Dark Boxes From Cornell, Light Boxes From Wall, and Smoke and Mirrors From Eliasson--All Seasonal Gifts at SFMOMA

Stepping into the SFMOMA atrium these days, tourist couples from Iowa and Wisconsin get this great idea about buying a fan in Wal-Mart and hanging it up high on a wire to fly and swish by, just like Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator [1997] does here.
But that's just the beginning. Brace yourself before coming out of the elevator on the fifth floor, where "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" show is currently on display through February 24, 2008. From Room for one colour [1997], which makes visitors look their zombie-like worst under harsh incessant yellow light seemingly oozing from the walls around, to the serene water world of Notion motion [2005], as if suspended in the moonlight, to rainbow droplets of the streaming from above Beauty [1993], and to the faint smell of death, emanated by the drying moss, Eliasson takes his viewers on an all-encompassing sensory journey, dipping them in mirrored wells and enchanting with colored tunnels along the way.
Another show by the same artist, titled "Your Tempo" is displayed in a giant freezer, and features a hydrogen-powered BMW stripped of its shell and enshrouded in ice instead.
"Jeff Wall" is another stunner of a show--a retrospective of Wall's amazing transparencies in light boxes--all looking like snapshots from a bizzaro world (in which we all reside sadly or happily), and all meticulously staged, dress-rehearsed and executed with precise cinematographic directorial vision by a Vancouver native who does not like to travel much for his subject matter.
The Destroyed Room, Mimic, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), The Flooded Grave, In front of a nightclub, and other iconic images by Wall were all created around his native town, or right in his studio.
"I have only made 140-150 pictures in the last 30 years," said Wall at the opening of his show, which is now on display through January 27. "I try not to repeat myself. A subject can be abandoned because it might resemble something I've already done."
With his imagery being extremely diverse by design, one work stands out even among the most unforgettable ones: Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) [1992].
"I felt that as soon as Afgan war was over, it became a forgotten war, so I wanted to make a picture about this hallucinatory moment between life and death when these young soldiers imagine that they are still alive," said Wall. He staged his picture after a real war episode when a patrol of 12 soldiers, all 18 to 20 y.o., and their older commander were killed in a brief and severe attack, having very little time to realize what happened to them.
The third major show on display at SFMOMA through January 6 is "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," which took up the whole third floor, usually reserved for Photography, the explanation being that those intimate, dark, and fragile boxes and collages he constructed required lower ceilings, smaller galleries and mellower lighting to be properly displayed.
Cornell's recurring themes, like stars and constellations, ships and navigation, hotels and exotic birds, ballerinas and fairies, and endless references to obscure literary sources from Romanticism, Sentimentalism and Symbolism are adequately represented in his chosen medium--3D box constructions, often interactive, filled with stuff childhood daydreams are made of, a.k.a. found materials. Navigating Cornell's show is like being gradually immersed in a twilight zone, eerily familiar, yet not welcome any more, something we try to forget in order to grow up, to become fully adult. As it seems obvious from Cornell's biography, he never became one.
SFMOMA is located at 151 Third Street, San Francisco. For information, visit www.sfmoma.org