At a party in Los Angeles, some artists asked me if it’s fun in San Francisco. Should they move to the Bay? Highland Park doesn’t feel cool anymore. The rents have gone up, and there’s a Le Labo on Fig. 

I blushed. I didn't know what to say. I’m disturbed by this idea of a city as a field of pure extraction. The taking mentality requires a practical relationship to place. It's imagined almost like a product, a service that might furnish a particular identity through association.

San Francisco doesn’t really allow for that. The real’s destroyed the speculative. The speculative’s got the real by the throat. The present is disturbed by an enthusiastically pitched future. A driver-less car can’t figure out how to go around a trash pile. It’s not fun, I tell the people in L. A..

Still, I like it here. I love it. It’s my only home. How can that be true?

There must be something here.

I keep thinking that; a blended sentence formed as a half-baked counter to Gertrud Stein’s quip about Oakland: “There’s no there, there” and also comprised of the mis-remembered title of that Talking Heads song, “This Must Be the Place.” 

There must be something here. Otherwise, how is it possible to love a place across time, to still love it across its myriad contorting iterations?

Being as used to San Francisco as I am, novelty can take on a surreal quality. I’ve walked certain stretches of city blocks hundreds of times, and over decades, so I’m accustom to anticipating buildings before passing them. I don’t have to read the signs. Any small change registers as if an apparition, an unexpected phantom which my eyes did not remember to expect. I’m always looking for the sublime in these mundane increments.

I had an experience like this recently at Altman Seigel, when white lines seemed to ink out of the gallery’s concrete floor. The latest show’s curator, artist K. R. M. Mooney, had directed my attention with descriptions of his research on the building’s index of past identities, recasting the space for me as its prior uses. One of which, it turns out, was a parking garage. I’d never noticed, but boxy white rectangles outlining boundaries for cars that would never come had been on the concrete floor every time I’d visited the gallery.  

Mooney went on to explain that his curation was inspired by the idea that surface is a “charged space” where information is exchanged, and signals are located, noting, specifically, the participatory nature of glass in his own work. The surface of which, to come into its final shape, requires collaboration with “heat, breathe and space to expand in”. While he talks, the sound of a car on the nearby freeway rips through the space, ricocheting reverb against the gallery’s aluminum roof, intercutting the minimal instillation with imagined reliquaries of threaded tires and ferraris. 

The show's title "vītatio" means avoidance in Latin. Mooney says he sees that moving away, that pivoting in relation to an external force, as a generative quality. Avoidance puts movement in flux, requires repositioning and adjustment, and avoids a fixed position. I particularly like Mooney's sculptures and a piece by Harmony Hammond, a buttery palimpsest of burlap and rivets, uniting different kinds of holes in monochrome, mended and affixed by same colored paint. 

After seeing vītatio, I had Lotte, Alonso, Roberto, J, Julia and Nico over for drinks. I gave them tequila in ceramic espresso cups and we talked about value as an undertow in art-making. It’s strange that for artists being exploited and being successful look so similar, all this obfuscated by institutional expectations that artists are supposed to be unaware of their own financial precarity, working for passion, undeterred by material things. 

We wonder if there are geological features that make the threat of being commercialized stronger or weaker. Is the “art market” physically in New York and Los Angeles, or is it a speculative force that can drift in and out of any place, pulling young artists under its unsuspecting influence. We agree, at least, that there it isn’t much of a threat in San Francisco. You can make your work with a degree of privacy, without worrying that a gallery will start pressuring over-production or try to convince you to replicate a most marketable and recognizable branded style.