A visit to MAH on the occasion of a Nutzle show, in which the author falls into a reverie.
Puns run amok in this Nutzle show, the artist’s pungent pen subverting the uppermost floor of the county-jail-turned-temple-of-culture where I commune in pleasant privacy with the artifacts and arty fictions, my afternoon paused in one more interactive interlude between serendipitous meetings in the street and leisurely browsings in Logos. Machines of artificial ventilation groan in the walls, discombobulating contemplation, but the concrete floor echoes a more musical, jazzlike, subtly syncopated, all but abstract rhythm off which the pictures bounce jokily as sentences in a Zen blender, a smoothie of pure non sequitur. Remembered aromas of freshly historic coffee can be smelled from the next gallery where Caffe Pergolesi is commemorated, pictures of Page Smith and Mary Holmes in their heyday holding forth at the Penny University having dropped out of the other one they founded. Just outside is the sculpture garden, punctuated by lovely succulents and a three-stream fountain whose cool murmur is a delicious antidote to the industrial drone indoors. You can still hear the street three stories down and smell the exhaust of the trucks pulling up behind the supermarket but this is urbanely apropos for such a downtown terrace from which you can look up and see Loma Prieta. You walk into this building and you are moved to prove you too are art, or at least an artiste with cheeky nerve enough to scribble a caption under a cartoon—one of those enigmatic doodles that has you scratching your head and laughing at the same time. It is the clean black line that captivates, the ink speaking for itself in loopy hieroglyphs, something to stuff into the beholder’s pipe while he contemplates what is said in what he has seen. I think of the preening egret on West Cliff yesterday, posing, I swear, for the photo-clicking strollers as if to say Check me out, I’m so beautiful, as are those blazingly radiant trees across the street and just beyond the bank. Where was I? Oh yes, above a river where art demands to be spoken back to and whose transient birds can see their faces in the bus windows.
