press
San Francisco Magazine - March 2004
by Justine Sharrock
Chain link fences surrounding an abandoned Taco Bell. Two open U-haul trucks with a makeshift plank forming a walkway between them; the side wall of an abandoned building. Not exactly the places you’d find the wine and cheese crowd of an art opening. But lately more and more local artists have been collaborating in turning our everyday city streets in the new hot art spots.
While adapting public spaces for art is a longstanding Bay Area tradition—witness the ascendancy of the Mission School artists—a still-weak local economy is spurring an insurgence of an organized approach to DIY public art. Instead of the individual seemingly spontaneous sidewalk stencil, wheatpasted poster or alleyway mural, these artists are holding group art shows complete with everything but the gallery or the hefty prices. While the range of artists involved is impressive, the scene is dominated by a street-smart art, which draws heavily from graffiti and comics and is laden with anti-war, anti-capitalist imagery.
Among those showcasing the art is Steve Lambert’s Budget Gallery. Instead of exhibiting works in a white-washed gallery space in pricey Union Square, the gallery shows its artists’ works on the street. Pieces not sold on opening night remain in the public gallery and sold on the honor system, or left as an uncommissioned public art piece. And so it is that even famed local artists such as RIGO04 and Adam Connelly, who have no problem getting into galleries and museums are choosing to sell work through the Budget Gallery.
“There is a lot of energy in San Francisco around this kind of coming together of different artists” says Janet Bishop, chief curator of painting and sculpture at SF MOMA, who’s been following the scene closely. “They are coming together to do what they need to do to reach people, even when the [traditional] galleries are being pushed out of San Francisco”.
Mission Balazo recently housed the DSLR West Conference, a four-day long event of collaborations between artists involved in public guerilla art projects throughout the city. In San Jose, while albeit with the consent of the city, abandoned store fronts are being used as art galleries in the “Phantom Galleries” project. Even the Jack Hanley Gallery, which was described by Art in America NOV 2002 as being at the top of the not-to-be-missed spaces to see work by cutting-edge, international artists is getting in on the scene. Their recent well-received 17-Reasons show featured works by Yoko Ono and John, installed throughout the neighborhood, in parks, construction sites and abandoned walls.
By moving the art out of the gallery and into the everyday arena where people normally interact, artists are able to reach people outside the elitist art world. For artists such as Aaron Noble and Chris Johanson, this is a way to give back to the neighborhood that inspires them, addressing their own community, instead of their funders. It is also a way to critique the very hand that feeds them: the art galleries, dealers and collectors. “A lot of people, collectors and artists, are frustrated with a market that is driven by commercial profit–we offer an alternative to that”, explains Lambert. “Artists are frustrated with big name galleries and the buracracy involved in getting into the shows, especially since there are so many artist and so few galleries.” To some artists, collectors are too focused on seeing art as an investment—storing art instead of displaying it somewhere that everyone can enjoy it. As artist Jo Jackson points out, shows become preoccupied with “quantifiable goblins of success and failure, with collectors taking their cuts before anything even goes up”.
This kind of critique of art collectors might not fly in scenes like New York or LA where galleries reign, but San Francisco is a different kind of town. With so few art galleries, and more and more closing as of late, the focus has shifted away from galleries and towards these non-commercial alternative spaces. While seen as provincial and small for its lack of galleries, San Francisco is known within the art world because of its dedication to alternative non-commercial spaces, explains Courtney Finch, director of Southern Exposure. “There is an ethic and a history here of liberal politics and a vibrant counter culture, that creates an alternative for artists apart from the normal commercially driven approach.” This shift has created an atmosphere that is conducive to artistic risk taking and an open dialogue of ideas that might normally be censored—even if indirectly by a lack of commercial interest. As Renny Pritkin, the Chief Curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, points out, the power in these uncommissioned alternative pieces of art is in their freedom from censorship. As he puts it, “unauthorized work is free to speak its mind”