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Art Humanities Final

Sadie Peery

Miller

Art Humanities

14 April 2019

Gallery Visit Review

For my review of a gallery, I decided to go to the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California. I came with the idea that I would be able to see the work of my childhood favorite artist, Claude Monet, in the “Monet: The Late Years” exhibit; however I ended up focusing more on the work of others. The collection of art from Ruth Asawa, Pat Steir, Tony Feher, Tom Marioni, and other artists came together to make a collective group exhibit named “Specters of Disruption”. On display were many different types of art including sculptures, collages, paintings, and even pieces like quilts, luggage, and and large bells. There were types of art I’d never seen before. Pieces of metal placed on the wall together, wood and wire tangled, and others that lead me to question how they all fit together into a cohesive idea.

“Specters of Disruption” was an exhibit with many different artists’ work in instead of being by just one person. The description of the exhibit said “Specters of Disruption is the result of an inquiry into the shared encyclopedic collections of the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, performed with an eye toward patterns that might suggest a storyline within a collective institutional subconscious” (De Young Museum). It continues to say that the exhibit has a focus on “...different manifestations of disruption within nature, history and myth, culture and technology” (De Young Museum).

There were a few pieces in this part of the museum that really caught my eye. Some I thought were interesting but many of the things caught my interest in a negative way. One specific piece was one names Cardbird II and comes from the series Cardbird by Robert Rauschenberg (shown on last page). I was very confused on why a piece of cardboard and steel stuck together with tape was concidered art and was placed in such a pristegious museum. The label to the side of the piece didn’t have much description besides the artists and time period so I decided to look deeper into his work. I was more interested in the meaning behind it as I felt there had to be some sort of strong feeling behind the work for the collection to have been featured in the Museum of Modern Art as well. Upon learning about the meaning of the Cardbird collection I found less meaning than I expected. Rauschenberg was simply experimenting with new, earthly meaterials and the time. He was known for his use of non-traditional materials. Although today the materials he used seem like a crumpled amazon box, they were much more of an interest during the 1950s-70s when he was working most. Although personally I wouldn’t consider the piece to be something that belongs in museums, I see how it is because of how his use of different materials (like in this work) helped guide art into the pop art movement and changed the view of art at the time.

Overall, I didn’t find the exhibit very enjoyable. The overarching theme was very elaborate and confusing and I didn’t see how all the pieces tied into its theme. For example, there was a series of squares done by Frank Stella that was so simple and had no description about it. I was confused on why it belonged there. There were some pieces such as an Untitled piece by Nick Cave that was a suit that was elaborately decorated. His description talked about how he made it in response to police beating Rodney King and all the riots happening in Los Angelos at the time (1959). His piece is said to show how he felt vulnerable as a black man when all those events were going on. The suit was a shell to hide race, gender, and class, and to avoid judgement on outer appearance. Pieces like this I appreciate because they are really well done pieces of work with real meaning. Pieces like that left me confused because there were still many pieces that didn’t seem to show any advance or change from society like the theme stated they would and didn’t even explain why they belonged there. In conclusion, this exhibit left me torn as I wanted to appreciate the work, but couldn’t even comprehend the reasoning why it was there or what it meant overall

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