Misericordiam: Mournful Clacks at DUMBO Arts Festival

In Ranjit Bhatnagar's Misericordiam, an old accordion hangs in space, suspended from cords and cables. If you press one of the 4 buttons in front of it, the keys begins to move and then play the "tune" you selected. Tune, here, seemed to be more a clacking of keys than anything else and had names like "Shake."Ad Misericordiam is traditionally an appeal to pity, and in this case you start to feel bad for the old accordion still struggling along make mournful noise. 

 

It has the appeal of fascinating old mechanical things, even as it plays itself at your command. It was definitely one of the pieces I really enjoyed at the DUMBO Arts Festival last weekend. 

More from the artist here (and a lot of it is awesome.)

Frida Kahlo, and Me, at MoMA

Me with Frida in Fulang-Chang and I

I took this picture at the MoMA the other day. I really do LIKE Frida Kahlo, even while I think she is over hyped. Fulang-Chang and I depicts Kahlo with one of her pet monkeys. The painting was included in the first major exhibition of her work in New York in 1938 to much attention. Later Kahlo gave the painting to her close friend Mary Sklar, attaching a mirror to it so that, if Sklar chose, the two friends could be together.

And of course, I love inserting myself into other people's art; see Pistoletti and Kiki Smith.

Image from the museum's website, so you can see the painting better:

Chardin and Proust, on the Beauty of the Everday

Still Life with Plums, 1730

Rather I should say: Me, on Chardin and Proust, on the beauty of everyday things like jugs, water, and fruit in an article up on Escape Into Life magazine.  Being able to see the beauty in the commonplace is surely a quality to be valued.  Chardin's still life above looks nothing like my messy kitchen table--but then perhaps it does more than I can appreciate.

I'd love to hear what you think about the article.  This train of thought spun off my enjoyment of De Botain's How Proust Can Change Your Life, an enjoyable book I shared earlier this month here and also worth a look.

Naomi Grossman's Seated Woman at the DUMBO Arts Festival

Seated Woman, 2010

The DUMBO Arts Festival 2010 was, as always, a chance to stroll around a cute neighborhood and see art in a stunning backdrop, but this past Saturday was a little low energy compared to last year. I did see some nice pieces like this wire sculpture by Naomi Grossman, a NYFA MARK Program Artist. I thought the pose of the sculpture very suggestive and loaded with emotion. On the wall behind there was more amorphic wire, and from the artist's website I take it she does whole rooms of wire with furniture and people. I also love the delicacy of all the thin wires. It's very akin to making graphite pencil lines in 3D.

Another shot with my terrible camera-Seated Woman

A Room of My Own

I signed the lease on an apartment last night! I plan to move in October 1. After 9 months of going from place to place, whether St. Maarten or Mexico or different sublets in New York City, I'm tired. I want a place of my own. And so it is with great relief that I am hiring movers to help me get my stuff out of storage and put it in this white box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a year.

But the question is: what to do with all those big white walls?
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Genius: Vegetable Heads ala Photoshop and Mannerism

Linnea's Melonhead

As you can probably tell from my melonhead, I am the child prodigy of my Intro to Photoshop course I started last night. Last night's assignment was to take all these different fruit and veggies and make them into a melonhead, in a file named--at my teacher's insistence--"Linnea's Melonhead." Hmmm.

Obviously, I'm not good at all, which is why I am taking the course. If I was good, I would have found a way to split the kiwi mouth into upper and lower lip and turned them into animated gifs that moved up and down like he was talking.

In the great tradition of melon and other cruciferous heads, mine doesn't rank next to these:

Summer by Giuseppe Archimboldo, as are those below

Autumn

Man in the Vegetables

I think Man in the Vegetables is probably my favorite of these bizarre works, with his sly peeping expression, but this angular, incredibly modern-seeming man of books is also amazing when you think that Arcimboldo painted it in 1566:

Claire Twomey: White Baroque

Claire Twomey combines a Baroque excess of domestic--therefore feminine--paraphernalia with a Minimalist palette that manages not to overwhelm in her immersive ceramic installations. The white palette is really interesting with the shadows that come into play. They are installations rather than sculptures because they not only interact with their environment but because they often involve the viewer as well.

A bit like Rachel Whiteread's  signature plaster casts of the insides of ordinary domestic objects, like wardrobes, beds, floors and baths in 1988 that have been described as "minimalism with a heart". This artist, also British, has done a number of cool things, including but not limited to:

1. In London in 2006, Twomey created an intervention that wanted to  create an interaction between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the audience. The work, Trophy, filled the cast courts with 4000 Jasper Blue birds. The birds sitting amongst the classical sculptures created a three-dimensional landscape to walk within. 
2. For Consciousness/conscience 3000 units of porcelain were produced to create a temporary floor at the Ceramic Biennial in Korea. The floor was crushed by the participation of the audience during the exhibition period. Crunch crunch. That kind of porcelain destruction seems absolutely delicious to me.

Life-changing Proust?

No, I've not been drinking the lime-blossom tea with madeleines that slipped me into a delicious reverie on childhood, as did Swan, Proust's hero in In Search of Lost Time. I've only read the first two volumes of that masterpiece. However recently I read Alain de Botton's much shorter book How Proust Can Change Your Life, and came out greatly enamored of the book's subject Marcel Proust. (For a details on how very strangely he did live, try the book.)


I found an audio recording of the introduction to this well-written, and thankfully terse, work:



Alain de Botton has a lovely website featuring some other introspective and interesting-looking books in case you are interested.

Distractions: Robot Birthday Invitations

Note that "birthday" is written across the top in binary code

Yep, robot birthday invitations. Not really normal fodder for the blog, but it is what I was up last night writing instead of a blog post: an article on robot-themed birthday invitations. Isn't it amazing somebody would pay me to do that?

Mark Alsweiler: Folk art gone contemporary

Carrion Crows

I'm trying to remember just how I came across these fantastic paintings by New Zealand artist Mark Alsweiler, but as I can't, let me just say I feel lucky I did. They remind me of much of art I saw in Mexico, and like most folk art often suggest a narrative, but the palette strikes me as particularly contemporary.

Different Times

I'm also impressed by the sophisticated way he uses folk elements without "talking down to them," so to speak. Symmetry and balance play a role in that I suspect--as does a judicious use of blank space.

The Bigsky Web

The use of white in the paintings above and below feels so refreshing.

Sitting Down by the Fire

Horseman

This piece, with its skeleton on horseback riding next to the living man, reminds me of Mexican art most clearly.More than anything, I end up feeling fascinated and lingering over details in these pieces, wondering what the story behind them is.

Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy

I don't know what it is about the TED talks lately, like this one from Dan Norman on three ways good design makes you happy, but somehow I find them rather soothing.

Partly I think the attraction stems from my boyfriend and I now living in a place with a TV (!). Its very tempting at the end of the day, but all those espisodes of Law & Order are starting to make me nervous when I shower. Plus, nothing is very aesthetically-inclined, unless you count America's Next Top Model. So somehow I end up in the bedroom watching these on my computer while my boyfriend revels in X-Men, and will probably keep doing so until PBS starts doing Art:21 marathons. By the way, did you know that ART:21 had a William Kentridge movie in the works?

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Grown-Up Mobiles: Nathan Carter at Casey Kaplan

Williamsburg Brooklyn Public Housing Project Concealed Swinden Call and Response  

I'm really over long, evocative but gibberishy names for exhibitions-- POCKET SHRAPNEL SET-UPS VERONICA VEX AND BROOKLYN STREET TREASURE --being a great example of such. That being said, the art itself in this Nathan Carter exhibition at Casey Kaplan was quite good--small scale Calder-esque with a bit more intricacy. The wall-sized installation above could have been a Miro if flat, but Carter brought out the dimensions by creating the composition from large metal pieces at varying depths to good effect (hard to capture in a photograph).

There was another fabulous, playful piece reminiscent of the game Mousetrap that I loved. However I am in a sad state--camera-less-- and so will have to leave you with this one image pulled from the web and tell you to go see for yourself before October 23. For some reason Casey Kaplan doesn't have any of his new work up.

Early 1900s in color

This fantastic collection of photographs documents not only time and place, but the first use of color technology in photographs. Notice how the reds here seem to come out more than the other colors.

I think I like the people shots best, but there are many, many more here. Definitely worth a long browse over your weekend.

Ballroom Dancing: Zilvinas Kempinas at Yvon Lampert Gallery

Installation shot from Flickr. Ballroom by Zilvinas Kempinas.

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." ~Nietzsche

One of the more fun works I stumbled into last night was this room by Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas entitled Ballroom at Yvon Lampert Gallery. The constant hum of fans suspended from the cieling kept the black circles of tape on the ground in constant motion, while red and blue lights arced through the air in a similar path above them. All this motion and energy was reflected back by loose reflective sheets of mylar that moved as well. 

It was quite engrossing to watch, and most especially walk among, the movement. On one hand, the ballroom title made absolute sense as you watched the light pair with the tape below, and all the pairs looked like couples moving in unison. The mix of red and blue lighting with the reflective walls also created a funhouse sort of atmosphere--as if you couldn't trust your senses to guide you. Indeed, you had to be careful how you toed your way around those fragile tape circles.

Successful? It was disorienting. I walked out and had to shake my head a few times. It was engrossing, just taking a few steps into the room felt like an exploration. Certainly be able to walk through it rather than just view it was a strength. The constant flux of color was enthralling. So yes, successful, and refreshingly playful.

Speaking of trees: Color and Season

The Park. Gustav Klimt

Speaking of trees, something about the end of the season has me nostalgic for the lush green leaves of summer. Here are my favorite summer trees...all green with no hint of the coming autumn. Pisarro's colors especially just glow with a warm energy.

Ferry on a River. Salomon van Ruysdael

 

Chestnut Trees at Osny. Camille Pisarro

Fontainebleau: Oak Tree at Bas Brea. Camille Corot

Promenade Among the Olive Trees. Henri Matisse

Matisse's colors are like a swan song. Then Monet's pale colors and then Mondrain's stark palette speak of the coming winter.

Four Trees. Claude Monet

Grey Tree. Piet Mondrain

But no point in thinking about that now. The leaves haven't started dropping yet, and tonight should be a great kick off to the New York Fall art season, with lots of great gallery openings, including a group showat Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Nathan Carter at Casey Kaplan.

Maggie Tobin's Luminous Treetops

 Green

I found Maggie Tobin through Art In Brookyn--always nice to have hyperlocal resources--and the artist maes some lovely images of tree branches, displaced and translucent. It reminds me of lying on your back in the grass and looking up to see the such shine through branches, all black in thick relief.

Tobin notes how she captures such a deep yet luminous effect in her artist's statement:

The trees are painted in oil on translucent vellum stretched over mirror creating a subtle luminous quality and 3-dimensional effect. I try to capture the sublime quality of the Hudson River Luminists as well as the sense of limitless space in twelfth century Chinese Southern Sung landscapes. Within my paintings there are no cultural references; I aim to reflect the timelessness of nature in a fleeting moment.

Fontenelle

The subject matter and the medium really work well together here. AND The artist's website features flipbooks (fun!) and other goodies.  

Thelma Golden: How art gives shape to cultural change

This TED clip (one of an excellent series) shows Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem discussing past exhibitions that have explored how art examines and redefines culture. The "post-black" artists she works with are using their art to create a dialogue about race and culture -- and Goldin shares her views about her role in the process. It's about 15  minutes long--so be prepared to settle in to watch it.



More great TED talks here.

Refreshment on a Summer Afternoon

Basket of Wild Strawberries

One would be lucky to find oneself with Chardin's bowl of strawberries one hot summer day washed down simple water. Nothing pretentious here--just a glorious warm red, and earthy immediacy, and a beautifully painted piece of carefully rendered depths. It looks as if you could reach in and pick one.

The quality of Chardin's naturalistic painting in the 17th-century Dutch tradition was exceptional and his success as a painter of animals, birds, and fruit was immediate. The critic Diderot wrote in 1767, "One pauses instinctively in front of a Chardin like a weary traveler who sits down . . . in a grassy spot that offers silence, water, shade, and a cooling breeze." I agree. 

May your long last weekend of summer be full of wild strawberries.

It's September!

And I'm so surprised I'm a day late noticing. Ooops!

From Hyperallergic's dead on calendar above (click for details)

So this means its that lovely time of year to make a Fall list so that you can hope to cram in all the great,and less of the not so great, art. I've got a lot to catch up on. Anything I should definitely pencil in for the New York area?