Tag: Art

This is a kick ass collection of art which covers like a lot of the history of art in orange county.

One of my favorite pictures is the top of the Flour building all washed out. It really feels like my childhood.

I spent most of my time sitting in some op-art space with a ring casting spheres on the wall–very cool (Robert Irwin Untitled (#2220), 1969. I could hear some Magic Carpet ride Steppenwolf song coming from some other art, but the space still felt very cold quiet and arty.

There are all these video screen with people talking. Large new widescreen tv’s. There are cube chairs to sit on, one in front of each screen. There are headphones connected to each tv sitting on the cube chair. the monitors are set up in two concentric circles–there must be 30 of them.

I started at 3:00 position when you come in from the other gallery. I watched one monitor for about 15 minutes.

The monitor was a monolog by an Israeli women about teaching babies sign language, about her thoughts on diversity, and about her thoughts on LA. She was cool & I almost cried when she got all excited about her daughters first use of sign language.

The video looped after about 15 minutes & there was no indication about the start and stop which I think was part of the point. The women commented on the guy filming her several times which was interesting.

Getting through all of these videos will take a long time, but I will try going around and see if my thoughts on this project change. And it really does feel a lot more like a project then like an art piece.

Chris Burden sets up a giant battle scene with toy soldiers, Japanese robots, and other childhood toys. He also builds a large mound of dirt in the middle of the gallery space to arrange all this stuff. There are binoculars on the wall so you can feel like a real general and look in. There are planes hanging from string. There are missles in the wall and bombastic explosions in the dirt and around the water skirmishes.

I am really not sure what it is all supposed to represent or imply.

Before you enter the neatly swept space there is this entry way with a bench. It is a wooden bench and very comfortable to sit and think. You cannot really see the art from this location & I am not really sure why it is there, but it is my favorite part of the installation because I could sit and read.

Lisa, Jack, Kate, and I went up and saw LACMA this Sunday.

I went and saw the Magritte exhibit which was outstanding–lots of great paintings, fantastic curation, awesome exhibition space, good crowd, the entire thing ruled.

We also saw the Picasso print, Krishna History, Japanese stuff, and lots of other things–a really great day at the museum.

The salad bar is overpriced–in fact the food here is an issue that should be addressed, the line for the food cart is huge, but the sit down restaurant is not inviting & the cafe is kind of lame.

The Japanese pagoda was a huge hit with the kids. Jack and Kate also enjoyed rolling down the Tar Pits Lawn. Something that I remember doing as a kid.

After this we saw some live music–Vivaldi, Schoenberg, something else–lots of fun. A great day.

I am really excited about Sleep. A picture that I really think that I understand–how it plays with past painting, how it move painting in some direction. The creativity and the precision. The very real desire to intend something.

The book I have includes an excellent article on the painting, that stresses the linguistic effort that Desderio goes through to make paintings into something–the progress of his art, the unfinished aspect of this painting–all sorts of good stuf.

I have been talking a lot about his painting of his son, in which he attempts to magically make his son healthy by using art as wish fulfillment, or something. He paints his son, healthy, stepping from the canvas–I do not know if this helped the kid, but I do know that it helped Desderio. I am not sure how to measure if it helped the kid since all this may be interrelated. Something very interesting is going on.

Sleep, on the other hand, does not appear to be wish fulfillment–I do not get the desire to sleep from the painting, nor do I see a celebration of sleep. The genocidal nature of sleep is there, clearly, the AIDS metaphor is also very alive in the painting. But most importantly, the notion that sleep can be captured in a painting, without reference to Dream seems to me to be most of the point.

I will try to get to see some of this guys art as soon as possible.

When I see images like this, I generally do not consider it art–or maybe I do not see it as complete art. So much of the detail is not in the scene–the boxes at the bottom are cut off, the nobs move across the image in a way that makes me see that I am not seeing the entire image. And when I know that I am not getting the “whole picture” I stop looking. For some reason I am only interested in Art that I can “understand completely”.

At some level, I know that this is ridiculous, any attempt to fully understand authorial intent is always going to end in tragedy, but at another level, I am worried about art that will not stand up to serious scrutiny. If I do not see the entire thing, I doubt that I will every be able to figure it all out. And I am a figure outer–knowing the whole story is important to me.

Thus, I research the image & the artist–I do not trust that the image can contain the entire story. I need to work on that. I need to be more present with the art. To respond to what it says on the surface–I need to work to develop a more flat critical approach.

This images talks to me about mass production. It has yellows, browns, and purples. Their is a rainbow like metaphor in the movements of color. The bottom of the image is framed by a wooden structure that is part of the machine. There is a chain, like a bike chain, which rises from the wood into the machine. The brown wood transforms into the white metal that holds the dials. The top of the image is very similar to the bottom–there is a parallelism which is somehow slopping from the bottom right up to the top left–as the colors slide so does the image.

And there is a sense of slipping, the machine is slipping into or out of something. The chain has slipped.

I can read that this image comments on the means of production slipping into an imaginary purple space.

I went to this event in Brea with Scott and Toby. Before the show we had Indian food accross the street. It was very good food-buffet style, medium somosa, lots of fun.

After lunch, we hit the gallery. Lots of weird watercolors. Some very realistic street scenes, lots of pictures of farm equipment, lots of pictures that were too light. We talked a lot in the gallery–Scott was having a very good time. Toby taught us a lot–petina or something which means pictures that are too light. The importance of fast brush strokes–of water colors as zen art.

At the end of the exhibit we were standing in front of the second place painting. This short old Japanese dude walked up. Toby was not a big fan of the painting, but this guy knew stuff and Toby respected him–he shared his ideas on painting vs. illustrations. When I asked the guy to comment on the painting, he said that it demonstrated a lot of discipline.

Indeed.