There is an oft noted advantage to low expectations … you are rarely disappointed and occasionally blown right out of your shoes. I am shoeless after a couple of hours at the Lands End exhibit of 25 artists at the now stripped bare Cliff House on the edge of town, and at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The exhibit is sponsored by the For-Site Foundation, which describes itself as “art about place.” (Fellow San Franciscans, book tickets now because they are going fast. Free tix. This is a must see.)
The Cliff House is owned by the National Park Service (NPS), and it has long been a spectacular if food-mediocre destination. It closed at the and of 2020 when the NPS and the restaurant owners could not reach terms. Rumor has it that the NPS would like to turn it into offices … and that eventuality might spark riots among San Francisco’s elderly. Even so, the building has been stripped of all its accoutrements, and its bareness is a stark, light filled venue for this challenging exhibition.
So for a few short months, it has been turned over to “Lands End.” (For the non-locals, there is a little play in this, because Cliff House sits at the far end of a stretch of coastline called Lands End.)
This is what For-Site says, in part, about the exhibition: “FOR-SITE’s new exhibition, Lands End, invites visitors to wade into an immersive environment where their charge is twofold: to discover artwork in unlikely places and to consider the planet’s health. By bringing together a group of artists from around the world, the exhibition strives to remind viewers of our interconnectedness via global currents of water and air, and to encourage them to partake in all the fresh ideas and perspectives that emerge from the rising tides as we head deeper into this tumultuous century.”
Wade in, indeed!
Galleries to me are about losing yourself in impression, letting the work wash over you. I can’t help but think, of course, but you have to try not to let the thought get in the way of just experiencing. At Lands End, it helped that the stripped down Cliff House was itself engrossing, airy and open, and yet still a mausoleum. In my photos of the exhibits, I have tried to capture this undersung building and its ghosts.
The Goldsworthy piece occupies an entire room, late a cafeteria. It is spare, desolate, all the while encompassing as if it will grow to swallow the site.
There is despair too, alas, all too prevalent.
This is a detail of a kitchen full of trays of whitened plastic collected by the artists on Kehoe Beach.
The older lady docents were very chatty. I had a wonderful conversation about this piece …
Adam is a San Francisco artist, and the piece was created for this window. It is paper, all freehand cut with an X-Acto knife. The docent and I got to reminiscing about our own backgrounds with X-Acto knives way back “in the day”. And when I later repeated the conversation with another docent, a friend of the artist standing nearby interjected to discuss his methods and genius.
The show stopper, however, is a video.
The film is called “migration (empire)”, by Doug Aitken, 2009 as best as I can find out. There is more information on it at the Minneapolis Institute of Art web site. A remarkable piece, jaw dropping. You have to prevent yourself from wondering how the hell he managed to do it long enough to understand its dark inner mystery.
I’ll close with this picture of a photo from the Allies of the Sea, Surf Art from the collection of Kevin King. Yeah he’s sexy. But what happens if the world he lived in is irreparably lost? This exuberant collection left me in despair. What are we losing? What will be gone forever?
San Francisco, See This!
I'm glad to see this, especially since I don't recall seeing it back last November.