I Left My Art In San Francisco

During hard times we find ways to get around financial obstacles. Because we must continue doing whatever it is we do. In San Francisco, where I live, there is a thriving art community, but as with many professional endeavors right now, there are limits to what can be accomplished. Small galleries that might once have provided a home for young or otherwise burgeoning artists are struggling to stay afloat and some have closed for good. I am a small gallery owner, but I manage to keep things going because I run it out of my house, and avoid overhead by doing everything myself or with the aid of a few selfless friends who know they will reap little more than satisfaction as a reward. My Victorian-era flat in the city’s Mission district has been doubling as an exhibition space for almost a year under the name of Partisan Gallery, with shows occurring as sporadically as my schedule and whims will allow. The previous show, back in March, featured 20 artists from New York and San Francisco and managed to put this ramshackle operation somewhat more on the map. And I am in good company in this DIY niche, as several house galleries have sprouted around town and are operating quite successfully, including 31 Rausch run by photographer Chris McCaw, and the Hallway Bathroom Gallery, both of which have become serious contenders in the city’s art community.

August 14th saw the beginning of the fifth show in just over a year of my gallery’s modest existence, and I am getting progressively more excited about its future despite complete lack of funding and almost no capital to speak of.

The art this time around is by San Francisco-based video artist Nate Boyce, whose vernissage was delightfully well-attended and well-received.  Certainly there is the novelty of someone opening their private home to the public––”So do you clear out these rooms for every show?”, “Does Your Landlord know you’re doing this?”, “Wait…you live here too?”––but the real draw for this show was the strength of the work.

Boyce takes a formalist approach to abstraction by employing complicated notation structures derived from avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen to create representational rhythms and patterns, composed of both analog and digital video, that unfold bewilderingly before our eyes. Working with rhythms is not new to Boyce’s work, as he makes music himself and has created videos to coincide with live musical performances, including for experimental electronic duo Matmos, with whom Boyce has toured.

His geometry and color palette take cues from Frank Stella’s Eccentric Polygons series, and experimental filmmakers Paul Sharits and Peter Kubelka. Included here are stills from the films, which are as much their own work as the moving images; once frozen, these images take on the qualities of a two-dimensional painting but with strong implications of the movement from which they have been arrested. Boyce’s accomplishment in this regard is boggling. A vibrant, pulsating reminder that sophistication and creativity are not strictly the provinces of traditional gallery spaces.

As video art is such a difficult medium to extend past the walls of its exhibition space, and as such remains inaccessible to the majority of us, we intend to publish a catalog of stills from Boyce’s videos to properly document, and reveal the dynamism of, his work. All we need, of course, is the funding! Yes, the mixed blessing of the labor of love in the dark days of the American economy is that love is the primary currency being exchanged. The budget these days provides beer for the opening reception and photocopied invitations, but one day we will be sponsored by Veuve Cliquot and pass out magnums of champagne to each guest. Until then, it’s Pabst Blue Ribbon in cans.