Gilman - San Francisco Views
Introduction
The 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. Evaluations of the style as underwhelmingly banal or mere kitsch reflect general critical distaste for realism in the wake of abstraction and, in equal measure, representations of ordinary life and mass culture not deemed witty appropriations or satirical transformations. Bechtle's works stand firmly in this (ironically) charged territory, as he consistently represents the architecture and automobiles ubiquitous in postwar Californian neighborhoods without overt commentary. Moreover, by linking the traditionally vaunted city center to its apparently subsidiary suburbs, the artist upends deep-rooted urban visual paradigms. He offers the viewer not iconic landmarks or arresting vistas, but rather a way to comprehend how everyday life in the city is informed by complex spatial alignments, under-remarked geographic particularities, and historical development that frequently confounds the distinction between center and periphery. My purpose is to shed light on Bechtle's Photorealism in a manner akin to work by Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Rebecca Zurier, and other recent historians of the city image; the goal is to identify how urban representation shifts in tandem with the city itself, yielding new understandings of the built environment.
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 Hill
4. Conclusion
