Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sits there on Third Street like some gleaming spaceship that crash-landed in SoMa and decided to stay, its accordion-fold exterior rippling with an architectural arrogance that either thrills you or makes you want to punch it in its modernist face. There's no middle ground with this place, and that's exactly the point.
Walk in and you're immediately confronted with the kind of hushed reverence that makes you want to either whisper profound observations about light and space or just start screaming to break the spell. The truth lives somewhere between those impulses. This is a temple, sure, but it's a temple built to house the beautiful wreckage of human expression, all the gorgeous failures and accidental triumphs that happen when people decide that canvas and paint or steel and light might somehow capture the howling chaos inside their skulls.
The Rothkos hit you like a religious experience you didn't ask for and can't quite shake. Standing there, you realize this isn't about understanding anything. It's about surrendering to the raw nerve of color and form, letting it mess with your equilibrium until you're not sure whether you're looking at a painting or falling into some void that's been waiting for you your whole life.
And scattered through the floors of SFMOMA: Warhols that still manage to feel dangerous despite their ubiquity, photographs that catch humanity mid-gesture in all its awkward glory, installations that dare you to call them art while knowing you absolutely will. The building sprawls and contracts, opening into atriums that flood with California light, then pulling you into intimate corridors where you're alone with someone else's vision.
This is why we build these monuments. Not to contain art, but to acknowledge that some things demand space, require witnesses. SFMOMA knows this. It just sits there, daring San Francisco to measure up.
Industries 2018
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Desire Lines: Retrofit If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy […]
Read
Industries 2016
What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took […]
ReadCollusion 2014
Frank Smigiel, from SFMOMA, calls me up and asks if I want to play the Mayor of San Francisco. Not the actual mayor, but some conceptual version of a mayor in a performance piece by these South African artists in the Mission District. I’m thinking: Why me? I’m not an actor. I’m not a politician. […]
Read
Industries 2011
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is not a squat, not a nightclub, not someone’s living room where furniture gets shoved against the walls and something unrepeatable happens at 3:12 AM. It’s a museum. White walls, institutional lighting, the whole architecture of cultural legitimacy. And somehow, impossibly, the Workcenter agreed to bring Electric Party […]
Read
Industries 2011
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. Hunter S. Thompson I don’t know what the fuck I expected. You show up at a museum, they hustle you into an elevator, and suddenly you’re trapped in a metal box with strangers while someone’s doing something that might […]
Read