To celebrate its 10th Anniversary, the Kreeger Museum on Foxhall Road is opening its newest exhibit, "The True Artist is an Amazing Luminous Fountain." It features art from the di Rosi Preserve: Art & Nature, located in Napa, Calif. The exhibit showcases art from and around San Francisco made in the 1960s. Trends represented include beat art, installation art, Dadaism, pop art and funk art in the forms of paintings, collage, sculpture and installations.
The initial archway has the title of the exhibit nailed around it. It is quite a puzzling statement, but after you see the art it becomes clearer. Upon entering the room, you feel the vivacity of the artwork. At the center of the room is Bruce Conner's "Pillow," which is an actual pillow, painted as what can best be described as psychedelic. This creates a stir, and the viewers are hard-pressed because they want to stay and study the piece but are compelled to move on to the art, which seems to radiate out from the middle.
When you decide to move on, the art becomes intoxicating. The pieces are bright and large and all beg to be studied. A painting to smile at is Joan Brown's "Woman Preparing for a Shower," a large oil painting of a woman in a bright bathrobe in her blue-tiled shower and her obedient and excited dog holding her towel.
James Melchert invented a new technique for his "Yield (in Red) #1 (Phoenix Series)" which involved glazing and firing ceramic tiles, dropping them on the floor, reassembling them, painting red dots in the cracks according to the angle of the crack and glazing it once again. Some liken the finished product to cherry blossoms. The funk art, says curator Jack Rasmussen, is "about jokes, playing with expectations."
Some of the art is irreverent, as if to say that the complexity and seriousness of 1960s need not burden art with the same weight. But just beyond Conner's "Pillow" is a somewhat large silver ceramic sculpture by Robert Arneson titled, "War Head Stockpile." Shaped like a missile's warhead, the dark silver sculpture is made of small dead bodies piled on top of each other, reminiscent of corpses of Jews from concentration camps. In the context of the room, this was a reminder that San Francisco was not immune to concerns of war. The next room has a Paul Kos piece, which seems to straddle the line between the fanciful and the funereal. "Latvia?, Estonia?, Lithuania?" is three pastel-painted coo-coo clocks with antique sickles hanging on the bottoms, and which chime every so often. Biting and cheeky, it is memorable.
The works in the room containing "Latvia?, Estonia?, Lithuania?" are varied in form, from sculptures to works on parchment and an amazingly complex work cut-out collage by David Best titled "Triangle Factory Fire." If you do not watch out, you may knock over Paul Kos's "Equlibre III," a broom standing on its bristles and a coat hanger with cowbells on the ends balancing on the handle. It is impossible to find purpose or reason in Kos's piece, but somehow it is mesmerizing and invariably causes the audience surrounding it to smile.
When you exit the final room, you want to go walk through it all again. The initial high has worn off, and there is an understanding within the art in the room. It is not competing for you attention; it is as if the artists are trying to impress each other with the life force they put in their art. The works all complement each other, even if the tone or the emotion is totally different. The art is fun and it gets you riled up. Even the most solemn group will, by the end, become rowdy. To this, Rasmussen says, "It's something about the art"
