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.

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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)

I'm definitely learning more about Mexican art, having come to the city with only a vague knowledge of the muralists of the early 19th century - Diego Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros. But as emblematic as they were, elevating the peasant, the revolutionary, the indigenous warrior, once they became the establishment they were set to be challenged. The main permanent exhibit in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in downtown Mexico City has towering canvases of Rivera's communists, capitalists, rich and poor, then the depictions of the Aztec king Cuahtemoc at war with the Spanish, along with other immense, humbling masterpieces. But a few blocks away is the museum of Jose Luis Cuevas, who made his name by breaking with the muralists, saying that their nationalism and idealization of the working clases wasn't what artists should be doing. He went into the ugliness of poverty and class struggle, coming up with paintings and sculptures that revel in the painful and the grotesque. His is just one approach that followed the muralists, but there's more to come in future entries.

Posted by Kim at 08:25 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)

On Sunday I went to this huge international exhibition of modern art in Mexico City called Expo Reforma. A lot of the artists were Latin American, but many of them were from the US, Europe or Asia. I thought this installation by Carol Bove was really funny because it questions the idea of literature.

By showing a book with the word Poem written in type so big that two words fill the page puts into question the existence of poetry, because if that's a poem then anything can be a poem. A lot of Latin American poets have experimented with this type of thing. Like for example the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra took Neruda's desire to write poetry that "smelled like urine" to a whole new level with his Antipoesia.

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Posted by Kim at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lilia Carillo (1930-1974) only lived to be 44. That's one of the first things I noticed about her when I was browsing through a book of Mexican art. I wondered whether she painted up until the last week or day, and whether it was sudden or slow or painful. The other thing I noticed was that her art is almost not representational but it kind of is, if you see what I mean. You can see some obvious shapes, but it's not as if there is a scene or a clear story being told.

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Posted by Kim at 06:51 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.

Continue reading "Arte Moderno in the bosque..." »

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)

(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)

DADA. I took this photo at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, when I was there for a break in February. I have been sitting on this exhibit since, mentally anyway, and I’m bit embarrassed to admit it’s taken me two months to get around to talking about it. But DADA presents us with so many ideas about war, mechanization, progress, humanity, and it wasn’t until I saw the whole thing displayed – film clips, audio files of DADA poetry, the paintings, books and posters – that I realized DADA is political protest embracing the absurdity of our modern notion of progress drawn to its logical extreme (is our ability to perfect mass slaughter a sign we no longer believe we are fallible (in the Christian sense) and are we really progressing? What does it say about a species that, if nothing else, has become violent on a larger and larger scale as it has also made the greatest advances in sciences and the arts?) and the rebellion against war and fascism that crushed Europe in this time.

Continue reading "DADA, Vonnegut, Sin" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)