Thomas Fuller at SFMOMA

Yesterday we walked, my wife and I, with Thomas Fuller, through SFMOMA. The museum was busy, a consequence I suppose of the cold, rainy weather driving people with nothing better to do indoors. Fuller won't take an elevator, a longstanding philosophical conceit that's turned into a phobia, so we walked from floor to floor.

Fuller's looked at a lot of art through the years, as have we, and it turns out that he's now making paintings himself, "painting more than writing" as he put it. It was fascinating to see him in action at the museum, as if he was fishing a trout stream in the High Sierras and knowing exactly where the fish were, at least the fish for him: he'd enter a gallery, take a quick look around and either leave immediately or linger on a particular piece. Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian received special attention, as did the Philip Guston paintings.

We walked and looked, we made comments, all three of us. I've made sort of a record of what was said, if not by whom:

After looking at my thinking for years and years I now know what comes after abstraction: nothing.

This is the way abstraction works, by making sure nothing can come after it. All power has been rendered to abstraction, except the power of the distant past lodged deeply in the representational arts.

Consequently, the way abstraction keeps its power, which is everlasting, is by controlling what we think we see in the art of abstraction.

The big Rothko, "No. 14, 1960", has a wall all to itself in which abstraction explores both the bigness of the viewer of abstraction and his or her lostness.

I don't get much out of Arte Povera anymore, a movement both abstract and representational, a movement that once meant the world to me. I get the social content, the context of the time in which the art was made, but its time has passed and its products are now perishable.

Looking at the paintings of Gerhard Richter I see a kind of abstract representation that almost reaches the kind of perfection first practiced and then abandoned by Marcel Duchamp. Imagine if Richter had the courage to say as Duchamp said, "it's art if I say it's art."

Can a square photo be taken of Joseph Alber's 'Homage to the Square" on my iPhone?  

At least one of the gallery's of new work look interesting, especially the room with the paintings of Marlon Mullen. I like the way he's putting on the paint, like the paint has a mind of its own, and the intellectual content he infuses into his paintings that's not afraid to bite the hand that feeds him.

The future of art is in collage. (Fuller said this).

Woman sleeping sideways, SFMOMA, January 16, 2020. Photo by author.