Met Piece

I love egyptian art. I was obsessed with Egypt as a small child. As every other child was probably watching saturday morning cartoons I was tuned into PBS's special with Dr. Zahi Hawass as he explored the artifacts in the Egyptian tombs. I loved the rituals as a child. This world of mythology with such clear picture...really the fact that there could be a language of pictures. The idea of hieroglyphs was incredible to me. 

Now I have come to appreciate the timelessness of the art. Egyptian art is sort of amazing in the fact that it is so incredibly static. For several thousands of years (minus the reign of Akhenaten) the style did not change. It remained in a way where time just never passed. Much like how the afterlife worked to create a timelessness for these people. 

Maybe its my own fear and obsession with time passing that drives me so much to stillness. To remain the same seems so appealing. Maybe its just nostalgia. 

Anywho, while there are a lot of great pieces to chose from I've always been drawn most to the funerary objects. I chose the Singer of Amun Nany's Funerary Papyrus in gallery 126 for my piece as it also shows not only the stillness of the images but the amazing preservation of the papyrus. Such a fragile document to survive so long, its just incredible. 

Alberto Giacometti: Deconstructing and Reinventing Traditional Figurative Sculpture (Prompt 8)

          In 1945, coinciding with the end of World War II, Swiss born painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti returned to Paris from Geneva where he had spent the war years. Already having established himself as a well-respected surrealist artist in the early 1930’s, Giacometti returned to Paris with a different way of perceiving the world. Roman Jacobson points out in his book On Realism in Art, “that [just one year later] Giacometti suggested that the aesthetic framework within which he was experiencing the outside world had become transformed.”¹ In other words, this pivotal moment in history not only affected the way that Giacometti perceived the world, but also the way this was visually articulated through his work. Not surprisingly, the end of World War II became a reference point in history and art textbooks alike, sharply defining the pre- and postwar periods. To summarize the thoughts of many scholars, this date marks a defining moment in art. In his book, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, art historian Harold Rosenberg reminds us that W. H. Auden once called the period after World War II "the age of anxiety," while art became "the anxious object."² Consistent with these observations were the sculptural works of Alberto Giacometti after his move to Paris. In his works, Giacometti reduced the use of materials and formal language providing his figures with the highest level of expression. He transformed the idealized human figure into a semi-abstract human form to commemorate lives lost to war and to serve as a symbol of recovery from the fear and anxiety felt by a post war society. 

                             Image: Three Men Walking, II 1949, Bronze

                                                  Bibliography

1. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Iconic Experience in Art and Life, Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti    Standing Woman,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no.5 (2008) pg. 2 http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/5/1

2. Auden,Wystan Hugh. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (United Kingdom, 1947), quoted in Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New American Library, 1969)

Feeling Meh about the Met

Who goes to the Met and feels uninspired? Who goes to the Met on a class assignment to choose one piece to talk about, and comes out empty-handed? Who returns to the Met for a second look, for the same assignment, in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, to discuss in front of her class, and still feels the void?

The place only has some 14,000 objects spanning some 5,000 years. How is it possible for anybody but a lame-brain to fail to find one measly thing to muddle through?

During both visits, I couldn't stop thinking about Jerry Saltz's observation on the country's most comprehensive and highly respected museum, which I am going to paraphrase here: The Met gets 5,000 years of art right. It had better stop sucking at the last 70.

Isn't that the truth?

The special exhibitions are what typically draw me to the Met. Ken Price, Impressionism and Fashion, Matisse -- all examples of sublime, world-class excellence within the past year. Right now, though, the special exhibitions are blah blah blah. Balthus? A pedophile with totally uninteresting fantasies. The textile trade, medieval treasures, baseball cards -- these are not for me. Of course, William Kentridge is the bomb. But he is Emily's. Rightfully.

I'm not going to bore you with all the machinations to justify myriad artworks, from Philip Guston to Claude Monet to the Temple of Dendur (no joke I was desperate enough to contemplate a tongue-in-cheek speech on cultural piracy and the Jewish slaves who built ancient Egyptian monuments, which resulted in Passover, the worst holiday ever, and -- and, oh wait, I promised no taking-the-reader-through-my-process filler -- cut).

So who swooped in and saved me? Monsieur Cézanne, bien sûr. As everybody in this class knows, I cannot paint and who is a better painter than Cézanne? Nobody. Maybe I was too stuck seeking out a contemporary, or a mentor, for my own narrative-driven art-making. But maybe it's enough for us to look together at something that simply makes me swoon. Maybe it's enough that my favorite art-history class at Michigan culminated in a comprehensive study of Cézanne. Maybe it's enough that a small Cézanne exhibition at the Palais du Luxembourg inspired my return to school.

And now, here I am.

Merci à vous, M Cézanne.

Gallery 825.

Uppers and Downers

Could anything be nerdier than procrastinating (my Met entry) by posting about something that was never assigned? Or maybe it's just a case of inspiration (what I am about to post) versus flatlining (the Met). Whatever the case, I need to tell you guys about my totally awesome art encounter. And then a little bit of a letdown.

Good stuff first.

On Saturday, I got to join a small tour of the unfinished portion of the Highline, between 30th and 34th Streets, where Carol Bove has installed five or six surprisingly smallish sculptures (all are new except one, which appeared in Documenta). Madame Bo-vay was present, and she is so cool, so smart, so articulate -- she blew me away. Besides the fact of the sculptures, which work with the same vocabulary as the MoMA installation we saw together last class, I dig how she takes her work seriously but not so much herself. She can laugh at the randomness of decision-making in art-making ("We put this piece here because it was the only place we could crane it up hahaha") while employing, without pause or irony, serious art words ("I wanted to work in this particular syntax"). I have never heard "syntax" used in this context but I am going to take CB's word for it, despite the Merriam-Webster sitting next to me. (Nor have I ever heard "crane" used as a verb but again, I am feeling lots of love and trust for CB's brains at the moment.)

I was also surprised to learn that an artist of CB's stature doesn't necessarily always get what she wants in terms of her art. To back up, CB's sculptures will remain on the Highline for the next 12 months, and then they will be returned to her. She really wants to see them all installed afterward in a white cube, just to see. "But it's just not gonna happen. I wish but probably not."

Why?

Shoulder shrug. Smile.

Lacking the chutzpah to brownnose by telling her how much I loooooved her MoMA installation, I instead got in her face with a million pictures. Here are a few.

After all that awesomeness, I got ready for more. I rode my bike up the Hudson to Columbia for an event with Eleanor Antin, the artist I chose as my contemporary. While I don't regret aligning myself with her, I was bummed about the afternoon. I imagined a panel discussion but when I arrived, there was a screening of one of her long, live-action movies that don't speak to me. Reader, I dozed. Not surprisingly, I overheard the curator, Emily Liebert, admitting that she had never seen this particular film. No wonder. The good stuff is up at the Wallach.

When Antin got up to speak, I was saddened by her appearance. Ghoulish. The questions sucked, I wished EL had taken the lead. The PBS show on EA was so much better. Wah wah wah.

But hooray -- Carol Bove is sustaining me.

And I get to further delay my Met entry because it is time for French class woo woo woo.

There's nothing to see, so you look (out to sea)

"There's nothing to see, so you look"

There is nothing to see. Nothing to understand. So you look. 

The horizon is something that is almost impossible to wrap our minds around. The concept that we can see so far that the sky and the earth meet at one straight horizontal line is a humbling reminder of human scale.

The horizon is the visual equivalent of infinity. 

When we look out to the horizon, there is nothing to see. There is no action, no content, no narrative, just the sky and the sun and the sea. The natural elements. Life at its most elemental. 

Such seemingly basic foundations withholding such complex systems of life. 

Perhaps this is the key to the human fascination with the horizon. This attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, this vast blue space. The reality of it. People pay incredible amounts of money for ocean views- for nothing? 

This infinite nothingness has a calming effect, and is recognized as a sign of bliss. At least is did and was for me, until I examined it in this post.

The classic looking, gazing, searching stare out to sea is not a passive recognition, but an active search for understanding, an acknowledgement of the void. Such infinite emptiness, yet filled with so many elements of life, reduced to hues of blue meeting in a horizontal line.  

Psychic Atlas

What is my work?


What is my work though?

A moment? A moment. Not a controversial statement. Not a demonstration. Not a criticism.


A moment. Captured before it wisps away. A moment of beauty. Youth. Sentiment. Would have inevitably faded as memories do.

A constant struggle. Time. Trying to claw back what was.
Mortality.


"That was then and this is now" How about that was then and this is then?
The Impossible Preservation.

Prompt #7: My Physics Atlas

I make work from my personal experiences. Experiences that have shaped me as who I am now. For one of my works, I worked from my recollection/ memory of fireworks I went to see in 2011 winter. The way the fireworks scattered away at the end of the splendid show strongly moved my heart; it was the moment when everything ended and disappeared like the wind.

In order to capture this moment as faithfully as possible, I put great deal of effort in painting the sky; the hue of the sky was deep and mysterious at the same time! I put various (I used all color in the palette) colors to make the sky profound. Then, I tried to remember the marvelous, fantastic way in which the firework particles scattered away, and put endless marks of these on canvas. The process is shown below.

The final product of the work: 

As I intended, I was able to vividly capture the sparkling, splendid particles of the fireworks all scattering away in the deep, fantastic blue sky. This was the one of the most significant moments in my life that moved my heart. *