Well on my birthday I wanted to go out to
see some art.
I trained in art, have a master's, so of course I like to look at it.
Chicago at the moment my current favorite place to see it. Well, next to France.
Especially in gigantic rooms of contemporary works with big white walls and if possible in the hands of Alan Bates ( yes, I know he's gone) with An Unmarried Woman playing in my mind.
I might say in the "studio" of that Alan Bates as his model or something equally ridiculous.
But fantasies, they exist. (see 2nd sentence)
That is my movie favorite, with the Silver Streak and Spinal Tap, Groundhog Day and a few others like Roman Holiday and these delightful ones too much to name.....ok ...all Woody Allen except the one he cussed was that "Deconstructing Harry leaving Sarah in earmuffs"? I think so.
It was
my birthday so a decidedly unAlan Bates spouse decided on going into LA and to the new
Broad endowed Contemporary building at
LACMA at 5PM on a Tuesday you get in FREE,
("Sarah," said spouse says so happy "It's after 5 PM, after 5 it's free, so I tipped them 20, and that's great and we'll be doing that this summer for sure.....remember that") .....and it was essentially empty. Of people. So that was IDEAL.
When I first came to LA, unlike the now, I'd go to
LACMA almost everyday (ok exaggeration)...well all the time until I wore out the rugs and welcome. It wasn't like the East coast for sure. It was kind of like trolling grandma's old closets down in Florida. A pox on here actually in a way, that small cities back east have stunning museums in comparison, I clung to it because I missed the art of youth. Frankly.
I drew there in 85-86 and sat, met, talked. I saw Steve Martin looking so cultured, and talked to him as he put in his art...anyway loved the Japanese Pavillion. I liked the recorder player that would sit in this one space outside and play classical pieces. I didn't particularly like the smell of tar in the pits. I didn't like it say like the Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but it made me feel better.
So we went and the first thing I need YOU to know is that they
built a really big thing and transformed
LACMA. It's amazing. Wow. I did love the building itself, the massive escalator alone was impressive. Built by Renzo Piano. It's a pretty cool,
darn cool building. I have no photos of the parts I want to share because of their "
RULES." I don't like this. I couldn't take that. Enough said I will return to it....
Here was the first thing....I was shocked by the art.
For me to get shocked, that's new. Or news.
I'm going again ASAP to deal with a jumble of feelings.
The most challenging pieces for me were enormous beautiful works made from dead butterflies as cathedral windows so huge and immense...and iridescent and so full of color. I was captivated in my youth by drawers of butterflies in Pittsburgh and in New York in collections, even an expansive collection in Monterey in the Butterfly Museum. Dead butterflies as this art however rode an edge for me. Sophia says, "It was creepy."
So go to actually see this , click here and scroll till you see the butterfly work. Go on now..
Damien HirstI knew of Hirst from the lamb, as "
Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey," but this was not work I knew entirely so that was great. Right away I knew that Broad, his money, his collection were going to challenge me in some fundamental ways. Big enormous money does this. I'm reading a book called
The Edifice Complex : How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World
by Deyan Sudjic
I think it'll help me talk to my feelings about this experience.
The unbearable Lightness of Being, another butterfly work
in this exhibit was in essence so profoundly harmonious, breathtaking, horrifying, almost as hot nerve pain feels-of course I'm in unbearable hot searing nerve pain right now so...it might color my impressions, the work depends on light as it reflects from the wings of the butterfly. It's a work I'd like to photograph a thousand times.
I'm hoping this links you to it. My daughter Sylvia noted to me in
no way did the butterfly death thing bother her but it was a "seriously bad day" for the butterflies. We should call this the altar to our relationship to nature I said to her, she replied back, "think of how many people will look at this." The lovely female guard and I talked on about this piece. Life is fleeting and then there is the reverence, remembrance and living on..... sealed by polyurethane polymers. Mao got sealed up rather like the lamb of this exhibit. Frankly this artist got inside my definitions of art, event, life, ethics, profane, beauty.
Pretty cool I suppose.
Suppose torture is on your mind...over romances.... and who you wish was walking with you or thinking of you isn't good to think about...or over say, your self indulgences. Well then one can look at Broad's collection of giant works by
Leon Golub.
Click there to see. He's an artist I've known a longgggg time. My husband once doing works that remind me of his.
After a bit with these pieces I felt...diminished as this part of man does to us all. A speck of dirt really. His portraits were amazing. In his words:
- (June 2001) Too many people have a sort of protective attitude about art. You know, Don't touch. It's valuable. I'm trying to be more in your face, like when you walk down the street and suddenly you encounter a situation. I'm trying to invite you into scenes where you might not want to be invited in.
- (2000) If I had to give a description of my work I would say it's a definition of how power is demonstrated through the body and in human actions, and in our time, how power and stress and political and industrial powers are shown.
That's going to be challenging to see. It was in my younger days, it still is. Read about
Leon Golub here.So moving on...I love to see
Jean-Michel BasquiatDon't know exactly why, but his work is lighter, why that is I do not know, as the imagery isn't. But it is like scribbling for me.
Click above and look. Here is something
on him as artist.
- "I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is."
There are a lot of people refining those critical skills. There was a beautiful painting by an artist I like.
Cy Twomblyin fact I rather
adore his scratches. There is a great story about a woman I would fit within her if I might, not as chubby me (but as fantasy Marilyn not me) to give his work a kiss.
On July 19, 2007, police arrested artist Rindy Sam after she kissed one panel of Twombly's triptych Phaedrus. The panel was an all-white canvas, and was smudged by Sam's red lipstick. She is to be tried in a court in Avignon in October for "voluntary degradation of a work of art". Sam defended her gesture to the court: "J'ai fait juste un bisou. C'est un geste d'amour, quand je l'ai embrassé, je n'ai pas réfléchi, je pensais que l'artiste, il aurait compris... Ce geste était un acte artistique provoqué par le pouvoir de l'art" ("It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art"). The prosecution calls it "A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", while admitting that she is "visibly not conscious of what she has done"; asks that she be fined 4500 euros, compelled to an assorted penalty, and to attend citizenship classes. The artwork, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.
So I looked at his beautiful light turquoise work entitled, Untitled 2003 and thought it was a bit like candy, a bit decadent, a bit like a paintball and entirely lovely in the space of this museum.
What I'm ashamed I like is easy.
The humor and the commerciality and the silliness of a balloon dog bigger than my house. Yes that
Jeff Koons, I'm almost ashamed to talk to it. I laughed a long time over his pieces. My second son, sans actually being my son Pepe, touched his pieces. Watching the guards go nasty and watching him do this was fascination itself. He saw the work completely as toys.
See read this from wiki:
Koons has received extreme reactions to his work. Supporters claim (for Balloon Dog) "an awesome presence... a massive durable monument" (Amy Dempsey, ed. Styles, Schools and Movements, 2002, Thames & Hudson), and for other work that it is possible to be "wowed by the technical virtuosity and eye-popping visual blast" (Jerry Saltz, art critic) [4]
However, Mark Stevens of The New Republic dismissed him as a "decadent artist [who] lacks the imaginative will to do more than trivialize and italicise his themes and the tradition in which he works... He is another of those who serve the tacky rich." Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times saw "one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s" and threw in for good measure "artificial," "cheap" and "unabashedly cynical."
Whether Koons will be seen in time as a critical commentator in the tradition of the Dadaists and a genuine leader in the controversial tradition of the avant-garde, or merely as a fashionable purveyor of meaninglessness and banality, remains to be seen.
And I like Balloon dog, like my very own...puppy.
Dada? Well maybe billion dollar Dada and I THINK that's a paradox.....paradox critic talk.wow....wow....and wow.......He's another kind of edge, the kind of Louis the 14. The kind of how much is that doggie in the window. Where art MEETS BROAD. Did you realize this is the place some feel art died?
Was I also in a kind of tomb on my birthday?
Very likely. As art becomes industry and the plaything and toy of the very wealthy.
That was an overwhelming part of the experience. And I like the balloon dog, but I know he's an art porn kind of guy so I try to look away and carry this as a "need to work on it" reaction. Like restricting carbs.
On Koons. (If you read the link out on the child support you'll see the thing I'm speaking to....) dada, that makes me laugh.....
I'm coming to the belief that for the super wealthy the artist is the court jester, invited and touted as the best one's MONEY can get, there as perhaps Shakespeare once was, serving their need to contextualize that they can get a pass on this serious discrepancy of have ( they too, see truth and laugh at themselves being laughed at) they are "bringing art to others" putting them "on the patron history map," preserving them and their art in their public memory tomb, just cause it's them.....we gotta know they purchase, therefore they are.
And actually, it appears this is a function within civilizations.
That we have artists collected, million dollars built into public places as Broad seeks to do insert culture into the LA so devoid of it, apparently, it is all about that jester role now isn't it?
The "I can admit my foibles" super rich-man built a house.
Well, perhaps, I saw this relationship in the work of some few of the contemporary sellers of art there. Held by the expectations of big dollars.
I liked getting under the biggest table I've ever seen. It was by
Robert Therrien You can read about this work
here.
He reminds me of
Peter Charles, one of my teachers. He lived above Freda Vandervort on Euclid Ave. once in Morgantown, WV and had adorable kids. Moppets. I suspect fully grown ones now. Scale and the ordinary thrust into grand scale.... then..... was something he taught us to realize.
Peter Charles was my teacher. Opps said that. One of several and a fairly important one for me. I kind of knew him a bit...more than...you might as a student. In my hometown that as I look is now not a part of his vita at all, but he taught at WVU for awhile.
Take a look at his TV .......
well his concept TV. But you have to be kind of rich to get this. Oh that's art.
I'd like to encourage looking at his links to the Irvine show.
But back to the museum.
I can't show my pictures until the hardrive is figured out. Boo.
I can't delete all my photos but need to move them, my start up disk is "full" Soo...I'm forced to do this linking to Broad's web site, which is, of course beautiful.
I didn't intend to talk to every artist...but I saw a
Richard Artschwager I liked. I don't know him that well but the pieces I saw were
beautiful to me.
And
Keith Haring...ooh...I loved him too. What great pieces he got. There is a wonderful kid's book you just must get for your kids by Haring...you MUST...
Nina's Books of Little Things
by Keith Haring (Author)So I'll stop, lots challenged me, contemporary art often feels wrong. Like new foods as a kid you get strange tastes or it takes awhile to warm up. The relationship now to sponsor, ever the issue in the making of art...screams at me. CSREAMS....and in this way for me public art so often becomes a cultural artifact about
the way the rich see their power , their purchasing, their role in bringing "culture" to those like me. I get to looking from my places upward in this museum like Alice as her sizes shifted....tiny as the mouse in the big house. Feel my inadequacies, my poverties, my lesserness. It is a house that money built, now decorated.
And as jester this work is talking to our meanings.......in this way I'm re-defining what brought me to art long ago and what keeps me in this dysfunctional relationship. The symbiotic single-simpleton voice to the giant. I see this museum as climbing the beanstalk and facing the giant. Trying to get away with a gilded egg....as the speck of sand speaking and observing the ocean wave. I'll grind your bones to make
my bread....fee fi ...fo....
I see art this way, this felt this way, this day in my life.
Here are the artist works I saw that I myself, the PUBLIC it was "for", was
not allowed to photograph in
the house of Broad's great shiny toys.
