黑料不打烊

Few major art centers are as overlooked as that of Northern California. Though the iconoclastic energy coming out of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, associated with the Beat movement and artist-run galleries such as the Six and Batman, inspired the nascent Los Angeles arts scene, LA quickly supplanted the Bay Area in national recognition. Some disgruntled artists complain that San Francisco is the place where careers go to die. Still, they are drawn here by the region鈥檚 free-thinking vibe, the innovation and even wildness that it allows. And more and more of them, such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, who pioneered artistic collaboration with the local tech industry, are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

When I was reviewing the Joan Brown retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I casually asked a number of San Francisco-based writers and curators what they thought of her, and only one had heard of Brown. At the time of her death鈥�1990鈥擝rown was well-known locally, if not nationally, both as an artist and educator. So quickly does our collective memory fade. For any artist to survive history their legacy needs to be tended to, actively and incessantly. Walk Against the Wind offers both a reclamation and an expansion, reaching further and further out from the Beat Era artists who inspired it into the present, tracking mid-20th century unruliness as it mutates into the digital era.

A number of the younger artists in the exhibition have no direct link to the Beat Era or San Francisco, but according to the exhibition organizers, they encapsulate the overall spirit of their predecessors, and each share a radical sense of self. In a show that samples artists drawn from a span of three quarters of a century, what does a radical sense of self mean? Our current conversations about self, race, gender, embodiment, communal as well as personal boundaries, ownership, politics, factuality, and on and on, are vastly different than those of the mid-20th century. We鈥檝e moved past their sense of future shock and broke on through to the other side.

For me, Walk Against the Wind questions what is the center, what is the margin, what is a career. What does it mean to be known or not known? Artists are presented, for the most part, as individuals rather than through their group affiliations. The exhibition is not thematic, not temporally or spatially organized. Throughout there is a focus on otherness that鈥檚 either chosen or endured. Always there is a refusal of dominant aesthetics. And a commitment to expanding the range of who is allowed to speak, to be seen.

In my in-between times these days I鈥檓 listening to an audiobook in which a Jungian analyst tells fairy tales in a disarmingly sexy voice. In the latest tale a naive girl is tricked by jealous village girls into throwing the heirloom necklace her grandmother gave her into a lake. In despair she flees to the forest, where she meets an old woman covered in scars and raw wounds that are hot-pink as the tits on a clay sculpture by Ruby Neri. The old woman tells the girl she can help her retrieve her legacy necklace if the girl kisses and licks each of her wounds and scars. Squelching her repulsion, the girl licks and kisses them tenderly, and the old woman experiences great relief. The old woman then whirls the girl over her head and throws her in the lake, where she sinks down down down, discovering she can breathe under water. In a grotto she encounters another old woman who is beautiful and whole, and wearing the legacy necklace she lost. The old woman thanks the girl for healing her sister. Then she bedazzles the girl鈥檚 legacy necklace with a hundred gems that flash across her neck gaudy as Chris Johanson鈥檚 bubble heads. When the girl returns home, the jealous girls go all gaga over her necklace. They too throw their legacy necklaces into the lake and follow the girl鈥檚 path. When they confront the gross old woman they refuse to lick and kiss her wounds, so when she throws them into the lake, they cannot breathe under water, and the monster that lives there eats them.