BEAUTY BY SURPRISE

By Mainly Unexpected Means—

Work from the Cubberley Studios

Curated by Theres Rohan

Meridian Gallery

535 Powell Street, San Francisco

Through December 21

While I was passing the Meridian Gallery down Nob Hill the other lazy day, I let my eyes wander over the sign outside and was promptly stopped in my tracks by the title of the gallery’s current show. I am, I admit, a sucker for group shows: they usually include at least one artist I’ve never heard of worth the visit; so, in I went. And, after a discreet welcome by the eager-eyed staff (I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’m as penniless as most artists: the best I could give them was only words), I let myself sink into an hour of completely unexpected charm.

“By Mainly Unexpected Means—,” as it happens, displays work by 20 artists who have been active at the heart of Silicon Valley, where digital is king and the virtual world is bidding to take over whatever is still left of “analog” culture. That the totalizing grasp of such revolutions always fails (history, like nature, never letting any one thing succeed for very long) is some consolation; that at the very heart of Digitaland the material world and its spiritual extensions are so subtly celebrated makes at least this art lover breathe with relief. Not that the digital world is by any means ignored or scorned here: it is, however, used to deepen our humanity, not to try to replace it.

The exhibit comprises work by artists who have been in residence at the Cubberley Community Center, in Palo Alto. In the Cubberley Visual Artists Studio Program, selected artists are provided with studio space and engage in classes, exhibitions and related activities that bring together the arts and the local community. The current exhibit provides a selection of work by these artists.

And there is some very choice work here. Julia Nelson-Gal’s “Greetings From Kalamazoo” are scrolls made up of found photos and thread, stitched together in rows of narrow bands and suggestive of collage friezes and ancient reading scrolls expressing private fantasies and half-forgotten memories. Inga Infante has a series of little, gray metal boxes, all called (with delicate irony) “Wired,” lined up with dignity on a wall, with tops ajar like doors to tiny closets and lots of white space around each; with décor on the “doors,” wires impishly turned from the boxes (making the viewer wonder what they are connected to); inside the boxes, half-hidden, are curious objects and pictures.

Lois Anderson has a single, small but memorable piece, called “The Knowledge Factory”: a diminutive book made up of a couple dozen paper quires, bound with string so it can’t be opened, with “Withdrawn” ominously stamped, in institutional lettering, on wraparound paste-ons and a title “The Knowledge Factory student power and academic politics in America” making a statement that is clear, provocative and profoundly witty.

Sharon Chinen has perhaps the most sheerly beautiful analog work in the exhibit, with a series of exquisitely delicate pieces in the exhibit’s first gallery: wall hangings made of the thinnest wire and worked into, in some cases, spiderweb-like, in other cases nest-like, in still others crown-like, forms; expressing a combination of hardness and gentleness, strength and fragility, the kind of power that is only revealed through this kind of tenderness and control.

There are two video installations, either of which alone would make a visit to the exhibit worthwhile. Michal Gavish’s “Untitled Frame” is a brief film in which a transparent cloth seems to be hanging in a woodland, swinging in a gentle breeze; printed on the cloth, or appearing and vanishing in multiple-exposure, in long-bygone styles of painting, drawing, and photography, are the faces of an apparently Latin American couple, an older balding man wearing glasses, a woman with sad eyes and unregarded hair, people perhaps from the artist’s past, or from an imaginary past; the only sounds (projected from small speakers above and behind the viewer, who sits in one of two old-fashioned dark wooden chairs that themselves call up memories from early in the last century) of bird calls and distant traffic and the conversations of passersby on an unseen street.

Nora Raggio’s “Geo Wideo” is easy to miss, as it’s placed, alone, in a small room off the gallery’s main lobby, horizontally on the top of a small table. But it would be a shame to pass it over: it’s an example of digital tablet art; the viewer looks down at it from above and watches the piece slowly unfold in silence, screen passing across screen in random sequence and various divisions, revealing forms from nature: dense gray clouds, puddles spotted with tiny bits of natural detritus like floating splinters of stars, indecipherable blurs and flowing streams, and moving lattices of shapes: flowers, leaves, water.

Other standouts in the show include two large-scale archival pigment prints by Peter Foley, densely saturated photographs of interior architectural spaces: “Untitled Red” a pink-tinted empty space almost perfectly symmetrical, with a wrinkled, wall-to-wall carpet in shock red; and “Untitled Blue” a corner of an industrial room in the midst of demolition, viewed from a low angle, with a majestic rip across a panel of sheetrock revealing what looks like an old unused elevator shaft and a car with a door of cobalt blue.

Other work of interest includes photographs of a land installation by Linda Gass, curious “tools” by Ken Edwards, oil paintings by Ann McMillan and watercolors by Marguerite Fletcher, and metal serving platters wittily engraved with common, humiliating commands from childhood (“stand up straight,” “look at me when I’m talking to you”) by Marianne Lettieri.

A performance piece by Lessa Bouchard that is part of the exhibit will be performed on Saturday, December 7, at 4 pm. The exhibition also includes a small catalogue that includes an index of the artists’ websites for the curious.

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Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and the recent collection, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

David Strathairn in Underneath the Lintel

UNDER THE SUBLIME

Underneath the Lintel

A play by Glen Berger

Starring David Strathairn

Directed by Carey Perloff

American Conservatory Theater

A review by Christopher Bernard

Underneath the Lintel, the one-man play by Glen Berger that is receiving its first ACT production in San Francisco this fall, is a detective story of sorts, though the victim of the crime is not exactly dead – indeed, he is, or at least seems to be, anything but, and the crime is not murder, at least not of the usual sort, though what the victim is a victim of, is certainly most foul. There is even some question whether the crime’s perpetrator even exists.

Nevertheless, the play’s sole performer is most insistent that, if this particular victim exists, the criminal must exist also, and one finds oneself in the end agreeing with him, even excitedly so- if there is this victim, then there must be this criminal. And for reasons that will become clear, many of us will in fact want, even hope for, this very criminal’s existence. So in order to find the criminal, we must first find the victim. And that is where the story begins. Does the victim exist? And if not, where do all those drops of blood lead? To underneath a certain lintel?

(A lintel is a piece of wood (usually) that forms the top of a doorway or window, so “underneath a lintel” is the equivalent of standing in a doorway or leaning out a window. More about this later.)

But, before I continue, let me get some necessary housekeeping out of the way. First, this is one of the most completely successful productions at ACT that I have seen in years. There is an unusually strong balance of acting, producing, directing and scriptwriting that I don’t often find in local theater. The direction is discreet and focused; the acting is skillful, honest and selfless; the set is ingenious but not self-conscious, a back wall cluttered with paraphernalia from productions past, the sort of stuff you would expect to find in a small-town lecture hall, complete with carousel projector and little pull down screen, and the kind of bulky stairs-on-wheels you’d stumble over in a large, public library. And the play offers that blend of entertainment and enigma, puzzlement and illumination, strong feeling, deep thoughtfulness and humane comedy – philosophical in the original sense of the all-involving, all-tormenting, all-hopeful, and sometimes entirely ridiculous, search for truth that is the soul of all great love affairs – that theater, in the wealth of its humanity, can provide more effectively than any other medium.

A graying, slightly befuddled, one-time librarian from Poland (played with the deftest of touches by David Strathairn) walks onstage to give, “for one afternoon only,” a talk – or rather, as the play is subtitled, “An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences,” as he says in his slightly tarnished English. He opens a battered suitcase, in which he says he has collected “scraps” of a life, “evidences” that he hopes will “prove a life, and justify another,” namely, his own.

One day, in 1986, as the librarian was cataloguing books returned through the overnight book-return slot at the library of the small city in Poland where he has lived and worked all his life, one of the books – a much thumbed and annotated Baedeker – had been checked out, according to the last stamp on the inside book slip, 113 years before. The librarian is, naturally, dumbfounded, though also, like the small town functionary he is, indignant and his bureaucratic prowess being put to the test, decides to track down the offender and extract the fine the library, in all its dignity, is due. This, unwittingly for him, leads eventually to a worldwide search – from London to Bonn to Beijing, from New York to Sydney – in a tantalizing quest for the elusive borrower of the spectacularly belated volume; a quest that will cost him his job, his friends, his country, perhaps even his sanity, and may prove to be never-ending, even futile.

At each station of his progress, if that is what one can call it, he picks up a piece of the puzzle, a rag-end of “evidence” of the existence of the borrower, a person he grows to believe is none other than the mythical . . .

One cannot really discuss this play in any detail without being in danger of revealing too much – and yet, if one reveals nothing, one is left without the pleasure of demonstrating to the reader just how deep this artful, profoundly thoughtful and deeply felt play eventually goes, far more than one could possibly have guessed from the frayed bits of evidence and hardly sublimely promising opening – and yet sublime it becomes. So, if the presentation here stutters now and again, withdraws, shies coyly and bids fair to be just a bit too oblique, the writer can only plead extenuating circumstances and, if anything, a great, even perhaps too great, respect for author and players and public. But here we go anyway.

We’ll let it sit at “mythical,” shall we, and let the implications unfold in all their many, searching, reaching, even over-reaching and, yes, tantalizing directions. But I can’t drop it entirely without mentioning that it has something to do with an incident, perhaps apocryphal, during the passion of Jesus of Nazareth, as he dragged his cross among the Roman soldiers through the alleys of Jerusalem on the way to Golgotha, past the homes and shops of the locals, few of whom had any idea who this person might be – just one more troublemaker on his way to what was probably a well-deserved end – when the poor fellow dropped his cross, to rest briefly before the door of a cobbler, where the cobbler was taking a brief break from his labors under his lintel, and, frightened by the looks of the soldiers, the crowd, the other criminals on their way to execution, and the bloody face staring up at him under a nasty looking crown of thorns, the cobbler told the fellow to shove off, get off his stoop, and keep going, and Jesus said he would do so, but the man would have to tarry here until he came again. And, according to the story, the man did tarry, and is still tarrying, until the second coming, or forever: the Wandering Jew, the victim of the one certain “criminal,” God.

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Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and the recent collection, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.