Provocative Beauty

Designed to bewitch the eye and pique curiosity, "Gorgeous," a new collaborative venture between the Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA, succeeds on both counts. But the exhibition, like many of SFMOMA's recent partnerings with local venues, is a hodge-podge characterized by a mania for categories, and spectacular works of art in search of a premise. With "Gorgeous," a subjective, elusive term that implies much but can mean just about anything to anyone, the museums have landed on an expansive idea that's both tantalizing and loosey-goosey.
Narkissos (1976-91) by Jess. Graphite on paper and paste-up. Collection SFMOMA. Photo: Jess Collins Trust, reproduced with permission

Not concerned with glamour, theoretical ruminations on ideals of beauty, fashion, feminism, or the male gaze, the show is less focused on "neatly constructed perceptions of beauty [than] what happens when beauty is pushed to extremes and becomes provocative," explains the Asian's assistant curator of contemporary art Allison Harding, whose energetic intelligence and relative youth signal the museum's nod toward the 21st century. "The gorgeous is more about the outliers, the abject, the grotesque and the unbelievably restrained," she adds. "This work gets at an exquisite tension between attraction and repulsion." Tension, yes, but also exquisite delight; the show is as refreshing and piquant as a tall glass of iced limeade on a warm summer evening, and should be enjoyed and assessed in the lighthearted spirit in which it was conceived; with playfulness, guilt-free subjectivity, and access to the treasures contained in two of the city's finest permanent collections.

Drawn equally from both museums' holdings, the nearly 80 objects were chosen based on the personal responses they elicited from the curators - two from each institution - whose brainstorming sessions over a two-year period resulted in this show. One can only imagine the quantity of fine wine that has lubricated many a wide-ranging art-historical discussion since SFMOMA closed last year.

The curators have evinced excellent taste, selecting stunning works from an eclectic group of artists, ancient and modern, including Picasso, Joan Miro, Chris Ofili, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Yves Klein and Marilyn Minter, as well as sculptures, vessels and statuary by unnamed artisans from India, Japan, Persia and China. As the Asian is the host venue, the installation is as polished and capacious as one would expect; a thing of beauty in its own right. Object labels provide some historical background, but primarily consist of entertaining accounts of the curators' reactions to various works. Yes, they're fun to read, but the verbiage is merely scaffolding and beside the point. There's DIY impulse here in that it's visitors' responses rather than curatorial imperative that matters, whether contemplating the streamlined elegance of an iPhone (which looks stranded in this context), a sensual female nude, or a generously endowed deity.

This visitor's attention was wrangled by deeper-than-deep blue of Yves Klein's blissfully strange "Sponge" (1957), which resembles either a flower from 20,000 leagues under the sea or extraterrestrial flora. The outsized, irregularly shaped blue flower - or whatever - is mounted on a long, skinny rod protruding from a moon rock. I couldn't help thinking of the interplanetary explorer played by Halle Berry (on the upcoming TV series "Extant"), who's impregnated with alien spawn without her knowledge before she returns to terra firma. Uh-oh, there goes the neighborhood. But really, maybe this unearthly interloper was the culprit; with Berry's fashion sense and that Yves Klein blue, well, the scenario isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

Sexuality, though not explicit, is a subtext that hums like an electric current beneath the surface. Take, for example, Robert Mapplethorpe's "Bob Love, N.Y.C." (1979), a controversial, full-frontal nude photograph of a muscular black man seated on a pedestal, an image that offers a forum for contemplating the human body and a penis too large to ignore. "Futago" (1988), a gender-bending painting by the impish, New York-based, Japanese "sexual appropriation" artist Yasumasa Morimura, made me long for a future show called "Transgression." In his recreation of Edouard Manet's masterpiece "Olympia" (1863), Morimura casts himself, with the aid of wig, makeup and chutzpah, as the courtesan, laid out like Venus on a satin divan, but he couldn't resist masquerading as the black maid. If Manet's painting scandalized the Paris Salon, Morimura's might have incited a riot.

The exhibition has a raft of fluid, interchangeable categories with enticing titles such as "Danger," "Pose," "Seduction," "Dress Up," "Fantasy," and my fave, "Beyond Imperfection," where Bruce Conner's "Looking Glass" (1964), a riveting, unruly assemblage, resides. If Miss Piggy had been a burlesque dancer who had exploded and then landed on messy Masonite shelving along with bits of dried fish and tattered fur, torn nylons, a discarded shoe and a bunch of girlie pictures, this would be the scene of the crime.

The same grouping includes the smallest yet most powerful piece, an oddly affecting, armless tomb figurine from China's Han Dynasty whose broken condition arouses compassion and speculation about the mysterious fate that befell it. Elsewhere, note an intricately carved stone torso of a voluptuous armless female deity from Southern India (1400-1600); her female warrior allure and formidable presence are undiminished by the passage of time and missing limbs.

So what does all of this have to do with "gorgeous?" As with movie thrillers, it's better to enjoy the ride than question the logic of the plot. Instead, walk into the last gallery, where you'll encounter Rothko's immersive "No. 14 (1960), a magnificent color field painting of scorched orange descending into a pitiless sea of inky blue; sit back, drink it in, and exhale.

Through Sept. 14