The Art of Noise
Started: 2024-07-23 20:20:13
Submitted: 2024-07-23 21:31:54
Visibility: World-readable
An art exhibition at SFMOMA mixing graphic design, psychedelic rock, industrial design, and engineering
On Saturday the 6th of July I needed to pick my family up at SFO airport in the afternoon, so I took the morning to head to SFMOMA to see what was new.
I parked at San Bruno BART so I would be located close to the airport. On the plaza in front of the BART station I saw the Tanforan Memorial, dedicated to the people of Japanese ancestry who were detained at the racetrack on this site at the beginning of the Second World War on their way to internment camps, on the dubious theory that they were somehow a threat to the United States. This was an avoidable tragedy based on racism and xenophobia; and now we are on the cusp of a new wave of racist anti-immigrant rhetoric aiming at dehumanizing people based on their perceived immigration status with the aim of violently removing them from their communities. (Indeed, as I write this a couple of weeks later, I just had the opportunity to see news coverage of people at the Republican National Convention waving signs reading "mass deportations now".)
It is our moral imperative to defy these unjust, immoral, and illegal actions by any means necessary.
(Deep breath.)
The first thing I saw at SFMOMA was the temporary exhibition "The Art of Noise" on the seventh floor, which opened with a huge selection of concert posters from the 1960s arranged in a massive grid stretching wall-to-wall all the way to the ceiling. There were too many posters to look at them all, but they were all amazing: bands I recognized, playing at venues I've visited, all drawn in bright psychedelic colors with eye-watering intricate patterns. Around the corner was a wall full of record covers from the same era, followed by a smaller selection of more recent concert posters from the past twenty years, each with detailed curator tags explaining the context of the poster and the band and the show and how the design of the poster served its commercial goals. This was commercial graphic design, mass-produced in the service of business; but it was also art, subject to critique and display and admiration. All of these things can exist together.
As soon as I walked into the gallery I wished that I had brought Calvin, because he just finished a year of graphic design in his first year of high school and is enjoying the opportunity to design printed posters like the ones carefully displayed here.
The second part of the exhibition was a large gallery exploring the industrial design of music players. It started with streamlined Art Deco-inspired radios and record players from the first half of the twentieth century. Then there was a jukebox, and a bunch of fancifully-designed record players that defied the logic of the machine; one as built from a series of chrome spheres suspended on narrow pedestals, one for the record player and two on either side for the speakers. At the end of the gallery there was a boombox built into a concrete block, and a record player mounted on a slab of reinforced concrete. It was part industrial design and part engineering; and it was on display in a museum of modern art so presumably it was art as well.
The final gallery presented as part of the exhibition was across the elevator lobby, a large softly-lit room full of sturdy sound equipment opposite large carpeted stairs to sit and listen. It felt weird to sit and listen to recorded music with a group of people, so I stood for a few minutes, listening to the sparse instrumental music before moving on.
I wandered around the rest of the museum, looking at a mixture of the permanent and temporary exhibits. One of the temporary exhibits was an Infinity Room, which turned out to be a cube about the size of my living room, covered in mirrors on the inside, with brightly-colored glowing plastic circles embedded in the walls, providing the only light source inside the cube. I joined the queue just in time to join the next group into the room. We were given three minutes shut inside the cube, and advised that if we got too disoriented we could just close our eyes and it would all go away.
Inside the Infinity Room felt like being inside a kaleidoscope, though the bright plastic circles were not moving (which would have been even more disorienting). I didn't quite get the feeling that the room was stretching on forever, because there were enough other people that I kept seeing other people's heads, and the bright plastic circles; but overall it was an interesting experience. I walked around the room trying different perspectives, looking at myself (and over my shoulders, and around the corners) in the mirrors watching other people doing the same. By the time the three minutes were up I felt like I'd had a good experience and there wasn't much more I could see inside the cube.
I walked through the rest of the museum, much of which is occupied by the permanent collection that I've had the opportunity to see before, then left to grab a late lunch in the Mission, and headed to the airport to pick up my family and drive home.
