Category: environmental art

Lands End

at the former Cliff House

The FOR-SITE Foundation, founded in 2003, has taken on the unique project of mounting exhibitions of immersive, site-specific installations set in some of the Bay Area’s national parks. With memorable exhibitions including 2012’s International Orange set at the imposing Fort Point, followed by 2014’s @Large:AiWeiwei at Alcatraz housed in the stark and unforgiving former prison, our relationship with the ocean, nature, and the environment, coupled with concern for human rights and freedom of expression, have long been at the forefront of their mission. Other exhibitions have dealt with thorny issues such as the needs for shelter, safety, and security.

The latest in this series is Lands End, curated by FOR-SITE’s executive director Cheryl Haines, which takes the site of the former Cliff House restaurant—vacant since 2020—as a point of departure for the work of 26 artists and artist teams from around the globe. With its spectacular vistas and precarious perch, the work is brought to our attention in a setting that dramatizes it and also holds it at a distance, our attention torn between the interior and the exterior. The show, Haines states, “invites visitors to wade into an immersive environment where their charge is twofold: to discover artwork in unlikely places and to consider the planet’s health.”

This is my second visit to the site, the former Cliff House, an iconic SF restaurant and ballroom—which I somehow managed to completely avoid during its lengthy history of providing dining with a spectacular backdrop to countless SF natives and tourists alike. The first Cliff House was built in 1863, and was destroyed and rebuilt twice, the rambling structure is perched at the edge of the Pacific Ocean on a bluff, quite literally the land’s end. On my previous visit, a clear day, the jaw-dropping views outside distracted me from focusing on the art for some time. This time, SF has been socked in and the coast is still blanketed in wispy fog. Crashing waves on rocks outside still beckon. With such a large show, I intend to give just a taste of the work, installations which stood out the most to me. As I am getting my bearings and juggling my pen, notebook, and other belongings, another visitor remarkably precisely echoes my initial sentiment, that “it’s hard to know whether to look inside or outside…” Well, perhaps it’s not so remarkable, given the show being put on in the bluffs.

Off the bar area, which seems a fine place to start, is a large-scale work by Andy Goldsworthy, Geophagia (2021).Salvaged restaurant tables have been covered with Ione kaolin clay from a mine in the Gold Country near Sacramento. Goldsworthy is of course known for site-specific works often set in nature, using natural materials at hand. Here, the brittle clay echoes the earth with the changes it undergoes as it dries and cracks, while alluding as well to the white tablecloths often found in restaurants. We may read the cracks as a metaphor for the parched earth as California repeatedly deals with prolonged and cataclysmic droughts. “Geophagia,” incidentally, refers to the psychological disorder of earth-eating, creating an allusion to the tragic fact that many in our world have a meager table laid for them.

The restaurant is huge, sprawling rooms opening out into vast dining areas with expansive picture windows, lengthy stretches of bar, and other massive spaces whose functions may remain a bit of a mystery. The whole undertaking has the feel of a secret and kind of spooky place, a very cinematic vibe with it’s echoes of a bourgeois past juxtaposed against a harsh yet spectacular present. My first take is that there are some vibrations of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining, I could envision a reclusive restaurateur going mad here in the empty shell of the facility.

Moving, perhaps, from horror to scifi, one might flash on the scene in Jurassic Park where the children are pursued by velociraptors into the hotel’s kitchen. The brushed steel cabinets here are certainly large enough for a small person to hide in to avoid being devoured. But rather than a game of reptilian hide-and-seek, we find a remarkable work by One Beach Plastic, the husband and wife team of Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang, who have created a striking and sobering installation for here or to go (2021) using an enormous amount of white plastic debris—a fraction of the tons they have cleaned from Kehoe Beach in Marin County since 1999. The West Marin-based couple have made combating plastic pollution of the ocean very much a life mission. Simultaneously playful and horrifying, the detritus is sorted into piles of different types of things, bottle caps, tampon tubes, hunks of Styrofoam, tortured plastic bags that refuse to die. Many are arranged aesthetically, almost appetizingly, on ceramic plates lining the steel shelves…“order up!”

With a related aesthetic, Tuula Närhinen, a Finnish artist, presents Baltic Sea Plastique (2013-14). A row of acrylic tubes contains colorful plastic assemblages suspended in water, all filled to the same precise level, suggesting a science project whose intent is unknown. These appealing, almost floral works make the menacing issue of aquatic pollution a bit seductive; one might liken them to colorful plants and animals who lure in their prey with beauty.

Lurking in an alcove, perhaps the old freezer, we may find a display of solemn photographs, Metal Graves 14 and 15 (2009) and When Dead Ships Travel 10 and 12 (2015) Living in Bangladesh, Shumon Ahmed documents desolate areas there which constitute a container ship graveyard. We may think of the current issue of global supply chain breakdown, with these massive vessels stranded unloaded in ports around the world.

On the lower level, the prolific punster and skillful draftsman William T. Wiley, who sadly passed last year, is represented by an uncharacteristically spare installation—a single pinball machine situated in a large wedge-shaped room. Wiley’s piece Punball: Only One Earth (2008) takes the theme of pollution and global warming to a repurposed vintage Gottlieb “North Star” game. Wiley’s alter-ego, Mr. Unnatural, poses bent over, wearing a red commedia dell’arte clown/jester nose and doffing his wizard cap to Buster time, a character who reminds viewers that the clock is always ticking. Wiley always had a strong social conscience, as as the environmental issues facing us grew more dire they became increasingly important in his diverse body of work. Recalling the artist’s propensity to a bit of excess, in its opposing starkness this work serves much as a memorial totem.

Echoing the theme of something which beckons, but is a bit repellent on closer inspection are the Confectionery Marvels and Curious Collections (2021) of Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. These evoke ornate jello-molds in sparkly, colorful rows perched on small glass shelves set in circular niches, six glimmering jewel-like on either side of this elegant lower bar. Dotted with butterflies and other taxidermy insect specimens, the contrast implies the dual existence of food waste and excess for some, and food insecurity for others.

Ana Teresa Fernández fills an airy, light-filled room with her installation of seven large acrylic cylinders, each about human height at six feet tall, filled with sea water and perched on small heaps of sand. The cylinders distort the view outside, bringing it indoors, and create mesmerizing visual effects. On the Horizon (2021) alludes to the disturbing fact that sea levels are expected to rise at least six feet in the next century. We may think of Roni Horn’s installation Library of Water, in Stykkishólmur Iceland, where similarly-scaled tubes are filled with water obtained from melted glaciers. It bears noting that Fernández also created an earlier version of this work, temporarily installed on nearby Ocean Beach with the help of community volunteers.

Taking the cinematic aspect of the exhibition to another level is Doug Aitkin with migration (empire) (2008), a single channel video installation. Aitkin has filmed surreal vignettes in empty motels where wild animals explore their unlikely surroundings; a puma enters, looking wary and alarmed, reindeer, peacocks, and even a buffalo roam. The banality of the motel gains an eerie, ominous quality when seen through the eyes of the unwitting animal visitors. Scenes of desolate roadsides are interspersed, giving the work a feel of a dystopian future somehow particularly appropriate for this moment.

Exiting Aitkin’s work through passageways that feel remote and a bit disorienting, one may encounter Norway-based Jana Winderen’s sound installation Energy Field (2010). The artist collects sounds from inaccessible places, like the bottom of the ocean or the interior of ice sheets, and quite appropriately here we also cannot reach the source of these unsettling sounds. Cold blue fluorescent light adds an unsettling quality.

With so much to see, don’t miss Chester Arnold’s five small-scale oil paintings hanging in a narrow corridor. Unlike the traditional placid nautical scenes one might expect at a restaurant, here roiling seas churn with whirlpools from which these vessels clearly have no escape. Arnold’s meticulous style shows to good advantage in this intimate space, with Survivors (2021) huddling in a life raft showing a particularly deft balance command of gesture. Clearly Arnold finds a metaphor in the image of vessels and their crew at peril for the journey we all embark today on our imperiled planet.

By the entrance/exit is Gülnur Özdağlar’s The Last Reef , (2021) a beautiful suspended installation of jellyfish made from plastic bottles, a glowing, ethereal work. This piece, like many visually stunning works on view, helps temper the harsher, more pessimistic vibes that also abound. Certainly plastic can be beautiful, it comes in so many bright, cheerful colors. The fact that it has been so inexpensive to manufacture for so long has made us complacent about using it once, then “recycling” it; we are just learning that recycling the material often merely meant shipping it overseas where it would ultimately end up in the landfill. Now, as these markets are increasingly saying “no thank you” we are stuck ourselves with this monster which we have created.

Reflecting on Lands End, I was delighted to play the game of seeking out the artworks amid the architecture, and the underlying message of environmental devastation hit squarely home. A third, strongly felt dimension is that of time, of the feeling of stepping into a realm caught between the past and the present, the lingering presence of different times and ways of living. We may sense how fragile our world is, how what we assume is permanent may without warning vanish, from a beloved restaurant to the polar ice caps.

Barbara Morris

Due to space concerns, many additional noteworthy works could not be discussed here. The other artists in the exhibition are Daniel Beltrá, Andrea Chung, Ólafur Elíasson, Elizabeth Ellenwood, Adam Eli Feibelman, Angelo Filomeno, Carsten Höller, Suzanne Husky, Brian Jungen, and Tony Matelli.

Lands End is free and open to the public Thursday through Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm, through March 27. Admission by timed ticket.

https://www.for-site.org/project/landsend/