Episteme

After months of cultural drought, I finally made it to a great exhibition yesterday. It made me realize how important culture is to how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to the world. After seeing the photos, I felt like I started to reconnect with people in other parts of the world, not in that I had had similar experiences exactly, since many of those depicted were of war and violence, but on some level there were universal feelings and reactions and relationships.

Here is the link to the event:
2006 World Press Photo of the Year
I can't cut and paste the winning photo in here because of copyright laws, but take a look -- the wealthy Lebanese girls in the convertible here looking at a demolished building show that Israel's bombings affected people of all economic levels.

Continue reading "World Press Photo exhibit" »

Posted by Kim at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a small notebook some where which lists the titles of various works of art. I came up with the ingenious idea while taking pictures of works of art for myself and for this blog. Of course, like all things with meaning, it has somehow become lost, somewhere. I actually still think it's in my suitcase, though I don't know. In any case I can remember where I took this, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen.

Yes, I remember it well. It was an arrestingly beautiful day and the museum sits by the sea so at times it the views better outside than in. This is painting by Gerhard Richter. It has order to it that my life does not and it has a sense of simplicity and structure that my life does not. I don't say those things with any sense of longing, it's not things that are so unstructured I can barely hold down a job or anything, but you know I see the lines and the space and color and there's harmony. But whose life has all those things anyway?

OK, so that's not what I'm trying to get at. This work, the name I don't know right now, is a magnificent grid whose patters manipulate space and rhythm of the universe. It's truly wonderful, the colors and the apparent randomness of those colors but they aren't, there's logic and order.

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of all the works to photograph at the Tate Modern, this was the one I chose. I remember that night, not long after playing music with my ass, and walking all over the place and being generally tired from two weeks of running like mad from country to country all in search of friends and familiarity. Yes, that night in mid-September was truly tired but possessed by what I saw: a yellow t-shirt.

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Posted by Dawn at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a white Lego paradise in Oslo. Nearby the National Gallery, thousands, may I hazard millions, of Legos where left out in a public square for people to assemble. It was part of another public exhibit encouraging people to construct buildings, real and imaginary, from Legos in a makeshift city of skyscrapers, futuristic domed dwellings and rather fantastic towers. What I appreciated most was how none were vandalized or destroyed, though some in were in various stages of disrepair or disassembly.

After a few drinks with a group of friends, we came upon the eerie white constructions late one evening. Maybe is was the drinks I imbibed but I was taken with the wonderful site and amazed that people constructed replicas of the TransAmerica Pyramid and Eiffel Tower on these folding tables laid out along this square.

Continue reading "Art in Public, 2" »

Posted by Dawn at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh the art! I've been thinking about the art, the art from Europe, the pictures I took surreptitiously while away, in all the many weeks I've been lamely absent (but always thinking about posting). Those gallery guards would turn their backs and I'd snap a photo - BAM! - inside that small contraption, an image, frozen of something meaningful to me. The art I love, always so simple, always so very much what it's meant to be, which I don't always know but I know it's good because I can feel it. Some of the very best art I saw while in Europe was in the public sphere, meant to be engaged by anyone. There's something so grand yet straightforward about public art projects, especially the good ones, which are rare, alas.

In this exhibit I participated in, you make music with your ass. Quite literally. This was one of my favorite examples of the public art projects I saw, this time in London on Sept. 16.

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Posted by Dawn at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The essence of rhetoric is allegory," Foucault writes. Lovely words for a rather dreary morning on the coast. He says that in "This is not a Pipe", written about the famous painting by Rene Magritte. True, the painting isn't aimed so much at dispelling truth but rather calling into question our perception and understanding of symbols and languages and how that relates to art. But I see a wider application here. Think about it -- words interplay with art, how a word can be divorced from meaning, taken out of context, made to stand alone and be something other than what it is. I think of Ed Ruscha's words from the 1960s (from "Thermometers Should Last Forever" by Yve-Alain Bois from MIT's October 111, the whole issue a meditation on Ruscha and language, "Ruscha is more modest (than Mallarme), more laconic; he registers both the thickness and the shallowness of the forest of signs daily produced by the mass media, pointing to the absurd poignancy of these lost messages") and how they continue this tradition, surely started long before Magritte, but now a staple of contemporary and 20th century art.

Continue reading "It Isn't Language At All " »

Posted by Dawn at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe this is upside down, I don't know, but this is Gerhard Richter, who oscillates between photo realism and abstract, but regardless, is always precise. When I took this picture, I didn't write any information down about it, its title, the date, but no matter. I wanted to take this picture because the texture and colors and composition make my eyes vibrate. I don't think I need a better reason, do I? Someone once wrote, "Art is useless", but, reader, I politely disagree. Nothing that makes your eyes vibrate is without meaning.

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Posted by Dawn at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I, the fearless explorer that I am, went to check out the Museo de Arte Moderno in the Bosque Chapultepec. I tried to take photos of the artworks themselves, but then I realized it was more practical and more interesting to look at people looking at the paintings, especially with the ones that always had people in front of them.

This is one of Frida Kahlo's great self-portraits. I liked how the mother and child were looking at it together, and the mother has her hand on her heart as she is speaking.

Here is a couple looking at the same painting. I like how the guys is kind of leaning back and to the side as he looks at it. Now I won't go into details, but it makes you think about personal experiences and men and how they are, and that's why I wonder what it's like for a couple to look at Frida. Probably the guy was totally cool and never would make the woman feel like he was pasted onto her forehead like Diego did to Frida, but you just don't know that looking at them. Nobody knows but them.

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Posted by Kim at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just think this is sculpture of Josephine Baker by Alexander Calder is amazing. Wires, lines in light, shadow and three dimensions.

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Posted by Dawn at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a more than 10 years since the publication of End of History when, as the title suggests, the end of history was declared by Francis Fukuyama. OK, that’s not what he really declared but that’s what’s been written about the book and Fukuyama in all these long years since it debuted. I was really prompted to read this book after reading a review of Fukuyama’s latest book, which The New Yorker reviewer characterized as being an update, a critique if you will, of Fukuyama’s standing as a neo-conservative.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.

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Posted by Dawn at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Another picture from the National Gallery's DADA exhibit).

It seems to me Marcel Duchamp is one of the few artists of the 20th Century to really laugh. I think about what it would be like hanging out with him, urinal, dismantled bike in his studio, what he would say and do and think about.

He's creating this works around in the decades before WWII but he influences a generation of artists to find the grim absurdities with life (I think of Max Ernst here) and laugh.

Posted by Dawn at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)