Art Exists Everywhere: A Minimal Taste and Beyond: From the Traditional to the Unconventional

Original visit: March 23rd, 2017

From within the picture frame to outside in the tactile, three-dimensional world, the amount of sheer variety of styles and mediums that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art houses is a stunning sensory sensation to experience. More traditional art displayed here has its overwhelming grandeur and familiarity, but with the always surprising and unique use of the frame to capture even the most gestural, colorful, and emotional works. Artists such as Mark Rothco and his simplistic use of color-fields to invoke onlookers with a raw reaction of clashing color gave myself and others a sense of wonder and inquisitiveness into ourselves. Other traditional canvas works like Charles Howard’s “Abstraction in Flight” play with familiar yet still simplistic forms and colors to give a surreal, yet strangely calm practicality of the World War 2 era aerial warfare behind the paint. These examples of the familiar plane of artistic expression are shattered when, just a few floors away, more exotic and drastic shifts in style and medium await to be seen.

Standing in front of the art is one vantage point, but there are artists that break out of these conventional molds of art and branch out into the bold territory of the three-dimensional space, extending out and using the physical world that we reside in to give tactical and physical connections to our own place in space. We view and interact with such pieces like Sol LeWitt’s fractal-like wooden sculpt, only named by the dimensions used to create it, “12 x 32 x 12”, circling around it to see how all the edges and pieces change and shift as our perspective moves and twists the numerous cells of empty space, like looking at a skeletal building. Not only are there changes in dimensional form with art, there are changes with what constitutes the makeup and physical material that constructs the forms that dot the halls of this treasure trove of color and shape. Frank Stella’s unusual and dynamic canvas of soldered and welded metal, “The Chase, Third Day” invites the viewer to carefully approach and study the frozen explosion of sharp and soft edges extending out into space with equally bombastic color infused onto every surface, nook, and cranny along its volume. With a surprising and puzzling use of fluorescent light fixtures, a few of Dan Flavin’s seven-hundred art pieces like this brightly illuminate the space around the viewer with common urban sight in a unique display of form and mixing of basic color, colliding with art and technology to make the entire room a collage of color and light. The fusion of old and new ideas within this cathedral of modern design is one that cannot be missed on any tour of the California Bay Area.