Let's get lost

In 2005, the art world wanted to escape, just like everyone else.

By Glen Helfand

It seems like a lifetime ago in the short-attention-span theater that is America, but you may recall that the first big art event of 2005 was The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's orange Central Park extravaganza. It was big – complete with crowd-pleasing factoids like the multimillion-dollar price tag and synthetic orange fabric footage measuring in the hundreds of thousands – making it a blockbuster spectacle that the general public could get its mind around. The temporary public art piece even inspired a Halloween costume here and, of course, in NYC, for which gleeful groups of friends raided Home Depot for materials.

Champions of The Gates point to its function of transforming a landscape to bring people together in a public place in a city that took a direct hit, in terms of community, four years prior. The massive piece turned part of Manhattan into an expo-style wonderland where families of all sorts strolled. But there were naysayers who questioned the piece's value as art. In a well-attended lecture at Oakland's Mills College last spring, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl dismissed the work in a manner reminiscent of the February "Talk of the Town" piece in which he scoffed, in a Grinchy spirit, that the throngs of pedestrians who flocked to The Gates were lost in "a sort of vast, blanketing, almost drowsy contentment."

That criticism leads almost too smoothly into "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States," the Disneyland-on-drugs art extravaganza at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles (through Feb. 20). The exhibit features Carsten Höller's room of giant fiberglass mushrooms, which hang from the ceiling and slowly spin; Klaus Weber's tinkling crystal fountain, supposedly laced with LSD; and Pierre Huyghe's reduced-scale model of a rock-concert light show, including liquid smoke and an electronic soundtrack. Mechanized benches begin to move when sat upon. I'd have to place myself in the critical category: I found the show to be too literal-minded, trafficking in the standard vernacular of drugs – mushrooms appear repeatedly in painting and sculpture – to truly transport viewers. Yet that kind of deconstruction is beside the point: The exhibition was concocted to bring some box office and, I presume, to be escapist-art fun.

"Ecstasy" and The Gates are the bicoastal art bookends of the year, and both point to an unsurprising impulse to escape, to go through a portal to a universe a lot less harsh than one buffeted by the war, natural disasters, looming pandemics, and societal breakdowns galore. Who wouldn't want to retreat into fantasy?

The art world offers that possibility, though in it we're meant to enter another plane of consciousness with a more critical eye and the bracing contrast of a white wall. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's big summer show, "The Art of Richard Tuttle," might be a case in point. Tuttle makes small, rarified gestures with extremely ordinary objects: an inch of rope, a plastic bag, Styrofoam remnants, plaid fabric. I've heard him described as being a man who resides in the fourth dimension, and he's revered almost as a religious-genius figure who transforms his humble materials by adjusting their position by a tiny fraction of an inch. Clearly this sort of action only works for initiates, and this massive show, which was like diving headfirst into Tuttle's alternate formalist universe, proved a respite mostly for museumgoers with a particular sensibility.

The new de Young proved a more effective lure, especially during its highly publicized, open-all-night, 31-hour opening weekend, during which the mile-long queues felt, depending on the hour, akin to those during the first weekend of King Kong or the recent, family-friendly Rolling Stones concerts, or that of a large-scale nightclub. It was an extraordinary moment where admission fees were waived, and it created a sense of community, of people coming together in celebration rather than in protest.

Architecturally, the new de Young is a marvelous interior space that constantly makes visible its presence in the landscaped splendor of Golden Gate Park. The building is intended to open up the idea of a museum to the outside world, but here lush "nature" was long ago constructed over sand dunes. How fitting that the de Young restored its garden folly, the Pool of Enchantment, a circular body of water that sits by the east entrance.

It was heartening to see so many people clearly thrilled to be a part of new culture in San Francisco, though art viewing wasn't necessarily ideal in such raucous circumstances. In the subsequent weeks, my fantasy that the institution might quickly become notable for contemporary as well as historic art was somewhat dashed with the announcement of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's new director. John E. Buchanan, Jr., the former director of the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, who will assume the post early in 2006, has a track record that includes organizing shows such as "Stroganoff: The Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family" and securing the collection of the late kingpin modernist critic Clement Greenberg. Nothing wrong with either, but neither seems to strike the same forward-thinking tone as the architecture.

I had a far more hopeful feeling at a recent Friday-night art event called the 24th Street Promenade. The grad student-run Triple Base gallery invited a number of artists to create window displays in 14 storefronts in the easternmost blocks of 24th Street, an act that involved get-to-know-your-neighbors pluck. Much like the artists, I had a ball meeting the retiree in Billy's TV Repair Store – he's comfortable on Social Security, he told me, with his eyes glued to Julio Morales's art video playing on a large-screen model – and the friendly guys working at Laura's Beauty and Barber Shop who seemed to be thrilled to show off artist Matt Boyko's glamour shots of customers.

There may have been a whiff of gentrification in the air, but it was a genuinely satisfying evening of art in the Mission that felt markedly different than the funky Mission School. This group seems a little wry and yet truly invested in making community. How apt, then, that Mark A. Rodriguez mounted a copper pipe wishing fountain on the corner of Balmy and 24th for all to access a dream. I tossed in a coin and hoped for the best.

Glen Helfand's top 10

(in alphabetical order)

AB OVO at Steven Wolf Fine Arts

Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel

Simon Evans at Jack Hanley Gallery

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, by Elizabeth Royte (Little, Brown)

Me and You and Everyone We Know, directed and written by Miranda July

Marilyn Minter at SFMOMA

Deborah Oropallo at Stephen Wirtz Gallery

Wilson Shieh at Crown Point Press

Sarah Silverman

Tony Takitani, directed and written by Jun Ichikawa