3. The Sunset District
1 2013-06-25T19:17:10-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 255 6 text 2013-08-16T14:45:33-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2Contents of this path:
- 1 2013-06-25T19:13:40-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 Developing the Neighborhood 14 revpar 2013-08-17T16:44:51-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2
- 1 2013-06-30T14:22:06-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 Sunset Developer Map 1 plain 2013-06-30T14:22:06-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2
- 1 2013-06-25T19:14:02-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 'Little Boxes' 8 par 2013-06-30T23:11:10-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2
- 1 2013-06-25T19:14:14-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 The Suburban City 6 split 2013-06-30T22:54:18-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2
This page is referenced by:
-
1
2013-06-25T19:04:56-07:00
Exaggerated Cityscapes
11
media
2013-08-14T14:08:06-07:00
Two of Bechtle's contemporaries, Richard Estes and Wayne Thiebaud–artists with similar subjects and substantial shared aesthetic lineage–have utilized such familiar vistas. Thiebaud began painting his cityscapes in 1973; for many years the artist owned a home near Bechtle in Potrero Hill. Thiebaud originally attempted to paint on site but was unsatisfied with the results. Subsequently the works became composites; they mesh the structures of multiple drawings and the artist's spatial memories and improvisations. His synthetic compositions allow for juxtapositions of multiple perspectives, and aim to generate both corporeal and emotional experiences: 'Something to do with empathy, and drama, and the way [the multiple projective systems] gives you different kind of caricature, space caricature or color caricature, or even where you push things further than a single projective system might let you. And in this way you are helped to get the feelings of things, the way things physically feel.' Consequently, paintings like Twenty-Fourth Street Intersection (Twenty-Fourth Street Ridge) (1977) are distinctly different from Bechtle's images of the Potrero, in this case using a fabricated intersection to achieve an amplified sense of geographic experience. Thiebaud's amplified topography creates a synesthetic fusion: the works convey gravitational pull and press the limits of flat canvas space through perspectival embellishment. Like his famed confection paintings, Thiebaud's city works also maintain a prominent sense of surface action, balancing the sense of precipitous descent with the weight of painterly facture and playful infusions of bright color. Estes, the most well known of the original generation of Photorealist painters, is chiefly associated with New York, though in recent years his scope has become international. His selected subjects have also shifted slightly: whereas the earlier New York paintings mostly avoid famous landmarks, instead chronicling the cluttered displays and busy facades of ordinary shops and multistory city buildings, later works include such sites as the Guggenheim, Central Park, Times Square, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Along with this shift in subject matter, the artist's panoramic inclinations have also increased. Though his hallmark reflective surfaces remain an integral part of many images, the sense of refraction carried to mise-en-abyme extremes is often replaced by an interest in wide-angle views.Estes's View from Twin Peaks (1990) takes as its subject a pair of tall peaks near the center of San Francisco–a site that offers a 360-degree view of the city. The location is a prime stop for tourists; the painting thematizes this act of a viewing pilgrimage. Estes's panorama pictures not only San Francisco's skyline and its surrounding waters, but also the switchbacks of the access road and the 'vista point' parking lot, the latter sprinkled with visitors and merchants. The nearest figure is pictured in the midst of the quintessential tourist act–snapping a photograph of his companion seated in front of the scenic view. Here Estes's earlier complex reflective surfaces are replaced by reflexive acts of looking, encouraging awareness of the visual rituals of tourism. The expanded perspective's slight fisheye effect, the jutting form of both the city's peninsula and the viewing lookout, and the juxtaposition of rolling hills and looping streets create intertwining curvatures and additionally heighten the work's spatial drama. At six feet across, the viewing experience is not unlike that of Muybridge's panorama: each project implies more than the eye can absorb in a single moment, joining large quantities of visual data in order to recreate the physical experience of such elevated perspectives.Estes aims to create a phenomenological, embodied sense of vision: 'When you look at a scene or an object you tend to scan it. Your eye travels around and over things. As your eyes move the vanishing point moves, so to have one vanishing point or perfect camera perspective is not realistic.' This approach suits spots such as Twin Peaks, where the elevation invites the eye to scan the landscape, but also necessarily makes his paintings akin to a time-lapse experience, and thus markedly different from Bechtle's tendency toward a more limited photographic field of view. Whereas Estes connotes the mobility of the human eye, Bechtle selects smaller frames, allowing multiple images of the Potrero environment to accrue collective impact. Like Thiebaud's images, Estes's paintings are highly synthetic; they assemble a multiplicity of perspectives to conjure more of a sense of the city than a direct transfer of its components. The differences between Bechtle, Thiebaud, and Estes's cityscapes are constituted not merely by their chosen iconography, but also their fundamentally distinct ways of perceiving the city. Each is crafted to suit its particular environmental experience: Thiebaud's altered geography and color choices generate a heightened sensation of San Francisco's rolling hills; Estes's slightly chaotic reflections or lateral condensation of multiple perspectives express New York's density or the saturation of tourist spots; and Bechtle's horizontally sliced inclines refigure verticality, communicating the spatial nuances of the urban residential without resorting to overly familiar views. For Bechtle, everydayness is paramount: his works renew city vision not by stressing San Francisco's already dramatic offerings, but by balancing specific urban elements–views up its inclines of irregular, paved terrain and stacked row houses–with the architectural regularities of residential neighborhoods. Thus the city is distinct but not divorced from its Bay Area neighbors, blending life in the traditional metropolitan center and its surrounding environs.[Link to next path.]
-
1
2013-08-16T14:31:35-07:00
Gilman - San Francisco Views
2
Introduction
revpar
2013-08-16T14:39:39-07:00
IntroductionThe San Francisco Bay Area is often considered historically and culturally anomalous: episodes and incidents like the Gold Rush, earthquakes, and numerous countercultural movements appear to set it apart from the rest of the country. In fact, the region is both iconic and archetypal; a sprinkling of remarkable events and unique geography should not prevent one from seeing the mainstream on the coastal edge. Here, as with other 'Sunbelt' centers, the postwar era has largely been defined by decentralization, shrinking manufacturing, and the growth of technology and service based industries. Fierce battles over urban renewal, highway construction, and gentrification in city centers are representative of similar fights across America. Likewise, the so-called standardization of the built environment persists in the Bay Area as elsewhere. Thus, while San Francisco stands at the root of the region's image and legacy, to think of this dense portion of Northern California in the traditional form of magnetic city center and dispersed suburbs belies pivotal demographic shifts in postwar American growth. The Golden Gate may still stand as the touristic icon of the Bay Area, but the region's evolving population, industries, and economies have complicated the older model of periphery and core.This sense of being at once the center and the edge applies equally to the area's visual arts scene. San Francisco, rich with its own tradition of artists' colonies, bohemian culture, and a vigorous modernist community, led the West Coast for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but was generally thought of as lesser counterpart to New York. In recent decades Los Angeles has surpassed San Francisco in its cultural reach, fostering innovative practices tied to the contemporary global economy seemingly far better than its northern neighbor. And yet, San Francisco has remained an artistic center, its hilly topography and ocean-bounded geography providing natural fodder for continual meditations on the urban picturesque. Likewise, the city's diverse ethnic, cultural, and identity-based communities and longstanding liberalism are still thought of as quintessential elements of a creative core. Even as the South Bay dominates as a technological hub, the rise of San Francisco's 'Multimedia Gulch' in the mid 1990s and current prestige of many SoMa area companies are reminders of the city's continuing draw for inventive entrepreneurs.This essay focuses on the Bay Area as aesthetic subject through the lens of Robert Bechtle's Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Though a familiar term in contemporary art world parlance, historically Photorealism has been subject to both profound antipathy and neglect. Arriving in the mid 1960s and gaining considerable media attention by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the style was nearly uniformly dismissed as a weak descendent of Pop art. Though it shares with that earlier style reliance on appropriated imagery and dedication to the products of consumer culture, Photorealism is distinct in aesthetic means and cultural aims. If Pop weaves a playful dialectic of critique and exultation, Photorealism resolutely refuses such commentary, faithfully reproducing ordinary scenes and objects with a minimum of commentary and deeply mining the conventions of photographic vision to reinvigorate painterly practice. Early critics perceived Photorealism as an overly slick, populist appeal–a retrograde kind of academic realism wedded to philistine iconography and slavishly dependent on its photographic support. For these detractors, Photorealism's reliance on photographic source material and un-ironic view of middle-class subjects rendered it abhorrently philistine, incapable of advancing art's conceptual or aesthetic boundaries. Even today, despite the popularity of photographic-based painting practices across the global scene, Photorealism has yet to receive its full historical due.This piece examines Bechtle's work in the context of defining changes in the postwar urban landscape, contra the historic assumption of Photorealism's social irrelevance. As Eva Respini has observed, photography and the American West came of age simultaneously, providing a documentary accompaniment to geographic exploration and exploitation, and a recorded image to project potent ideals of national identity. Bechtle's Photorealism both draws on and reformulates this rich photographic legacy, while concurrently negotiating the traditions of American modernist and local figurative painting. Bechtle's sustained attention to the everyday reflects the cultural impact of transformations in the built environment and middle-class lifestyles. He paints the city and suburbs not simply to record ordinary lives and architectural structures, but to explore how a hybrid artistic process can yield new visual understandings of changing spatial alignments in the American landscape.This project includes four sections. The first and last frame its scope and spatial thematics; the middle two offer case studies of two San Francisco neighborhoods:2. Potrero Hill4. Conclusion
This page references:
- 1 2013-06-29T13:01:12-07:00 'Doelger City,' Sunset District, San Francisco. 1 Photograph by author. media/DoelgerCity4.JPG plain 2013-06-29T13:01:12-07:00