chagall in hell
So, on Sunday, we went to go see SFMOMA's Chagall exhibit.
We were morons once again, because it seemed everybody else in the city had the same idea. The line stretched around the block, with a wait time of around three hours -- worse than Disneyland at Christmas. We waited around 1 1/2 horus before we figured out that by buying a dual-person membership (not that expensive if we visit the museum about 3 times a year) we could skip the line.
We get our audio tour guides -- Peter Coyote, take me away! -- and I instantly behave like an older brother as I key in random numbers on Mer's set and press play.
The exibit itself threatens to strip away my love of Chagall entirely as we're cattle-herded, almost, from room to room. The audio tour is cheesily annoying, mostly telling me nothing I couldn't have figured out for myself (there were lots of Biblical images and allegory in Chagall's paintings and he drew a lot of his subject matter from a magic realist perspective, looking back on his upbringing in Vitebsk. DUH.) We shuffle from room to room, fighting for a view of whatever admitted masterpiece we're supposed to be looking at.
There were some interesting insights and good art experiences, though: we were impressed by the fact that Chagall stayed married to the same woman (Bella, his primary muse) for as long as she lived. When she died in 1945 he stopped painting for a long time. He eventually remarried, but Mer was a bit sad at how hard it would be to be the second wife -- constantly living up to a former ideal.
There was also that trademark Chagall love of life on display, including some set designs he did for Jewish theatre in Russia -- one piece eventually became the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.
There were dark pieces too -- women riding anthropomorphic chickens, Christ amidst the horrors of the human world, and my favorite of the exhibit, Fall of the Angel, which this picture does not do justice to. The cheesy voiceover says it's a harbinger of all WW2's cruelty.
Then we discover Diane Arbus. We didn't know it at the time but it's what we came to the museum for in the first place. The museum arranged her photographs to resemble a photographer's studio and a darkroom, alongside her voluminous diary entries.
Every picture is soulful. Every one worth studying. And almost every one a letter-perfect capturing of pain, alienation and loneliness. Many are kicks to the gut.
She was attracted to the misfits and the marginalized -- the zealots, as with the picture of "A Patriot" down below, and the odd.
She took rolls and rolls of pictures in nudist colonies and homes for the retarded.
Two of my favorites I can't find anywhere online:
1) A picture of a drive-in at night, the cars in the foreground barely visible against the starry sky. The image on the movie screen is a sunny day, with billowing cumulus clouds.
2) A picture of the living room of a suburban house in Levittown, Long Island. It's Christmas. There's a large tree, dripping with tinsel and decorations of every kind, and presents overflowing under the tree. There's a small kitchy mirror on the wall in a star shape, a small TV in the other corner, and a huge wide expanse of carpet in front of the camera. And no people. The tree and the decorations look like they're huddling in the corner, defensively ostentatious. Looking at this, you feel instantly lonely. You remember bad Christmases of the past, and yet you're compelled to look more.
And, after all these disturbing pictures, the most disturbing of all: another photography exhibit of alienation and loneliness, mixed this time with graphic exploitation: Sex Work in Asia by Reagan Louie.
Giant color photographs, about 10X5, of sex workers at all stages of the game, in every single Asian country (article is interesting and work-safe, but the "Portfolio" is definitely not work-safe). The flesh pits of Macau and Vietnam. The US servicemen's bars of Thailand. The kinky hotels of Tokyo and Hong Kong. The photographer was forthcoming about his pure motives and desire to capture the workers as people, given the sleazy atmosphere. And he did succeed in capturing a lot of the despair many of the girls must feel. One favorite photograph (in Salon's "Portfolio") is a lot like a Francis Bacon painting: it features a lone woman in a Taiwanese vending machine kiosk. I was unsure if she was a sex worker or not, but I assume she was. Another (not online) was of a young woman huddled in bed with a blank expression on her face, with the covers drawn around her neck. She wasn't clutching them tightly or crying, but the blank expression on her face was more depressing than if she had showed any outward emotion.
Still another picture showed the sex act in progress, only showing the back of one woman, an Anglo man's hand around her (he looked like he was probably military) with a very big wedding ring on it.
The guest book to leave comments was interesting. By and large the comments from women were supportive and took his motives at face value, and commending him for his honesty. A few doubted his sincerity. One said: "What the hell is it with men that this exists in the first place?"
I don't really have an answer.