Yesterday was beautiful in San Francisco (sunny and upper 60s), so Christine and I decided to go for a bike ride through Golden Gate Park to finally check out the new DeYoung Museum. We got up relatively early and biked to Rockridge Bart. From there we took the train to 16th Street Station and rode our bikes over to Tartine. Tartine is one of my favorite places to get coffee and pastries in the city. It’s a French style bakery around 18th and Guerrero. On most weekend mornings there is a line of yuppies on cell phones stretching half way down the block, but the croissants and bread pudding are worth the wait, so we parked ourselves in the queue and eventually munched down on some tasty, elitist treats.
From there we set out toward the park. At this point we are pretty full of rich baked goods and fancy coffee drinks that were served in bowls. From our map it looked like a cruise straight up 17th Street would be a pretty direct path. Of course the flat paper map doesn’t really let you know that section of 17th is one of the steepest streets in the city. By the time we got to the top I wanted to yarf, and the ride down Roosevelt and Masonic was fairly extreme, but the views from the top of the hill were awesome.
We entered the park down by the Haight Street Mc Donalds. Biking through that section of the park is great. You are moving fast enough that all of the red-faced, runaways from Indiana don’t try to sell you weed. We rode J.F.K. Drive all the way to the ocean. I visited the park for the first time in 1999, but yesterday I got to see some things for the first time, like Rainbow Falls at Prayerbook Cross and the Buffalo Enclosure. Yes, there is a herd of Buffalo living in the park. Yes, they are very cute but not very active. We came out to the ocean by the Dutch Windmill and watched the surfers tackle some big waves. I am pretty sure that last weekend was the Mavericks Surf Competition and there were some serious swells.
M.L.K. Drive took us back into the park, past the Polo Fields, and up to the DeYoung Museum. I liked the shapes of the building, but initially wasn’t to wild about the metal exoskeleton. As we got up closer and got to see the patterns in the metal, I started to dig it more. There was still a lot of construction going on outside of the building. The gardens seemed to be only partially planted, with giant piles of dirt, bulldozers, and orange barrels all over the place. In the parts that were done, everything seemed totally over the top. Crazy plants, crazy walkways, crazy bike racks, nothing seemed to be subtle enough to let key elements shine. The grounds felt like a battleground of egos. I guess that is what art is supposed to be all about.
Once inside, we got through a short line and paid the admission. Christine was a little put off by the fact that we had to wear a sticker showing that we had paid. I didn’t mind it much. Before hitting the galleries we got some food at the cafe. The museum cafe was a triumph of Form (as in “Form kicked Function’s ass.” We stood in line for a minute and a man gave us the day’s menu printed on a fancy piece of translucent paper with little dots that echoed the circles on the building’s exoskeleton. Seconds later the same man asked us if we wanted to order from the menu. I said “yes”, the man shuffled his feet a bit and did not respond. I am guessing that if I had said “No, I don’t want to order from the menu of the cafe that I am standing in line for.” he might have told us not to continue standing the line. There were tons of very verbose yet confusing signs all along the line. All of them were only in English and seemed to have no connection to the actual food ordering process. Eventually we got our drinks and strange, unbalanced, hexagonal trays that didn’t fit on the little rails that you are supposed to slide your trays along on. I almost dropped it bustling out to a table. We got to see a couple minor tray mishaps and one major Loony Tunes style cartoon dishes crash while we were eating our delicious (but again over the top) lunch items. The devil is in the details (of avant-garde, food tray design).
Don’t worry, I am close to being done complaining about the museum, but I have to mention the giant entry artwork. Gerhart Richter is one of our favorite painters and a big influence on Christine’s painting, but the giant grid of circles commissioned for the new DeYoung left us both cold. It felt like a commission, but it did match the cafe menu pretty well.
We started out in Art of the Americas area with the Maya and then moved through a huge gallery of Olmec, Colima, and other early Central American artwork. The examples they had were amazing. Everything from pristine terracotta dog vessels to a massive stone Olmec head carving. There was even a side room dedicated to the murals of Teotihuacan. It reminded me of a painting that Mike Welsh did for our Art of Mesoamerica class and kind of made me wish I had paid more attention in the class.
The galleries on the first floor changed abruptly from two thousand year old pottery to a room of glowing plastic contemporary art. Next there were some interesting glass sculptures in a glass hallway that cut across the courtyard. I loved getting to see a wild, twisting, Dale Chihuly piece sparkle in natural sunlight. The hall took us back into large room full of Jasper Johns works, including some recent works that I had never seen before. I wasn’t too fired up about them and I wasn’t really excited by the modern section in general. It seemed like they had chosen strange examples, even for artists I love. I almost walked past a Franz Kline painting without noticing it. I didn’t get what they were trying to do. The rooms almost felt decorative, which is very strange for a display of modern artists. The earlier European and America galleries on the second floor understandably took the decorative theme further with hallways of Weller and Rookwood pottery, fancy chairs, and oil paintings of the aristocrats who sat on them.
Christine and I are very interested in collecting and learning about art from Australia and the South Pacific. The DeYoung has been publicized as the premier museum for Oceanic Arts in the United States. We were blown away. The collection from New Guinea alone was massive, with beautiful carvings, giant painted spirit boards, and countless pieces of Sepik art. We spent a lot of time in these galleries, pondering things like the similarities between Maori and Celtic motifs, basically having a major geek-fest. The African section was also very impressive. They had a lot of great examples of things that we recognized, like the tall, impressive Dogon mask with crossbars, minimal Gabon sculptures, and a delicate Lega figure with outstretched arms. It was great stuff. We’ll let the fact that all the Non-Western art was displayed in dark, foreboding galleries, while all the Western stuff was displayed in bright opulence slide for the time being.
After the museum we biked around the park a bit longer before hitting the city streets. On the way back we took Page Street down to Civic Center. It was an infinitely easier ride than the mountain climbing we did to get to the park. Page Street actually had pictures of bicycles painted on the street and little traffic. Next time we will be sure to bring along the bicycle map of San Francisco that shows all the street grades. We made it back to Berkeley in the afternoon, got some pizza from Lane Splitter on San Pablo and watched North by Northwest. It was a great movie and a great way to wind down from a sunny, February day cruising around in San Francisco.