Ducks in A Row

Excuse the saccharine image, but I have good reason to be chuffed and post image of baby ducks in rows. In my long hiatus from posting I have

• sublet my apartment
• quit my job
• bought a plane ticket to Saint Maarten
• all the while enduring horrible travel ordeals to spend Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family, only to rush home yesterday and spend it packing up all our personal possessions, in order to put them in storage before the subletters move in tommorow morning

It's all worked out so well so quickly I've hardly thought anything through. That's not exactly true, of course; I had been trying to move to the Caribbean for the winter ever since my boyfriend's was approved to work remotely. But nothing was working out until last Tuesday morning, and now suddenly I have a whole new adventure ahead of me.

We'll be there until March. I'm going to focus on my writing. I plan to finish my novel and start sending out query letters. I also am going to do some travel blogging, and hopefully scour up some other freelance opportunities. It's a pretty amazing opportunity, even aside from the beaches and sun. That's kind of like the icing on the cake.

I feel very, very lucky.

Something Weird This Way Comes

Ah, love that title. It's from my new article on the Tim Burton at MoMA exhibition up on Blogcritics. To wit:

It certainly must feel strange for an isolated kid from the suburbs of California to have hundreds of his drawings and objects ensconced in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. No less so because he is known for his films rather than his drawings. Yet if the opening crowds are anything to judge by, most museum-goers are nothing but thrilled to see this exhaustive exhibition of 700+ works related to Tim Burton's career. The crowds are right, for the same aesthetic binds Burton's early work to his later films.

Face the crowds you must, if you want to wander through the strange byproducts of Burton's imaginative mind. MoMA created a great entrance: through the mouth of a monster you enter a black and white striped hall lined with TVs playing a series of Stainboy animations. Then you enter a dark room where a carousel turns to creepy carnival music and glow-in-the-dark paintings on black velvet stare out at you. Next you enter the well-lit, white-walled galleries of MoMA – but even here things don't return to normalcy. The walls are filled with hundreds of sketches of monsters and people on everything from canvas to cocktail napkins.

Rest here.

And a happy weird Tuesday to you all.




h

Tim Burton at MoMA Opens

So you can expect the crowd to be double the size of the one pictured above, of people waiting for the Tim Burton book signing from Wednesday. From what I saw over the weekend, this is going to be a very popular exhibition.

Tim Burton did this great ad for his show at MoMA (although I'm a little unsure where MoMA would advertise). Luckily it's up through April, so if you want to see it you can wait until the crowds die down a little.

Exhibition entrance

I Got Mail

...from Sweden! I received a nice package this weekend, and of all the things that might have been inside it, I found this: a sponge emblazoned with the face of the Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden. I'm not sure about the man (not being on my Swedish gossip) but he certainly looks a lot like her fiance, the fitness trainer Daniel Westling.

Nice mail to get, and so helpfully labeled as kitsch. Otherwise, I might fear it was sincerely meant.

Electronic Pop Up Book Extraordinaire

Amazing, right? I've been mulling over making pop up books as Christmas presents. Then I came across this on Art:21 Blog. I'm not quite up to snuff yet, but if I can get my boyfriend to figure out the wiring thing, maybe. There's a wealth of pop up books on Youtube, should you feel similarly inclined to do present research this morning.

Anna Jóelsdóttir: Near Chaos

There is turmoil in the world, too many dots to connect; we are many outsiders floating around lost centers. I want my work to reflect that near chaos. - Artist Statement

Of the openings I went to in Chelsea last night, I saw a lot of more, or less, successful toyings with geometric shapes and color (nostalgia much?). What a relief then, to come upon Anna Jóelsdóttir's show priest chews velvet haddock at the Stux Gallery.

For this exhibition, the Chicago-based Icelandic artist produced mylar installations, paintings, a really extraordinary journal, and a big game of pick up sticks. While that may seem like quite a range of objects, they were very much unified by a stark, sprawling, detailed aesthetic that was precise yet evocative. It was too crowded to get a good installation shot last night, so I pulled the images above from Stux's website. The artist folds, cuts, and otherwise manipulates the painted mylar into a variety of complex forms. The mylar shows her typical thin streaks and spurts of color on a white background.

When the Bough Breaks

Jóelsdóttir's paintings, also on white backgrounds with pulsing color connected by thin lines, create poetic yet direct images. Somehow even where there is chaos and tension, there is also a sort of peace. I'm not sure how well these paintings reproduce here, but seeing them last night I was struck by how refreshing and clean the white background was, and how well the artist used the thin crawling lines to explode the space. They felt very personal and immediate. I like how they reconcile what ought to be opposite characteristics, like emotion and coolness, and strength and delicacy. They'll be up through the New Year if you have a chance to go by, and I recommend you do. More about the artist on her website.

Bent Horizons

Eco, lists, and the Louvre

Doesn't he look like Hercule Poiret?

I confess, despite having left University, I still manage to have professor-like crushes on men I've never met, and Umberto Eco comes first and foremost on my list. He wrote the bestselling The Name of the Rose novel, is the preeminent semiotician, and more recently has written treatises On Beauty and On Ugliness. So how chuffed am I that he's curating an exhibition at the Louvre as part of its recent shake up? Very.

In exploring the infinity of lists, his chosen subject, Eco studied the Louvre's collection for two years to create Mille e Tre. He likens our tendency to make lists as one that attempts to order and quantify chaos. This leads us to accumulate lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art, and encyclopedias. One painting that represents this might be a Dutch still life, with its profusion of naturalistic and bountiful fruit. Eco chose works related to the subject of lists and enumeration but also voluptuousness and the effects of abundance, or "vertigo."

Eco, from Art Newspaper, says:

“The search for The List in the corridors of the Louvre was as exciting as hunting the unicorn. Painting has a beauty that is born of accumulation; art embodies the plurality and variety of reality in the limits of the form. From Antiquity down to the 19th century we have been prisoners of the picture frame; in painting, the frame tells us that ‘everything’ we should be interested in is inside it. I want to invite people to go beyond the form of the physical limits of the picture, to imagine the etcetera, a very important concept that suggests that it may continue. I want to invite people when they look, for example, at the Mona Lisa to go beyond what is most obvious and to observe the background landscape and wonder whether it extends into infinity—something that Da Vinci perhaps intended. To look at a picture as if we had a movie camera that would do a travelling shot to show us the rest.”

If you want get more of a taste of my crush, check out this great Spiegel interview. Lucky for me, who won't be visiting the Louvre before the exhibition ends this February, is that Eco has written a book entitled The Vertigo of the Lists to complement the exhibition. On one hand, a list seems like a simple enough thing; we all make grocery lists or task lists. But if you think of an encyclopedic museum like the Louvre, what is it but a large list of universal culture, trying to encapsulate in one building objects the signify all of human achievement?

Damien Hirst: Practice Makes Perfect

"Anyone can be like Rembrandt. I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It's about freedom and guts. It's about looking. It can be learnt. That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice you can make great paintings."

The artist poses in front of his latest show

The Telegraph reports that Hirst: "made the comments as he defended himself from critics of his latest exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London, which has been described as "an embarrassment" and "shockingly bad". He admitted he had a long way to go before equalling the 17th century Dutch master, but dismissed the idea that Rembrandt was a genius and claimed that, with practice, he could learn to paint like him."



While I might not entirely disagree with Hirst's comment, it's hilarious that he is getting defensive now. Apparently putting animals in formaldehyde for ridiculous amounts of money required no comment. He really branched out with his work, and kudos to him for taking that kind of risk. At the same time his idealism- anybody can be a great painter if they just believe- isn't working here, at least according to the critics. Maybe he needs more practice?

Best Post Ever

I haven't blogged since Friday, and I truly truly meant to yesterday, but obviously that didn't happen. So I truly planned to make this up by writing the BEST POST EVER.
...
...
...

[Insert BEST POST EVER here]


I don't even have the BEST EXCUSE EVER--I went home to Georgia for a week. I got back late Sunday night. Yesterday I spent about three hours opening everything that had been sent to me and a solid hour dithering before I weakly began to do something about it. Then I succumbed to TV shows and two historical novels I wanted to finish. This is not the stuff blog posts are made of. I could tell you a bit about how I painstakingly listed each scene of my novel, cut up the paper into scenes, and played with their order until I had restructured my plot. (It was a more refined version of the post-its I showed you.) Then, however, you would know how long I've been stuck on it! I wish I had just written it this way in the first place, but ultimately I'm really glad to be excited about it again. It was like an albatross hanging on my neck.

So yes, this is just a 'hello' for now. I have to make myself a cup of tea and get some work done. Tomorrow: a MIDDLING - BEST POST is on the agenda! (I promise : )

Mandalas and Computers

I was drawn to the Rubin Museum because of the special Red Book exhibition (more details of Jung's work here), but what I enjoyed the most was the museum's Mandala: The Perfect Circle exhibition. Mandalas from the 8th C. onward are displayed in a variety of styles and mediums and for different purposes. They often show a circle bound in a square. Within the circle, like in the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) mandala above, the circle contains a four sided structure that radiates out from a central point.


Mandalas are created as aids to spiritual visualization, especially in diety yoga in which Tibetan buddhists imagine themselves as ideal beings in the form of a buddha. The one above is devoted to Yamantaka, symbolized by the blue thunderbolt at the center. The archectonic form within the circle is his palace. It soars upward at each level, and he is housed at the very center and the very top. The circle around is actually circles, representing different places that must be crossed before entering the palace of the god and ascending. The outermost circle is a ring of fire, followed by a ring of charnal grounds, followed by a ring of lotus blossoms. A monk would use a mandala to cross these circles and enter the palace, then to walk down the hallway, up the stairs, around the next level, etcetera all in his minds eye. The mandala is a 2 dimensional representation, like a map, to aid in the visualization of a 3 dimensional reality. It is difficult--especially for someone like me-- to look at a mandala and truly understand the visualization involved.

Enter, computers! The Rubin Museum has computers displaying virtual mandalas, in which computer graphic designers turn the 2D image into a 3D environment. The point of view of one is of a person dwarfed by the gorgeous and elaborate palace he/she is ascending. I gained such a better understanding of how mandalas were used and what a monk might see. The virtual mandalas are brilliant. Seriously, the coolest thing I have seen in eons. I didn't have time for the rest of the collection, so I hope to go back soon. Not to mention, the museum is gorgeous, not at all overcrowded, and has a lovely cafeteria with samosas and white wine.

Keats and Autumn

I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet's love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat's verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j

GreenEdge Artists Call

My friend Nicole is helping GreenEdge Collaborative NYC, a non profit that encourages a community-oriented approach to green living, to organize its 3rd annual fundraiser celebration. Part of the evening will be a an art auction, and GreenEdge is looking for art submissions focused on one or more element of sustainability: environment, society, economy, lifestyle/individual. If anyone's interested, check out this page. Also, if you live in Brooklyn, check out their supper clubs--super fun.

Weaving for the Future: Anni Albers

Albers, 1925

Albers, 1925
Speaking of color theory and Bauhaus, another artist who caught my eye at MoMA's exhibition was Anni Albers (wife of Josef). Albers produced textiles that explore color values and composition as well as the technical properties of fabric. She began study at the Bauhaus in 1922. Being female, she was denied access to disciplines like glass (taught by her future husband) and architecture, so the artist turned to weaving. Her initial reluctance disappeared and she grew to love the medium. A focus on production rather than craft at the Bauhaus prompted Albers to develop many functionally unique textiles with qualities such as light reflection, sound absorption, durability, and minimized warping.

Albers is probably one of the most prominent textile artists. In her own day-- before the more recent Feminist movement to reclaim the domestic arts as Art-- she received recognition for her work. She updated traditional textiles with modern technologies and process of consumption, and she united the craft and art worlds in her designs. These two accomplishments are tenets of the Bauhaus school, optimistic mandates intended to create a better modern world that remain relevant in design today. I can't help but think that Alber's career presaged another still relevant Modern trend--that of the successful female artist.

Albers, 1926

Picking Favorites from Bauhaus at MoMA

The images below are some of my favorites from the Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity exhibition at MoMA on view through Jan 25, 2010.

Joseph Albers of left: Glass in Grid, Upward, Skyscraper on Transparent Yellow, Paul Klee on right: Angler, The Twittering Machine, Mask of Fear

While this informative exhibition will lead you through the history of the Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933, the infighting of school leaders and teaching system didn't interest me quite as much as work of some of those who studied or worked at the school. The work of two pupils/teachers of Bauhaus on view are shown above: Joseph Albers and Paul Klee.

Albers produced the images on the left, a series of glass grids. These jpegs can't do justice to the quality of the glass and how it works with the color, but these are really beautiful pieces. The first is truly stunning: ends of bottles and other shards are wrapped into a grid with black wires. For a really amazing view of a similar piece, check this out. Later, Albers perfected a sandblasted method that created the sharp, flat later pieces seen below.

Klee, whose images are to the right, was a teacher at Bauhaus. These watercolors of Klee's were partially a way for him to work out color. Color theory was a large part of the Bauhaus curriculum, and important for both artists, although it appears more clearly in Alber's work here. What I think is fascinating about looking at the work of these two influential artists next to each other, in conjunction with the school they both taught at, is the very different work they produced. Neither artist's work fits with the image of Bauhaus I had going into the exhibition, which especially early on espoused a surprising spirituality and never truly lost its forward-looking optimism.

Bauhaus as a style has come to mean something quite different than the competing aesthetics and theories produced at the time suggests. This thorough MoMA exhibition, comprised of hundreds of objects, suggests the vibrant life of the school, which so hopefully produced objects for the future. More about the exhibition from the New York Times here.

h

Experiment: Successful

My bench.

Or at least I was happy with the result of my slow art "experiment"- 30 minutes staring at one painting. I poked around the museum a bit, and eventually chose one of Monet's Water Lillies. This was mainly because it had the cushiest bench in front of it. So I sat in the middle, put on some music to drown out distracting conversations, and looked.


And looked.

And looked.

It was actually quite interesting. I pondered over how Monet layered the paint and what his method of working was like. I tried to imagine what time of day he painted at. I've been to Giverny, and I tried to imagine him on that dark green Japanese bridge staring right down at the water. He really jams the water right up in your face, and without any kind of focal point. I grew to love the yellow at the edges, and to dislike the central purple area toward the right (it doesn't recede as I felt it should).

What I really loved about the whole experience was how peaceful it felt, as if I had all the time in the world. It was like meditating, except a hundred times easier because I had something to look at. The time went surprisingly quickly. I realized I should do this more often, and not just with art.

j

Experiment: Slow Art

Today I'm going to MoMA with a purpose: the challenge is to really look at a work. I mentioned a Slow Art event at MoMA a while ago. It asked participants to pick one or two works and just look at them from 15 minutes to an hour. I don't think I can handle an hour--so I'm aiming for 30 minutes.

But now I have to choose what to look at for that long? I'm tempted to choose something in the Monet's Water Lilies exhibition, because it will be big and pretty and I don't know that I fully appreciate Monet.


I've also been checking out the permanent collection. Of course, I can't go wrong with a Picasso. The collection has a magnificent collection of Odilon Redons--but they don't seem to be on view. I love Klimt's The Park, but I'm afraid I would get bored with it.


Of course, maybe I should choose something less well known. If they had Cy Twombly's Four Seasons up, I know what I would choose (it's another absolutely beautiful set of seasonal paintings.) I have quite the penchant for landscapes this morning. A portrait would also be a nice choice, because you could make up stories about the person. Ah well, decisions, decisions.

Anybody have any ideas?

A Bruegel For All Seasons

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters, above, is an iconic fall painting for me. This large work, bursting with golden yellow tones, illuminates the room it hangs in at the Met, more reminiscent of a Van Gogh than of the 16th c. works around it. However, Fall is nearly over.

The painting below is more appropriate for days when it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. Hunters in the Snow is a rare winter landscape of Bruegel, and one the similarly captures how a season feels. It's flat grey sky and the starkness of the trees against the white snow exude chill. Like The Harvesters, it's a picture that looks shockingly fresh and recent.

According to the Met's excellent Heilbrun Timeline for Bruegel, the artist was trying to capture the different seasons in a commisioned series, sic:

For the Antwerp home of the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, who owned no less than sixteen of the artist's works, Bruegel executed a series of paintings representing the Seasons, of which five survive: Gloomy Day, Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow (all Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum), Haymaking (Prague, Národní Galerie), and The Harvesters. Though rooted in the legacy of calendar scenes, Bruegel's emphasis is not on the labors that mark each season but on the atmosphere and transformation of the landscape itself.

Jungian Art?

I'm fascinated by the recently published Red Book of CK Jung since I read this New York Times article, which is a unique, fabalistic account accompanied by drawings of Jung's struggle with his unconsciousness. It happens to be the basis of Jungian thought, and shows Jung at his most unhinged, and perhaps transcendent. The drawing above is one that Jung did for the Red Book, which he used more as a journal, and is currently on view at the Rubin Museum of Art. The book has never been seen before. The museum describes the exhibition:

During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. More than two-thirds of the large, red, leather-bound manuscript’s pages are filled with Jung’s brightly hued and striking graphic forms paired with his thoughts written in a beautiful, illuminated style. Jung was fascinated by the mandala—an artistic representation of the inner and outer cosmos used in Tibetan Buddhism to help practitioners reach enlightenment—and used mandala structures in a number of his own works.

A great post on Artopia runs wild with mandalas and Jung and Aboriginal art...I highly recommend you check it out. It ends by arguing that none of these are, in fact, art, but tools of spiritual devotion. This kind of argument would rule out a fair chunk of the Western canon as well. Why can't it be art and be a spiritual tool? However, it's hard to fault someone who has turned me on to a really exciting exhibition I could have missed--I'll have to report back after I check it out for myself.

Contradiction in Terms: Shepard Fairey

Some thoughtful press agent forwarded me this video interview with Shepard Fairey of Obama poster fame talking about art and activism. Click here if the video doesn't work.

How does his marketing campaign for Saks fit into this spiel?

Kudos to Mr. Fairey for his excellent graphic design. As for his activism, the less videos made, the better.

Dr. Wicked's Write or Die

Continuing the Halloween theme, this writer's application is evil, fun and useful all at the same time. Dr. Wicked's Write or Die lab lets you put in the number of words you want and a time length. Then you choose between Gentle, Normal, or Kamikaze mode. Then you press go...and if you don't start typing and keep typing the white background starts to go red and crazy consequences ensue. Negative reinforcement has never before used the Hanson Brothers MmmBop to such good effect.


And in other scariness, Halloween best in show photo! Unfortunately it was POURING and we never made it into the parade, but at least I got to see this girl with her amazing claws and head. I would also post the man wearing only a bunch of leather straps with a huge feathered headress (because it was pretty scary too!) but I'm afraid my blog would get flagged. So use your imagination.