WALKING WITH A MISSION

 I was in San Francisco, a great walking city so they tell me, and a few people had said I should go down to the Mission District and walk along Clarion Alley, a short, narrow, traffic-free alleyway running between Mission Street and Valencia Street – both pretty good streets to walk down - the latter the home of all manner of hip enterprises, the former full of old fashioned pork and fish stores.  Clarion Alley, I was told, was a kind of street art paradise, or at least theme park, where some high quality artists had gone hog wild on every surface, with amazing results.  Off I went.

As I walked down there it occurred to me that San Francisco is so awash with street art and graffiti and murals, that the idea of having a special place for it is slightly superfluous.  Still, as a Hollywood walker I was extremely taken with the sight below; not only the art on the surrounding boards but also the name.  There’s nothing like attaching the name Hollywood to your billiard hall to give it a bit of class, though that may not be enough to keep it in business.

But anyway Clarion Alley did prove to be very much as advertised and was full of street art and also full of people looking at the street art, and people photographing the street art, and people having themselves photographed standing in front of the street art.

Most of the art was pretty good, some of pretty great, and most of it excessive and intense and hit you in the eye, and of course much of it was tagged with the marks of much less accomplished wannabes, or maybe just vandals. My favorite by some way was this terrific homage to and recreation of the art of Moebius. 

As regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of what I call “feral furniture,” chairs or beds or TV sets that look as though they’ve escaped from people’s homes and are now living on the street.  There was an armchair where you could sit and have Moebius’s work looming over you.

I gather that the art changes all the time in Clarion Alley, works fall into neglect, disappear, get painted over: all is flux.  But right in the middle of this artistic mayhem were the two garage doors below, absolutely free of art, graffiti or anything else.  

I wonder how often the owner has to go out there and paint the doors to preserve the integrity of this color field.  However often it is, it’s worth it.  Minimalism had never looked so good.