conference and other art

The Hotel Whitcomb, where the conference I'm attending is taking place, has definitely seen better days.  It started existence just after the 1906 earthquake/fire, as part of the rebuilding, and since it was going up very close to where City Hall was being reconstructed, it actually served as the city hall until that building was finished.  In its time, it must have been extremely grand - panelling, and marble, and mirrors, and Tiffany glass.  Only half the glass in the ballroom (where Catherine Gallagher gave a plenary talk today, and where I was on a plenary panel yesterday, and where we had a Banquet Lunch - an occasion at which I was very glad to have read and chosen the offerings carefully in advance, since salmon is, well, salmon, and some people were very nonplussed to be served a toasted chicken salad sandwich) - only half the glass was illuminated, but I confess I rather liked its Arthur Rackham like mysterious gloom.

The conference seminar rooms were mirrored and early C20th opulent, so that speakers and audiences could disappear into an infinite set of recessive mirrors.

Hats off to the conference organizers, not just for running a great show, but for all the details that have made it memorable - like the conference aluminum water bottles (are these the new Bags? if so, I like it), and perhaps above all, the fortune cookies, made with mottoes from authors who celebrate some kind of centenary this year.  I was super-pleased when Marx popped out of mine.

But I spent the afternoon in SFMoMA - today they had the first US showing of British/Ghanaian artist John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (it's on till September: go).  45 minutes; 3 simultaneous screens; much beauty; much horror of human cruelty (slavery, migration, animal slaughter, whaling); some slightly surreal people in Victorian dress with abandoned furniture and weirdly positioned clocks and a stuffed golliwog, in wild Scottish (maybe Irish) landscapes.  I'm not sure those bits came off.  And indeed, the migrating birds and butterflies; the swirls of sea and seaweed (yes, seaweed!) were at times rather over National Geographic.  But the effect was accumulative and mesmeric, and left me torn between wonder and despair.  Mostly despair, really.

Many other good things (this was my first time there since their complete renovation - the interior architecture is fabulous): a new Rebecca Horn piece in which a mechanical butterfly periodically flaps its wings inside a glass case; David Brenner's The Living Wall with Peter Fischli and David Weiss's Snowman in front of it; and lots of Louise Bourgeois spiders.  They are so photogenic - the bottom ones are as if Epstein's Rock Drill had slimmed down and taken up line dancing.