. They had every building in the City on them and were bound in large, cumbersome books. I’ve spent hours in the history room at the main library perusing the edition of maps from the 1880’s. Now, I can do it right from home. The 1905 edition is available online. I love cutting up old maps for my artwork. But I do set some limits for myself. I wouldn’t cut up a Sanborn map — these are digital images that have been reproduced.

With Halloween approaching the maps could come in handy if you were looking to meet some of the ghosts in the neighborhood. They reveal buildings that were in the Lower Haight in 1905. Some structures are still there and some have been replaced. The maps sometimes have details of business located in different buildings.

I have been around long enough to remember the abandoned taxi garage on Haight between Pierce and Steiner. Lofts are on that location now. But the space had a long time in the transportation business — it used to be the Haight Street Stables. Do the loft dwellers occasionally hear the heavy breathing of a draft horse or the distinct sound of its hooves?

A block north of the stables, on Page Street, there is a church in a building that used to be home to a dance academy (I’ve seen some old photos). Before that was built the street was empty except for a Chinese Laundry. I imagine the church ladies startled by a gentle tap on the shoulder and a whisper of Cantonese in their ear.

There were Chinese Laundries all over the neighborhood. One was down the street from me on Oak. And further down the block was a French Laundry that still is a Laundromat today (and one with a very sweet ghost who was the proprietress for years). Across the street at Haight and Scott is a dry cleaners that used to be a bakery (I wish the bakery would come back). The Tae Kwon Do Academy was a bicycle repair shop.

Many people mistake the old telegraph office on Page Street for a bank. We almost lost that building in the dot.com boom. The maps mark it as a Telephone Building in 1905. In the middle of that block was a windmill.

My building was built in 1927. The lot was empty before then, an outcropping of serpentine had to blasted away to fit the building into the lot. There is a church parking lot in the middle of the block where zipcars rest. One hundred years ago a “machine shop” with a gas engine was at the back of the lot. Nowadays, maybe only the ghosts remember what was made in the shop.

September 6, 2011 – Sylvester

Do ya wanna funk? Won’t ya tell me now? If ya wanna funk, let me show ya how.

Gaze into the disco ball. If you’re blessed, you may have a vision of San Francisco’s legendary disco diva Sylvester smiling back at you on the dance floor. We lost Sylvester way too soon but his spirit still lives and watches over the City he loves. Today would have been Sylvester’s 64^th birthday, but he really wasn’t born until he came home to San Francisco back in 1967.

Sylvester said, “My life started when I moved to San Francisco.”

Many of us feel the same way in our magical city. We know it is where life really begins.

January 19, 2011 – Street Art

I finally saw the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The title lead me to assume it was an indictment of the commercialization of museums and their big spectacle shows. Just last weekend I even saw the DVD for sale in the SFMoMA’s gift shop. It’s a great title, but, if you’ve seen the film, you know it really doesn’t fit.

I have a little patience for long documentaries. 30 Minutes would have probably covered it. This one is rather disjointed. The beginning is a mix of fairly interesting footage of street artists. The footage was taken by Los Angeles-based filmmaker/artist Thierry Guetta. The last hour of the film becomes a documentary about Guetta and his work. Let’s just say, France has exported a new P.T. Barnum to the United States.

For the past six months I have been repeatedly asked if I’d seen Exit Through the Gift Shop? My friends all knew I would have something to say about it. Honestly, that’s about it. But it did get me thinking again about the nature of street art.

Last summer Banksy was in town. It was amazing how much of a buzz his visit created. Sighting his work was the thing to do in July 2010. Some of my fellow citizens acted as if we were blessed by a royal visit. Should we really feel so honored? Or was Banksy like a waning pop star in the 1980’s who had to start touring Japan. Or worse yet, was San Francisco on the state fair circuit in terms of the international art scene. I realize I am bordering on blasphemy, if I question the cultural significance of the City I do love.

My neighborhood, The Lower Haight, could be called one of the centers of street art in San Francisco. A city where a good deal of interesting street art is created and displayed. For all the good stuff I see out there, I often sense this blind, unquestioning love of street art that borders on fanaticism. There are some who seem to profess that if art is plastered to a building or stenciled on the sidewalk, that it must be good. Some of the biggest champions of street art will totally reject any artwork in a gallery or museum. How can you legitimize art solely because it is on the street yet reject art solely because it hangs in a gallery?

Part of the appeal of street art is the relative ease of showing it to the world. There are no curators acting as gatekeepers to the art world in the streets. Street art has given the public access to a lot good art that may never been seen otherwise. But, it also has resulted in a lot of crap around the neighborhood. I realize that art appreciation is inherently subjective and then we could step into the debate of where we draw the line between tagging an art.

Street art is to art as blogging is to journalism. There are a lot of good blogs and some are better than newspapers. With both street art and blogs, there are no gatekeepers. Anyone can do it. We have to remember, just because anyone can do it, it does not make it legitimate.

The street often adds a legitimatizing context to bad art in the same way that a posh gallery can show terrible photos. The sort of bad blurry, photos that have been blown up, framed and attached to a price list.

January 12, 2011 – Abandoned Shoes

If I really wanted to be timely I’d be painting abandoned Christmas trees. Right now there are a few on pretty much every corner in the Lower Haight. But today is about abandoned shoes. There are always abandoned shoes to be found on the sidewalks and gutters of my neighborhood. What are the stories behind all those shoes? Last summer, just to be silly, I started photographing them and putting them up on Flickr. I had no idea how popular they would turn out to be. I have to keep at it. Can you say coffee table book? This shimmery pair was spotted on Oak just down from the car wash. Hurry, maybe they’re still lying there, they could be yours.