Washington, D.C. / San Francisco, CA. Various.

I have overlapping memories of walking through, or floating under, Leo Villareal's installation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Every time I am in DC I stop by the National Gallery, partially just because I like going back and forth under Multiverse. I enjoy the piece because it reminds me of airports (the moving walkway obviously helps). Usually I am alone at the National Gallery and usually I am alone at airports.When in Multiverse, all these moments blend together and create a unique kind of solace, a silly pleasure in being completely free amongst so many strangers and amid so much art. It makes me feel like I am a tiny, yet significant light in this big huge world; a small, blinking unit in all this organized chaos.

I am thrilled that Villareal is designing a light sculpture on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. The Bay Lights will be lit March 5 and the best thing about it is that there is no need to go back and forth underneath to experience its charm. The installation is designed to be viewed when you are looking at the bridge, not when you are on it. I can gaze from my favorite spot on Bernal Heights, or when I am riding the J Church, or maybe, on a clear day, from the garden rooftop of my office. I may even start planning dentist visits after dark as that is my best enclosed view of the Bay Bridge.

The idea of 'turning on' the space between San Francisco and the East Bay is interesting. It will literally illuminate the space between us. We will have an unavoidable piece of public art that connects us and maybe encourages a free flow of ideas and people. Instead of being here or there, the journey will be noted as a part of the environment. Bridges are connections that often get a bad reputation for being a congested, temporary, tunnel of pain - that place you have to go through to get to the place where you are going. One time I went over the bridge only to come back with firework burns on my upper thighs after a fourth-of-july party gone bad. Most recently, I endured a nauseating three hour journey to Oakland airpot, most of which was spent just waiting to get onto the Bay Bridge. I have vowed never again to drive over that huge thing. It is difficult and often ensures pain. Still, some of my best memories are on that bridge: Convincing one of my best friends to give someone (who is now his significant other) another chance when they had first started dating, blasting 90s tunes while speeding, singing Young Americans worse than anyone with another friend as we embarked on a Reno adventure, realizing I am happy and I am a creator and I have a day job and all of that is ok, being all alone in a car. Alone again, but still amongst so many people, stuck in their own cars, in their own heads.

Though I probably will never drive myself across that bridge, I will certainly stare at it, from afar, and ponder the significance of painful, and pleasurable, journeys, and all those feelings that happen in between pain and pleasure, the ones that get lost because we are so focused on what we want or don't want. Or think we want. The space between is sometimes the best part.

Learn more about the project and the artist in Adam Fisher's piece in the NY Times Style Magazine, in which I took this delightful quote:

“what I was doing at Burning Man suddenly I started doing all year long." - Leo Villareal

If we could all be so bold.

Berlin. August. 2012.

Last August while in Berlin I stopped by one of my favorite art galleries - the Deutsche+Guggenheim. The current show happened to be a commissioned body of work by Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms. Later, the Guggenheim in New York also exhibited the show, resulting in a less-than-desirable review in the NY Times by Ken Johnson.

"The transformation of detritus into art and chaos into order resonates, for example, with ancient alchemical procedures in which the processing of low-value stuff into priceless material is supposed to have the magical effect of advancing undeveloped souls toward higher orders of consciousness. But any such flights of interpretive fancy are left for viewers to supply, since Mr. Orozco has not framed the project in ways that would connect it to psychological or spiritual spheres. Imaginative liftoff stalls at ground level." - Ken Johnson, Swimming to Shore

While I somewhat agree with Johnson's assessment, I had a very different experience. Instead of consciously ascending to the top floor of the Gugg in NY expecting to see Art, I locked up my borrowed bike on Unter den Linden, wandered into a familiar yet foreign place, floated through the room of found objects, then drank a cappuccino in the gift shop and tried to read German fashion magazines. Not that the experience was trivial, but I just wasn't making it more than it needed to be.

When I first moved to San Francisco I taught 'found art' classes to children. While I've taken some art classes and had been making art in a printshop in Bilbao for the previous year, I didn't think I was the most qualified. I founded my curriculum in my knowledge of the Duchamp's ready-mades, Dadaism and the cultural theory of Adorno (not that my students ever had any idea, but there was a reason behind the cutting and pasting, the de/re-construction). I was helping those kids relearn what art making was - creation (through critical thinking) - instead of fearing it (like I sometimes did and often still do). We would think about context and connections, but mostly I just wanted them create without fear. To get to a place other then wherever they were. And accept that, enjoy it if they could.

Back to Asterisms. When I wandered into the gallery I wasn't thinking about anything. I was present and able to look at each object, and everything all together, without any preconceived notions. But of course I was thinking about something, and of course I had preconceived notions - these things can't really be erased... they are sometimes just firing off in your subconscious until they resurface again. Like now, I think about that show and how real it felt. All those things just sat there waiting to be reckoned with. If they hadn't been collected and assessed and transported by Orozco and his team, they'd still be sitting on the beach in Mexico or hanging out in a baseball field in New York. But instead they were laid out in this art gallery in Berlin and I was there, too, looking at them. Or walking around them. Or maybe thinking about them and where they had been before they were in that new place. Being objects they are simply used. Nature, man-made materials, human remains, whatever the substance--they are inanimate. Or at least we don't know them to think or talk or move around on their own. And that is what I liked most about the exhibit: I was able to see objects as objects regardless of their origin without being told the context. I got to create the context. I got to reconstruct what I wanted them to be. I liked the colors. I liked that I could just look deep into something and see things and imagine and enjoy the pleasure of it. And I'm sure I thought about consumption and culture and decay, but I mostly remember looking into the colors.

I'm glad Johnson mentioned the video “Whale After Waves” (2012). I stood there for a while watching the sea gulls. I stared at the video and thought about how I've been in many planes and have landed in all these places and someday I'll be in the ground, landed forever, as we all will be, and that will be that. And maybe a part of me will have an interesting color and be displayed by some future artist that collects things. And that is ok. It's not anything more than what it is.

(On the note of collecting, my flatmate has a blog about things he collects. It's pretty funny.)