Home Is Where the Art Is

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Home Is Where the Art Is

by Myriam Weisang, from her Down on the Corner feature

San Francisco Examiner Image Magazine, January 10, 1988, pages 10-11

The view of San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley is not a particularly engrossing one: Around the bloated mass of the Cow Palace, the neighborhood south of Bernal Heights consists of rows of neat little pastel houses a la Daly City. Except for one ramshackle cabin that sticks out like a sore thumb. Or, more to the point, a baby torso — the chubby, upside-down fiberglass sculpture that juts up some seven feet from the roof.

Closer inspection reveals other intriguing details nailed to the façade, rusted bits of Americana clinging to the walls like misguided ornaments: a box spring, a birdcage, a ladder, a shovel, a drill, a digging fork, eggbeaters. A black pond filled with organic dye reflects the sky, darkly. Sitting in a flower bed is a gilded cage tangled up with a mess of measuring tapes. It is titled My Ambition Cage.

There is also a “dungeon” — ordinarily known as a garage — filled with tools, chunks of metal, rocks, a child’s cart piled with assorted trophies. “I dragged the cart around on Halloween,” says sculptor Alison Ulman, “I wore this burnt, torn dress. I looked bedraggled. I called myself The American Dream.”

Ulman laughs. This is her house. She is an artist of a different breed. Ulman does not sell her work. She lives it... (“Well, she admits, it’s for sale, but almost no one buys it.”) Her house, which she opens to the public on Sundays, is her art. The dungeon is where she brings all her ideas to life. “The stuff just collects on me. I’ll keep something around until I find a use for it,” she acknowledges, pointing to the bric-a-brac.

A former housewife and construction worker, Ulman began putting her odds and ends to use shortly after she moved into her home. “When I rented the house, it was supposed to be a normal house and I wanted to be a normal artist,” she explains. “But the house was a mess and the landlord wouldn’t take care of it. That’s when I changed gears and started adding my own stuff.”

Over the past seven years, Ulman has slowly changed the place into a permanent, if ever-changing, exhibit. Once inside the front door of the house, decorated with Girl Scout uniforms (faded ghosts of so many cookie-bearing little girls who rang the doorbell), visitors face an invisible dining room set, Spray-painted white, the breakfast fixtures hang in the air on fishing line — a plate, a glass, salt and pepper shakers, flowers, vitamin bottles (“At first the bottles wouldn’t hang because they were too light, so I made steel pills,” Ulman volunteers), a kettle, an ashtray filled with little alligators from “when I smoked, a demonic habit.”

The objects in Ulman’s unlikely collection together form scenes from her life. In place of her ex-roommate are his resin-coated pants, cross-legged as though he were sitting down, with a mask of his face affixed on the front page of a newspaper. “I made it several years ago when the furniture got repossessed. The check bounced. I was trying to make my roommate feel better. That was practically the only furniture we had.”

Today, there is more furniture, such as the handsome wooden coffee table hanging midway between floor and ceiling. An empty television cabinet houses a boulder. “The television used to be chained to the boulder,” recalls Ulman, “It started out as a security system.” Ulman gave away the television and kept the boulder. On top, where she has planted grass, sits a framed postcard of a ’50s urban couple. Gold-painted barbed wire encircles the frame.

“I wanted to make a statement about becoming handicapped,” the artist explains, pointing to a rusted wheelchair, broken in half, that lies on the floor in front of a pane of glass, half-mirrored, half-transparent. “I went blind in my central vision a couple of years ago but I still have my peripheral vision. I function pretty well but I can’t do things fast. I have a foot in both worlds. It’s an interesting perspective. It broadens you instantly. It’s a little like dying in life.”

Ulman sells an occasional piece, such as the concrete bookends that prop up a library of cement-covered books with doctored titles: The Boredom of Two Cities, The Boredom and the Fury, Remembrance of Things Bored. “The only books I had were classics,” explained Ulman. “My roommate said, ‘These are the most boring books I’ve ever seen,’ so I covered them in cement. It was a fun piece.”

But most of Ulman’s looking-glass world exists simply for art’s sake — from the Japanese “garden” in the middle of the living room floor to the overgrown outdoor garden, where she has installed a pretend stream made out of a conveyor belt, a plantation of television sets (“I’m looking for some VCRs right now.”), a couch, a mirror, and a seascape painting. In the roots of a gigantic cactus, Ulman has stuck a pre-Columbian art piece with a toy tractor running over it. The “experimental bathroom” has a door that looks like a boulder, duck decoys in the tub, and a fairytale miniature installation that takes the place of the mirror.

“I trade art back and forth with my friends,” Ulman says, showing off a borrowed pink statue. “The Chef Steve here is on loan. Sometimes I store other people’s artwork. Things change all the time around here. This is a home for art. It has a life of its own.”

© San Francisco Examiner Image Magazine, 1988

© Alison Ulman 2003