Visiting California

This week Adrian and I are in California "baby-sitting" two of our grandkids while their parents are on vacation in Hawaii.  On Tuesday, we all went to the Triton Museum in Santa Clara.  The exhibit we liked best was Ann Weber's WONDERLAND, a collection of large sculptural pieces made of woven cardboard stapled together and shellacked.  Some of the pieces were over 16 feet high, so it indeed felt like walking through a wonderland of organic, whimsical, always-interesting shapes. 

We saw another piece by Ann Weber later in the week at an "all cardboard" exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art.  This was a group exhibit with a huge variety of approches to making art out of cardboard.  One piece which summed up my feelings about a lot of conceptual art was a stack of cardboard boxes reaching to the ceiling with the word "BLAH" stenciled on each one, as in "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . ." 

Too many of the pieces in this exhibit were simply reproductions of ordinary objects, such as a lounge chair, or clothing on a clothesline.  It may have taken some craftsmanship to make these items out of cardboard, but what makes them art?  Only the theory-filled verbiage written on the wall next to them. 

My favorite exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art was a small room filled with works by San Francisco abstract expressionists from the 1950s and 60s:  Elmer Bischoff, Ernest Briggs, Edward Corbett, Edward Dugmore, James Kelly, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington, John Saccaro, and Hassel Smith.  Since my greatest influences were the NY abstract expressionists, it was fun to see the connections between them and their west-coast counterparts.