MoMA Mia

Yesterday, on a whim, I went to the SF MoMA. I woke up, showered, and could tell by the breeze from my open window that it was a lovely day, so I quickly dressed and grabbed my sunglasses to catch the bus downtown. As I walked from the bus stop to the museum I marveled at how much the architecture of the city has changed in the seven years that I've lived here. Many modern looking apartment buildings have been erected. In any direction you can see construction cranes building still more of them. San Francisco is a desirable place to live, and one need only visit it once to see why. People are friendlier, more relaxed than their east coast counterparts, and the weather, usually, and especially at this time of year, is beautiful. A new skyscraper is being built, called the Salesforce Tower. I'd heard, at an art show I'd attended on Friday night, that once completed the building will be the tallest in California. Looking at it from the street near the MoMA it seemed somehow out of place, as though it might fit better on Dubai's skyline than San Francisco's. That's not to say the building is unsightly or without charm; far from it. It appears taller than it is wide, and it tapers slightly as it rises, like a giant shampoo bottle made of glass.

Upon entering the museum, after purchasing a ticket and being ushered into an elevator, I pressed the button for the seventh floor so that I'd work my down instead of up. And as fate would have it, the seventh floor turned out to be stellar. Directly in front of the elevators was a little room full of small, sound-making machines made of wood, string, motors and metal. They functioned on a timer so that together they'd create a quiet symphony of oddly mechanical sounds which, on their own were not necessarily musical but, when heard in concert would produce an oddly pleasing song. The exhibit reminded me of something Da Vinci might have conceived. Passing through the room, on the right side, I noticed a darkened hallway and, moving away from the crowd, I headed in that direction. Because of how dark the path had been, traversing the space became very disorienting, causing me to have to shorten my gait and step cautiously, as to avoid losing my footing or colliding with another person, but when I entered the almost lightless room I saw only a faint spotlight illuminating an amplifier. The space was completely empty, or, at least seemed to be; as best as my adjusting eyes could tell. Within a second, a microphone swung into view and almost kissed the speaker. As it did, it produced a brief but beautiful hum of deep feedback distortion before swinging pendulously back into the darkness. Somewhere there must have been another, hidden speaker, one which played the soft music of harps and falsetto female vocals. The singer sang in a language I couldn't understand, which gave the scene an even more surreal feel. The piece, by Camille Norment, was ingeniously minimal, using a natural motion to make a vaguely percussive sound, and utilizing the absence of light to force attention to the hypnotic sway of the microphone, it lulled the viewer into melodic contemplation. What forced me to leave was the distracting sound of people whispering loudly in the dark and remarking on how "eerie" it was.

Next was a German art exhibit from the post world war era. All of the works were moving, but especially impressive was the work of Anselm Kiefer. One gets the impression of his canvas being slowly steeped in the color of desolation. Using a palate colored by mud, ash, soot and smoke and lead, he evokes a strong sense of aftermath. Constantly the work made use of ruined landscape, smoldering haze, and barren lifelessness, as though moments before viewing, whatever scene he'd meticulously crafted had been bombed into rubble. One piece, depicting what looked like a bathtub placed close to the foreground, showing an endless expanse of razed fields as its backdrop, had beside it a small placard explaining how the tub symbolized a German desire to clean their history of the atrocities of war. Sigmar Polke also had several powerful pieces. At what seemed like fifteen feet tall, they towered over you. When apprehending the paintings you got the feeling of looming tragedy, with such intensity that, at any moment, an avalanche of dust and sand might break loose from the wall and undo you. I couldn't help but think of Flight of The Valkyries as I stood in front of the panels. I cannot remember to which German artist the next sculpture belonged, but it depicted a fighter jet as a kind of fallen angel. It lie on the floor, charred and half crumpled, crucified, impotent and unable to fly, burdened by a container of ash atop its left wing. It seemed to suggest the godlike power of technology and how it would have to reckon with the wrath it inflicted, and the life it stole.


And while the other floors housed fantastic sculpture, beautiful paintings by Morris Louis that resembled ghostly smears of colored streetlights seen through foggy windows, and an entire floor dedicated to the photography of Walker Evans, still, I felt the final exhibit of the seventh floor was the strongest. It was a piece by an Icelandic artist named Ragnar Kjartansson, hidden behind the elevators. Inside the room were perhaps ten movie screens, each showing a different musician playing a song; a man in a bathtub with a small acoustic guitar, two pianists, two electric guitarists, a cellist, a drummer, a chorus, and female singer with a high-pitched Icelandic accent. I entered the room midway through the performance, as the lyric "there are stars exploding all around you and there's nothing you can do," was being sung, screamed, by almost all of the musicians as the song began to crescendo. All of the museum goers in the room, some of whom were sitting crosslegged on the floor, seemed to smile, spellbound, relishing in the delightful magic of the composition. At first glance it seemed that the musicians were located in various places throughout the world, all living in a lavish sort of squalor; as though a wing of the Palace of Versailles had been annexed and repurposed as hostels for poor poets, singers, songwriters, and they'd let it fall into light disrepair. It struck me as strange that the artist would travel or ship these container rooms all over the world, but stranger things have been done in the name of art. As the piece neared its end though, it became clear that they were indeed all in one place when the musicians began walking off their screens and appearing on another performer's. To watch the excitement on the faces of those around me as they scampered to their feet to cross the room and watch the work unfold from screen to screen was awesome. By this time, all the musicians had converged on a single screen and had marched out of the mansion to greet the coming sunrise, or sunset, acoustic guitars in hand, as they continued to yell and sing their song while vanishing into the distance.

I hadn't realized how large the crowd was until I saw everyone standing in front of one screen together, unified by the song, like the artists disappearing down into the grassy meadow.