Back to the DeYoung

I went back to the DeYoung Museum last Sunday morning, which we don't do nearly enough considering we're members and all. I got there right at opening time, so (as you can see) not a lot of crowds.

The marquee exhibit, a Vivienne Westwood retrospective, was interesting but I wasn't enthralled--not enough to have paid the $5 extra for it if I hadn't been a member. It cheesed me off right at the start, when a background panel explained that Westwood and (her husband) Malcolm McLaren had 'invented punk'. That makes sense if you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope--that is, if by 'punk' you mean not punk itself but 'punk fashion'. (Generations of DIY musicians have the Ramones to thank; suburban kids who stuck safety pins in their t-shirts can thank Vivienne Westwood.) One line did make me laugh out loud, in the notes for a display of enormous (as in acreage) flowing dresses: 'the sheer volume of the dress empowers the wearer'. Somehow a dress so vast that the wearer can do nothing but drape herself decoratively over the furniture doesn't strike me as all that empowering. But of course this is what fashionspeak does: it takes the aggressively superficial and repackages it as Important. In the end, it's all just a lot of clothes.

The coolest exhibit was one called Average Landscapes, by Elliot Anderson. Anderson started with Hudson River school landscapes in the DeYoung collection, searched for uploaded images with the same title or description, and superimposed as many as 500 images to create a sort of ghostly composite of a given landscape. I couldn't get a decent picture of them, unfortunately; you really have to see them in person.


I also loved the exhibit of recent prints by Deborah Oropallo (including George, above) that "layer images of contemporary women in provocative costumes, borrowed from the Internet, with images of men from 17th- and 18th-century portrait paintings" (description lifted from the DeYoung website). The effect is alternately disorienting, creepy, and amusing.


These Ruth Osawa sculptures are in the permanent collection, at the base of the tower. I love the shadows they cast.



Then there's your basic 19th century Gringolandian stuff, which is really pretty (and I know that sounds like an insult, but I don't mean it that way).


Including, of course, my favorite Frederick Church.