Here, There, Everywhere
Hotel des Arts, 447 Bush St., S.F., (415) 956-3232. Limn, 292 Townsend St., S.F., (415) 977-1300. Adobe Bookshop, 3166 16th St., S.F., (415) 864-3936.
Several months ago, a virtually unknown San Francisco artist named Tim Gaskin attracted the attention of an international luxury goods manufacturer, Louis Vuitton Malletier. Company executives had learned that one of his paintings, a pop portrait of Madonna striking a pose next to the Louis Vuitton logo, was in the background of a Women's Wear Daily photo spread. They sought him out—and, in a terse letter charging trademark infringement, demanded that he destroy the picture.
This is not exactly the response an emerging artist hopes to get. But it does show the unusual degree of exposure that Gaskin's work has received recently. How did that happen? Rather than exhibiting in an upmarket gallery, Gaskin displayed his work in a downtown hotel.
Hotel des Arts, as it's called, near the Chinatown Gate, is one of many nontraditional spaces in San Francisco where a growing number of painters have taken to showing their artwork, reaching a large and diverse audience. Naturally, there are bars (such as 111 Minna) and coffee shops (such as the Chameleon)—venues where artists have exhibited for as long as alcohol and caffeine have spiked creativity—but in recent years, painters have also migrated into bookshops and furniture stores. Art benefits by being a part of our daily experience, and so do we. Artists are liberated from the stifling pressures of conformity and challenged to improvise, to speak for themselves rather than for art history. Moreover, their work has to stand on its own, self-contained, instead of leaning on institutional authority or being propped up by learned commentary.
This is good for viewers, too, of course. More important, we feel at ease with art when it's everywhere around us. Because it isn't prescreened, we feel entitled to our own opinions about it. Rather than being inhibited by cultural anxieties and museum expectations, we can have a real, living relationship with art, as we do with family and friends.
Hotel des Arts is the city's most recent, and radical, experiment in artistic infiltration. Over the past year, half of the 51 rooms have been given to an artist to do with as he or she pleases. Some have taken six weeks, brushing in elaborate scenes fit for a Victorian parlor. Others have bombed the walls in 24 hours, as if the cops were waiting around the corner. The only quality the artists have in common is the confidence of John Doffing, an Internet entrepreneur whose enthusiasm as a collector has led him to curate shows in spaces ranging from abandoned SoMa lofts to the basement at City Hall and whose zeal has compelled all the artists at Hotel des Arts to contribute their work in exchange for exposure. Of which there's a lot. By arrangement with the hotel owners, Doffing has opened unoccupied rooms to the public.
Some of the work, such as Gaskin's soft-core pop (room 404), is merely decorative. More provocative is the graffiti art of Eric Orr (room 508), who got his start tagging New York subways in the seventies and by 1984 was collaborating with Keith Haring, chalking up subway walls with glyphs of robots. Then he started a family, which he supported by painting faux finishes in restaurants. His room in Hotel des Arts marks the return of his robots, only now they've been muted to make a subtle surface pattern, poignantly confessing the faux finish of street art gone domestic.
Context also enriches the artwork on view at Limn, a SoMa-based furniture store with an adjoining gallery space. Limn is best known for showing and selling contemporary Chinese painting, mostly figurative, of striking quality. Seeing such work in isolation, we might be inclined to view it in terms of cultural tourism. But when we find Mao Yan's existentially fraught portraits of young men, for instance, amid the furniture of everyday life (or at least the designer equivalent), we lose our distance and begin to feel for them without inhibition.
The Chinese painting shows are largely the legacy of store owner Daniel Friedlander, who travels to Asia frequently, though the range of art has extended considerably under the direction of Christine Duval. Unlike Doffing, Duval has a professional gallery background. Still, Limn and Hotel des Arts share an eclecticism that in a traditional setting might add up to incoherence but, as part of a larger undertaking, amounts to serendipity. The weakest works at Limn are easily overlooked, while the strongest, such as Sid Garrison's densely layered colored-pencil abstractions—studies in the pure pleasure of making marks on paper—seem to credit us with their discovery.
That idea has animated Adobe Bookshop practically since Andrew McKinley opened the shop, in the Mission district, in 1988. Surely the most dramatic instance of monumental serendipity was installation artist Chris Cobb's recent reshelving of every book in the store strictly according to cover hue. While not especially profound—obviously our spectrum of experience is colored by how our knowledge is organized—his piece was arresting enough to remind us how little of our surroundings we ordinarily appreciate.
McKinley never planned to show art, but some of his first employees were painters, whose work fit into the casual environment as naturally as their Adidas. Over the years, they've curated one another up above the bookshelves, and also in a back room that's slightly larger than a phone booth but as immaculately lit as the Museum of Modern Art, selling work (Cobb's installation aside) to support themselves and the space. Group shows have been organized around subjects ranging from the color blue to a neighborhood dog named Bo.
Adobe has become one of the Bay Area's most closely watched spaces by gallerists on the prowl, who have taken up talented young artists such as Sarah Bostwick, who in sculpting the industrial landscape in white plaster relief creates stunning architectural death masks of urban decay. Many deserve the wider attention, of course. But the deeper value of Adobe Bookshop, as with Hotel des Arts and Limn, is the way in which it literally brings art into our lives.
Jonathon Keats is San Francisco's art critic.
