During one of my recent trips to Chicago I spent the day at the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute. My boyfriend planned the day to include lunch at Terzo Piano, the restaurant on the third floor of the Modern Wing. I got to take a few photos of some of the art in the Contemporary and Modern European collections, but most of what I shot was in the Architecture and Design Collection. Click on the photos below for more information about the art.
Threatening weather, but we planned to be inside all day anyway
My companion
Pea Tendril Salad
Cheese Ravioletto
Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta with strawberry sorbet, sweet pea puree and house made granola
Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta with strawberry sorbet, sweet pea puree and house made granola
The Pritzker Pavilion from the balcony of Terzo Piano
Woman Descending the Staircase by Gerhard Richter
Concetto Spaziale by Lucio Fontana
Model for the Visitor Center by Jeanne Gang
Airborne Snotty Vase: Influenza by Marcel Wanders
Model of the American Medical Association building by Kenzo Tange
I’m reading this new (to me) book I picked up at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston this past weekend. “After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art” details the careers of 12 women artists and how their work relates to, influenced and was influenced by feminism. I’m devouring it because it’s so readable and I feel like I’m getting a good sense of the history of recent contemporary art. A few of the artists have intrigued me, but Marina Abramović stands out for the raw emotions her work elicits from me. Abramović is a Yugoslavian-born performance artist known for pushing her body to the extremes of pain, hunger and deprivation. If you saw that Sex and the City episode when Carrie meets the Russian at the performance piece of the woman fasting and living in the gallery, that’s Abramović. The piece referenced in that show is “House With Ocean View”, and Abramović won a New York Dance and Performance Award for it in 2003.
They walked this entire thing. Swoon.
Abramović met Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) in 1975 when she was 29 and still living at home with her overbearing mother, who enforced a strict 10 PM curfew. In spite of or possibly due to this restrictive life, she created and performed horrific performance pieces that often resulted in bodily harm. A few months after meeting Ulay she ran off with him to Prague and began an intense working and romantic relationship. The two performed many pieces that explored relationships and sexuality, but after 12 years they decided to part ways. OK, get out your Kleenex. Rather than go about it the way the rest of us would, Abramović and Ulay decided that they needed to do something monumental and spiritual to signify the end of their relationship. Each one started on an opposite end of the Great Wall of China, Ulay in the Gobi Desert and Abramović at the Yellow Sea, and they began on a spiritual journey of 90 days, walking in solitude 2500 km each to meet in the middle of the wall to say goodbye. The whole thing is like a fairy tale.
I’m getting choked up just writing this, which is crazy because I am never affected this emotionally by a piece of art. But that journey they took to end their relationship, it’s such a powerful symbol of their love and at the same time their future without one another. They went to tremendous lengths to pay tribute to their love, and yet the act of the lone trek set them on their paths apart. It’s so movie-perfect I can hardly stand it. It also got me thinking that the piece is symbolic of any departure. Once you have made the decision to part, from home, from any situation, you are in a sense alone in the pursuit until you say goodbye.
I am fascinated and scared by Abramović and I can’t wait to dig into more of her work.
I love MoMA. Last year they blew me away with their interactive site for the exhibit Design and The Elastic Mind, which sucked up many of my idle hours. The museum website was a great resource before the recent revamp. Last week the site got a facelift which includes a social media component. Much like any other social media tool, you can favorite and share single pieces as well as entire exhibitions. Check out the screen shot from my brand-spanking-new MoMA profile.
Going on an art-adding spree
I was excited to see the sculpture “Woman With Her Throat Cut” by Alberto Giacometti (fourth one in above) in the collection, mostly because I first saw it at the Pompidou in February of 2008 and I forgot to write down the name of the piece and the artist. Another Mystery Art solved! I took a picture of it that looks almost exactly like the one in the MoMA online archive.
OK, maybe not EXACTLY like the one in the archive.
I’m excited about the new feature, MoMA Voices, which is described as “…a new section of MoMA.org that will expand in the coming weeks and months to open up a dialogue with our visitors and provide them with different views of modern and contemporary art and the Museum.”
Uh, so you have a blog now. That’s what it is, guys. A blog. Right. On. I’m looking forward to an peek into the behind the scenes action at MoMA.
I’m beginning to realize that I’m a moonie-eyed fangirl of contemporary Asian art, especially Chinese Art. The Chinese sense of humor, dry and self-depricating with a nod to the ridiculous and the tragic, permeates a lot of their art. Many of the pieces I’ve seen are funny while expressing emotions like loneliness, hopelessness and despair. The good stuff is layered with emotion, and makes me think about it long after I’ve walked away. The videos in this exhibit by Cao Fei are a perfect example of this. In Cosplayers (2005) she documents young people in Asia who stage elaborate role playing scenes on the city streets of China. They stalk, fight and engage each other all while dressed as their favorite Manga characters.
What’s funny about these scenes is they play out in the streets amongst people going about their daily lives. At times the onlookers are even roped into the action unwillingly. This blurred line between fantasy world and reality is seen again when the Cosplayers return home to their parents after their battles, sitting in front of the TV or in the kitchen cleaning up with their folks, still in full costume.
Still from "Whose Utopia?", Cao Fei, 2006
The disparity between dreams and reality is a theme that is also explored in Cao Fei’s video “Whose Utopia?” In this piece the artist follows young workers in the OSRAM lighting factory for 6 months as they go about their daily routines, working, saving and fantasizing about their futures. The video opens with a series of scenes showing the machinery in the factory churning out the various components of fluorescent light bulbs. In the next part, we begin to see the role the workers play in the process, engaging in repetitive and mind numbing labor. Cao Fei does a great job with the presentation. I felt the mental exhaustion one must experience doing this kind of work. The following scene is more dreamlike, as some of the workers get up from their posts at their machines and begin to act out their dream careers. One woman pirouettes in a tutu between rows of machines, a peacock dancer flits through boxes in a warehouse, another boy plays the guitar amongst large pipes and ducts. It’s silly, but there is also a poignancy about it. That these magical dreams thrive in such an uninspired surrounding speaks loudly to the strength of the human spirit. My favorite part of the video is the final scene, titled “My Future Is Not A Dream”, a montage of close shots of the workers at their posts, looking hopeful and insistent that their dreams are real. Looking into their faces parading by one after another, I felt connected to these anonymous factory workers on the other side of the world, people I would normally never give a second thought to. In the face of the repetitive, stark and uninspiring city life, these people are chasing beautiful dreams with such earnestness as to be a bit tragic. Although we may not want to admit it, I think many of us can identify with that.
I found a clip of “Whose Utopia?” on youtube (below). The exhibit runs through this weekend, January 11, 2009, and includes other videos in addition to those by Cao Fei. I highly recommend it.
One of the goals of this blog is to learn more about art, and what better way to do that than to visit artists studios and observe the creative process? It sounded like fun to me, so I grabbed my friend Fayza and my little point and shoot and headed to the annual Houston ArtCrawl on November 22. The event takes place on the edge of downtown in the warehouse district, where local artists open their studios to art tourists like me and let us peek into their world for a day.
There was plenty of art to photograph, but I found the items laying about in the studios to be more interesting subjects. For example, mixing trays. Who knew they could be so fun? Fayza and I were fascinated by the evidence of the artistic process and took many pictures of paint splatters, used brushes and discarded bits. I suppose we should have taken more shots of the art, but I found some of the most beautiful things to look at were the scraps and unintentional “artworks”. Below are just a few of the photos we took.
Looks like a frog emerging from a Monet-esque lilly pond to me
This is a tray of discarded glass. I doctored the image but it looked cool before I processed it, too
An unfinished glass piece at Liz Conces Spencer's space in Mother Dog Studios. You can see some of the sketches through the glass
One thing is certain: creating art is MESSY. Now I don’t feel so bad that my own art desk looks like it has fallen victim to entropy.
Experimental musical scores are considered as works of visual art in Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine. This group exhibition samples the wide array of notational strategies and explores the cross-fertilization between musicians and visual artists, revealing the vital connections between experimental sound art and cutting-edge visual art.
I wasn’t prepared for the composers’ interpretations of musical scores. They look nothing like the scales and notation you are used to seeing, some resembling geological maps, others sparse arrangements of geometric shapes.
An except from "Treatise" by Cornelius Cardew
Having worked at and listened to KTRU for several years, I am no stranger to avant garde compositions. It never occurred to me that what sounded like improvisations might actually have originated from scores, even if only in the loosest sense. Looking at these odd notations I began to imagine how the music represented would sound. I just bought Earle Brown’s December 1952 on iTunes (for real!) and I’m going to listen to it to see if I can figure out how you get the music from this:
"December 1952" By Earle Brown
You are supposed to visually interpret how the music would sound and then, well, play it I guess. Every Sound You Can Imagine runs until December 7 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
I’ve been quiet lately due to overwhelming work obligations, but I will get a much needed break this weekend when I head to Chicago to visit some friends and take in some incredible art.
Josiah McElheny courtesy of Flickr user windy234
The exhibit I’m truly jazzed about is Josiah McElheny at the Donald Young Gallery. I have drooled over McElheny’s mirrored glass sculptures for some time now, though I have never seen them in person. The sculpture to the left is a hollow blown glass vessel, mirrored on the inside, which is encased in one way mirrored box with other similar vessels. The effect causes a reflection of the object back onto itself without interference from the viewer, since the mirror is one way.
Also blown…my mind. I hope the gallery lets me take a few shots of McElheny’s work to share with you.
To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Art Institute will present, for the first time, a comparison of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the modern drawings, etchings, and paintings of his contemporaries—works that would otherwise be in storage in preparation for their installation in the Modern Wing.
Let’s see: 1. photography, 2. about Paris, 3. that’s a chance to see works that would normally be in storage…
I don’t know how I could forgive myself for not seeing this. I know very little about Cartier-Bresson, but that’s what this little experiment is all about: finding new (to me) art that I know nothing about and expressing my thoughts about it.
If only I could cram in a Chicago Architecture Foundation boat tour. I did that last time I was in the Windy City and it was worth EVERY PENNY. I learned so much about the history of Chicago and architecture in general that I think I annoyed my friends with my new-found knowledge when I got back.
Ahem.
That may also be a reason for this little blog. Now I can annoy you
Cai detonating a piece. Courtesy of Flickr user we-make-money-not-art
OK, so I have a huge crush on Art:21 right now. They have introduced me to many fascinating artists in the past few weeks (thanks to Netflix for stocking their entire series) and I want to share one of my favorites, Cai Guo-Qiang.
Cai was born in China and now lives and works in New York. His gunpowder pieces start out as drawings, which he then outlines with various types of gunpowder. There is great care taken to control the detonations. You can imagine it’s pretty tense working with such a dangerous material. In the Art:21 segment on Cai his description of the process is one of my favorite statements from an artist in the entire series:
This whole process of making drawings is very much like lovemaking. From the very beginning of laying down the paper, it’s like laying down the sheets on the bed. First you lay down the sheets and you have this idea of what you might want to do today, in form or in action, what you would like to accomplish. Then you bring in the materials, you lay them out, apply pressure here, but not too much pressure here. You know what kind of effect it might have. How much attention you should give to a certain area, how much material you should use, and how you should play off another balance are all things that you have to consider throughout.
It’s a very long process. You keep going at it and always working towards a final goal, but it’s a very prolonged process and all the time there’s this feeling that you just want it to explode, to finish. There’s continuous control of pressure, you want to set this on fire, to explode it, but yet you are afraid that maybe it’s too early, maybe it’s not the best time yet, maybe you need to work on it a little more. Excepted from the Art:21 interview
A gunpowder drawing. Courtesy of Flickr user ejbaurdo
Excuse me while I fan myself off a bit.
The final pieces look very primative to me, almost like cave paintings. There’s an organic, chaotic quality about them that suggests natural processes, even though they are created from man-made materials.
Cai also creates sculptures, usually with sharp objects sticking into or out of them. It seems he likes to evoke a sense of empathy for the objects, hoping that the viewer will identify with the pain. In one piece that I found amusing, Cai created a suspended sculpture of an airplane with sharp objects confiscated from passengers sticking out of it. Most items are nail files and the like, and were taken from people by the Sao Paolo airport security before they boarded.
Cai's airplane sculpture. Courtesy of Flickr user meltingnoise
I have been tweeting about Art:21 lately because I have queued the entire series on Netflix.
OK, lemme back up.
Art:21 is PBS series that discusses art in the 21st century from the artists’ perspectives. I’m wholeheartedly addicted to it. They have clips you can watch on YouTube and they have a blog which I find very entertaining and informative in that documentary/PBSey kind of way. If you are new to art appreciation this is a great place to start. It got me hooked on photographer Sally Mann, who is profiled in the clip below.
In the full length interview she talks about her wild days as a child running around nekkid, which explains quite a bit about her work. She gained a lot of notoriety for photographing her children nude, and some pretty awful things have been said about her work. When I look at those photos I’m fascinated by how mature the kids look. They are obviously young physically but they appropriate the soul-penetrating stares and assured postures of trained fashion models. Maybe being her kid would make anyone intense, or maybe she’s some kind of genius when it comes to photographing kids (which I’m told is NOT EASY). But these are more than mere portraits. Some are unsettling because it feels like we are seeing private moments that we shouldn’t. Not sensual, but intimate in a familial way.
Sally Mann "Tobacco Spit" (1987) or "How Did She Get That Baby To Stare At Me Like That?"
One more thing I like about Sally Mann: she uses an antiquated technique called collodion that takes a lot of patience and practice to perfect. It gives her photos a depth and tonal quality that I’m sure can’t be recreated in Photoshop. Perhaps the intimacy present in her images stems from her intimacy with the actual process of taking the photographs and developing them.
I first heard about Chris Jordan on Bill Moyers and was intrigued enough to dig further. An ex-corpo lawyer, Jordan now devotes himself to photography full time. In his latest series, “Running the Numbers: An America Self-Portrait” the artist assembles and manipulates small photos into large collages that represent some statistic of American culture. What I like about this work is that it’s clever and not preachy. The numbers are factual and the artist merely represents them in a way that we can grasp. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that we use 106,000 aluminum cans every 30 seconds in this country. Seeing that number as a five foot tall collage representation of a famous pointilism piece by Seurat makes you think about your contribution to that number.
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