Orlando Art

Last weekend went to the Orlando Museum of Art. Behind the front desk were two large-scale charcoals by Robert Longo.  (See tma for another.)  In the courtyard a large Chihuly.  (Scroll down in denver-2014 for many more.)

Then the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art.  The Florida Prize, now in its fifth year, is an invitational exhibition recognizing 10 progressive artists working in the Sunshine State.

Carlos Betancourt’s “Let Them Feel Pink,” a 26-foot-long banquet table topped with a smorgasbord of objects including a giant pelican, all in pepto-bismol pink:

There were many of his photos too.  This huge one, Castro in Triumphant Advance to Havana, piqued my interest.  He was born in Puerto Rico; check him out in Wikipedia.  He was selected as the “People’s Choice” award recipient.

I did a double-take with Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s The Seeds of Decadence andTropicalypse.  They almost looked like black-and-white photos, but were ginormous charcoal works.  The first is a negative of a Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace.  A section of it at right.  I just took these photos with my camera, so resoution isn’t great, but you can click on them to see them larger.  He was born in Colombia, but has resided of the US for over 20 years.

His recurrent opulent and decadent charcoal drawings have grown dramatically in scale and complexity with two monumental multi-panel, charcoal drawings such as “Tropicalypse” and “The Seeds of Decadence”. These massive works portray two seemingly disparate scenarios: While the drawing “Tropicalypse” portrays an imaginary apocalyptic landscape of burning palm trees; a gesture alluding to the palm tree as an archetype of “tropical culture” in America, “The Seeds of Decadence” depicts a lavish and opulent Victorian room with inverted values.  TROPICALYPSE

This by Kenya (Robinson), the recipient of $20,000 (the “Florida Prize”), considers white male supremacy (but no one mentioned the fake grass buddah).  Guess the artist’s race and gender.

The #WHITEMANINMYPOCKET, a project that began in 2013, is a work in which (Robinson) imagined a small, corporate-clad, plastic figure as a talismanic reminder that “white male heteronormative supremacy is an idea not restricted to phenotype, gender or nationality.” In fact, (Robinson) suggests that, “the -ism is insidious because we each believe in it a small amount, creating a dense network to be challenged internally, and as a societal task.”

I have many more photographs, but I  think this is enough for today.

Sink Holes

Sink holes are big in Florida (except for the small ones).  I’ve been watching one slowly grow next to the road I take from my hotel to work.  I first noticed it as a leaning power pole and a chainlink fence, covered with a vine (kudzu – the vine that is trying to take over the South?), sinking into the ground.  The fence has gone from about 10 yards to 40 yards underground so far.

This from the Orlando Sentinel (Monday, July 9, 2018):
Several guests were evacuated after buildings crumbled when a sinkhole formed at the Summer Bay Resort on US Highway 192 in Clermont near Walt Disney World.

This explanation offered by Cloud9 Services:

Types of Sinkholes Found in Florida

… Dissolution is a process where surface rock is soluble to weak acids and becomes dissolved. Suffusion forms cavities below the land …

Dissolution sinkholes of dolomite or limestone are most intense when water first contacts the rock’s surface…

…cover-subsidence sinkholes… develop gradually. Their cover sediments are permeable and also contain sand. Usually they form in areas with thicker brush [and] may go undetected for long periods of time since they are hard to spot. With new construction… they become uncovered.

…collapse sinkholes can develop over a period of hours [and] are devastating; you probably seen photos of them devour a family’s home…  They occur when the covering sediments contain a vast majority of clay. Over time, erosion, ground water flow, and deposition of the sinkhole will cause a surface depression and a cave-in from below.
http://cloud9services.com/sewer-drain-and-septic-services-blog/types-of-sinkholes-found-in-florida/

Post rain

It does rain almost every day now, and afterwards the sidewalk around our office is patrolled by tiny six-lined racerunners, a few dragonflies doing their thing, a few brown aloles on the wall, showing off their orange crests.  Racerunners can grow to 12” so I wondered why these were so small, and then I saw the egret.  Guess she (so graceful I made her female) was picking them off before they had time to grow up.

Phone Booth

Scott Pruitt is gone.  So I asked my boss if we couldn’t request his $48K phone booth.  We have no place here for private conversations.

I was thinking of Superman and his phone booth.   I can understand that he had his diver’s skin/bicycler’s lyrca under his suit, but where was the cape?  And does he leave his shoes and suit (neatly folded) in the booth?  What about his wallet?

Traffic

The lights here in Orlando are three to four times as long as those in Tucson.  It was a culture shock being back in Tucson –  I was stopped at a light and had no time to drink coffee or file my nails or read a book, the light changes to green so fast!

But long stoplights are not the problem on I-4.  This from the Orlando Sentinel:

Declaring that taxpayers deserve to know more, Central Florida’s Democratic U.S. Reps… today asked the state’s top transportation official why the “I-4 Ultimate project is both behind schedule and over budget.”

Other stories are Surviving I-4: Punctured tires, busted windshields – “Oh lord, please”, Construction resumes on I-4 Ultimate project after worker’s death, Local reactions mixed to plans to tear apart, rebuild SR 436 intersection with I-4, and more.

Aging

Some people worry about losing as they grow older: their eyesight, their hearing, their hair, their minds.  Some worry about gaining: weight, cataracts, skin tags, nose hair, a wavering in your voice (the website said I need to sing to maintain a robust voice). But I am bothered about the migration.  This is not like the wildebeest migration, which I have witnessed in Tanzania (and I can tell you, I don’t care if I never see another wildebeest again).

Over two million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles move through the Serengeti and Masai Mara ecosystems in search of green pasture, in a regular pattern.

Watching two million anything day after day can get boring.  No, the migration I speak of is more insidious, and quiet.  Not like those animals splashing and braying as the crocodiles catch them in the river (wildebeests).  That “baby fat” that kept your hands soft, which are now witchy, the bones and veins bulging out, slithers up your arms, gathering strength, until it slides down your back, leaving some scouts on guard there, peering over your bra straps, then realigning its forces into a circle, as Cape buffalos do for protection.  Against what?  The hug of a grandchild?  (This circle is sometimes called a tire, although for thin people, such as my brother, it’s usually a bicycle tire.)  Why did evolution create this?

But while the migration is happening, so is calcification.  Don’t stop exercising or you’ll be taken for granite – and exercising is much harder to restart!  Granite doesn’t bend well and moves more slowly.

Haboob

Two of my friends have been in Glasgow, two others in Amsterdam.  And of course I’m delighted to be in Orlando where it’s 94° (heat index, which takes  into account the 57% humidity, 99°), even hotter than Tucson, whose monsoons have “cooled” the city down to “only” 91° (and with the humidity of 45% still feels like 91°).

In my 40+ years in Tucson I have only seen one haboob, and it was last fall, driving back from Phoenix.  Our climate change must be hatching more.  A friend posted this marvelous video on Facebook.  It shows A mountain, and the two houses I designed and built are right behind it.  haboob

Newfangled Gadgets

I challenge you to guess how to open the back end of my latest rental car, a Ford ecosport.  Bet you can’t figure it out without googling video instructions.

Note

My fortune cookie said, New possibilities with friends are in your future. 

Home

I do so like being home, spending time with family and friends, and working in my garden, even if it only is for a week of “rotation”.  Harvested four round carrots (easier to grown in the desert hardpan soil), two stubby bell peppers,  five small japanese eggplants, and one ripe cherry tomato.  The squash is in bloom and there are dozens of green cherry tomatoes, but the brussel sprout plant is not producing yet.  These are all plants that didn’t die back in the winter.  I’m working my own compost (produced by slow but steady worms) into the soil to plant more on my next visit home.  The Abert’s towhee is enjoying water in the birdbath; fun to watch him revel in it.  Quail investigating the yard; guess they haven’t had chicks yet.  And lots of collared lizards enjoying the sun.

Wednesday friend K and I saw an art movie at the Loft, Leaning into the Wind – Andy Goldsworthy.  I love his work, and have two books of it, but now he’s doing a kind of performance art (like climbing through hedges, as in this photo).  Here’s a trailer: into the Wind

The next day we took a tour of University of Arizona’s Environment + Natural Resources Building II by Richärd+Bauer Architecture.  Awesome building which earned LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – I am accredited in it) Platinum Certification.

The vision for the Environment and Natural Sciences complex (ENR2)… sustainable design. The University’s goals: this project is the centerpiece of environmental research, the building should have a definable iconic identity… serving as a living and learning laboratory, and be the most sustainable on campus…

Organized about a central “slot canyon”; curvilinear anodized aluminum ribbons define the walls of the central canyon, recalling the terra cotta walls of the natural canyon, leaning overhead, and falling away. The vertical striations of the anodized scrim recall the desert varnish pattern of the Navajo tapestry and the canyon walls. As in the natural environs, each terrace reflects the elevated desert floor, with native trees, grasses, shrub, and stone. The canyon floor is a sand and stone dry bed, which gathers the rainwater and guides it into storage cisterns for reuse…

https://www.richard-bauer.com/work/environment-natural-resources-2/

Walked the U (of Az) this morning w/ friend B and her dog, and brunch at the B-line.  Weather lovely: 64° feels like 84°.

LOL

You must read 40 Sea Gulls Wrecked His Hotel Room. 17 Years Later, a Pepperoni Pardon.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/world/canada/sea-gulls-fairmont-empress-victoria-nick-burchill-pepperoni.html

Florida Art

I’ve not been posting as often because I spend at least 7 3/4 hours a day on the computer at work, so I’m not enthusiastic about working on my tablet on weekends. But St. Petersburg was fun a few weekends ago. I had to go to the Dali Museum. It was built by Reynolds and Eleanor Morse who, in 1943, married, became friends with Dali, and bought their first work of his.  In 1982 they built this museum to house the largest collection of Dalí’s works outside Europe.  The architecture was amusing.  Those colored ropes, trailing from the tree in the wind, are made up of the bracelets we got when we entered the museum.  When you leave, you contribute to art.  The spiral staircase is in the center.

Dali’s style changed with the times.  Here are some of my favorites.  Love this Post-Impressionist scene, Cadaques, 1923.  (Cadaqués is a town in Catalonia, Spain where Dali spent summers as a boy and later made his home as an adult.)

The Portrait of My Dead Brother is huge – 69 in x 69 in.  This older brother was also named Salvador and died at the age of two, before the second Salvador was born.  When you’re close to it you see only the cherries (click on the photo and enlarge to see them) – the two under his nose have joined stems representing him and his brother.  Sorry not great focus – I was using a phone to photograph.  Had to take that one from a room away.

This Surrealistic self-portrait of Dalí surrounded by the elements of war, Daddy Longlegs of the Evening–Hope! was painted in 1939 in the US, where Dali and his wife sought refuge during World War II.  (The daddy longlegs spider, when seen in the evening, is a French symbol for hope.)  This was the Morses’ first purchase, a wedding present for themselves.

You’ll have to look up this Surrealistic painting, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, to understand all of the references.  It took over a year to paint and is so large, over 14 feet tall and 9 feet wide, I couldn’t get back far enough, with the crowds of people, for a straight shot.  It is amazing.

There is a room where you put on goggles and earphones to move through space made up of symbols in Dali’s paintings.  Sound has been added.  Much fun!

Even the gift shop has Art: this car.

Then the Imagine Museum, a glass museum, which was free that family Saturday, with children doing projects in the cafe area.  Can’t imagine them touring the glass exhibits.  Asked one of the women in charge – she said it was “a challenge.”  I have the names of the artists who did these marvelous pieces, if anyone is interested.

This is not my best photograph.  These are all glass copies of plastic containers.

 

This is all glass.  Amazing.  I had lots more photos, but can’t find them now.  Took them with my FEMA iphone.

 

Anyway, am leaving Tucson tomorrow morning to get back to work.  So figured I ought to post this.  Hasta…

Halloween 2017

Just a photo of one house in my neighborhood.  Makes me think I ought to do something other than give out candy…  No photos of the grandkids in their costumes yet – the night for spooks is two away.

WordPress

WordPress shut down my adding photos to my blogs, saying that I had used 3.0 GB of my 3.0 GB upload limit (a limit that I didn’t know I had).  Well, considering that my photos tend to be about 13 KB, that I have an average of 5 (or possibly many more) photos per blog, and that I’ve been blogging an average of twice a month for the past seven years, they should have shut me down me four years ago.  So I had to chuck out $99 per year for the Premium Blog, which I did, and now have 3.0 GB out of 13.0 GB upload limit (23%).

Renegade installations

 

I’ve always liked flash mobs¹, including Random Acts Of Classical Music.  These are the visual equivalent – Catskill Yarn Bombers on trees, guerrilla knitting on statues (this one in Portland), Chilean yarn bombers, Lanapuerto, which translates as Wool Port (boat show here).

 

 

But now there are flash flowers, Lewis Miller with his pop-up flower installations in New York City (photos of which I saw in the NY Times), and Geoffroy Mottart, a florist in Belgium, who puts flowered beards and wigs on statues because he wants people to pay attention to statues.

TMA continued

Just one of the outfits I photographed from feature exhibition Desert Dweller, the original ad and the outfit, designed by Cele Peterson, who for more than 75 years served as Tucson’s arbiter of fashion and grace, died²… in 2010 at 101.

This photo, right, from the TMA website of the John Chamberlain crushed car sculpture that the museum owns.  Compare that to his humongous sculpture I saw in Berlin: berlin-day-three

Also from the museum collection, this Bill Schenck, Wyoming #44.  I used to own one of his large oils, Psycho Killer (shown on right), but the ex- got it in the divorce, and one of his subsequent wives didn’t like it, so it was sold.  I rather like his kitsch cowboy paintings; wish I still had that one.  Got to know his art when I as working at IBM –  they had a huge triptych of a rodeo scene in their dining room.  So we went to Phoenix  for one of his showings, met him, and bought the painting.

I also like Donna Howell-Sickles And the Dog Jumped Over the Moon.  Her art was inspired by a postcard of a cowgirl c. 1935 seated on a horse captioned “Greetings from a Real Cowgirl from the Ole Southwest”, according to her website.

Canyon Wren is by Kate Breakey. I wrote about her² when we saw her work at the Stillness show at the Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery, at the Pima College West Campus.  (Sorry – this photo is blurred.)

CAS (TMA’s Contemporary Art Society) bought this large photo, Untitled (Dispatch), Summer by Gregory Crewdson.  From Wikipedia:

Crewdson’s photographs usually take place in small-town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and techniques.

From our trip to Berlin, TMA purchased two of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno‘s spider compositions, Semi-Social Mapping of Perdita 0.638 by a Pair of Cyrtophora citricola – Four Heads.  Click on them to see the detail.

Sorry – I never got around to finishing my Berlin blogs.  Can find no photos of the lab so think that we were not allowed to take any.  We saw his studio the last day.  We were told that the spiders are not enclosed, so anyone with arachnophobia should not go in; one woman stayed out. Here are my notes:

Arachnolab – spiders at work.  Senegalese spider in open lab for a couple of weeks… Combining different species for hybrid webs.  Some webs overnight, some a month.  Biologists know which ones can coexist.

Webs natural or sprayed black (ink has linseed oil, so tacky).  After spiders are moved to another frame, paper is put under the web and lifted up.  Food crickets and flies.  Spiders from all over the globe, Croatia, South Africa, South America.  Open frames have spiders working.

I had written about Barbara Rogers in is-it-over.  This, Her Garden: Objects and Sights Remembered # 127, is just a snippet of her commission for the dining room of Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, the largest cruise ship on the ocean (16 decks).

CAS had visited Ellen Wagener‘s home studio in 2012⁴.  This tree she did in black and white pastels, D.H. Lawrence Tree, Kiowa, NM, was donated to the museum by the Greenbergs.

I have many more photos of the exhibits, but it’s late and I’m tired, so this shall have to do.

¹https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/the-vegetarian-coyote/
²cele-peterson
³https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/equal-pay-day/
⁴https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/phoenix-art/

TMA

 

Tucson Museum of Art

After a summer of renovation and expansion, TMA reopened to members Friday night, with new galleries, new feature exhibitions, and new selections from the museum’s permanent collection.  And the public are free this weekend!  Because I hadn’t taken my camera Friday night, I went back for two tours today, one, Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor, by our curator, Julie Sasse, another, Desert Dweller, by the CEO, Jeremy Mikolajczak, and a guest curator whose name I didn’t get (both shown at left).

The museum looks totally awesome!  You must go.  Here are a few of the pieces I liked.

Wikipedia says that Nick Cave is a… fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist… best known for his Soundsuits: wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey.  Can’t imagine him dancing in this Soundsuit – made from fabric, fiberglass and metal, and covered in sequins, it looks very heavy.

A painting of a ballgown, Unfinished Conversations, by Laura Schiff Bean.

 

Bob Carey is the photographer and subject of the “Tutu Project.” This series of stunningly silly videos and still self-portraits was originally launched to cheer up his wife, Linda, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and later went viral. ⁵

This lithograph, Untitled (Joseph), by Robert Longo [who, according to Wikipedia] became a rising star in the 1980s for his “Men in the Cities” series, which depicted sharply dressed men and women writhing in contorted emotion.  (Unfortunately, I caught glare and/or reflections on most of these photos.)

Barbara Penn, a professor at the University of Arizona, came in to talk of her sculpture, On a Columnar Self, which she had originally done in 1994, but recreated for the show, and how memorials are being much discussed today (as in the Civil War memorials).  Her mother’s wedding dress on the plinth.  She said the eggs represent creativity to her, but could also be (obviously) fertility.

Angela Ellsworth… was raised as a Mormon; some of her work relates to that upbringing, such as the Seer Bonnet XIX – 24,182 pearl corsage pins, fabric, steel, and wood.  This series of pioneer bonnets represents the wives of Joseph Smith – this one is ascribed to Flora Ann.

Had to add this photo of Julie talking as I loved the outfit of the woman in pink lavender.

This gorgeous video by Sama Alshaibi – Wasl (Union) deals with climate change and is part of Silsila, a multi-media project depicting Alshaibi’s seven-year cyclic journey through the significant deserts and endangered water sources of the Middle East and North African… Silsila

WordPress has started limiting the amount and size of photos that I put in my blogs (it is free…), so I have to stop here and add more TMA photos to another blog.  On to other topics:

Republicans

First, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, gives his staff outrageous raises:

Ducey’s PR guy, Daniel Scarpinato… has scored 14 percent in pay raises since Ducey took office in 2015, bringing his salary to $162,000.
…Registrar of Contractors Director Jeff Fleetham, a campaign contributor… snagged a nearly 13 percent raise to $115,000.
…Department of Child Safety Director Greg McKay, whose 33 percent raise has boosted his pay to $215,250. Or Corrections Director Charles Ryan, whose 10 percent raise brought him to $185,000.
[and] …a long-time pal he promoted from assistant director to deputy director of the Department of Administration… Kevin Donnellan scored a 41 percent pay raise, boosting his salary to $161,200. That’s not counting bonuses of $4,836 over the past two years.¹

Then he gives teachers only  1%:

…he proposed a four-tenths of 1 percent pay raise for teachers – though ultimately he was pressured to boost the raise to 1 percent.¹

When they protested…

Ducey’s office… stated that those receiving raises had assumed additional responsibilities, and the governor has shrunk state government by shedding 978 employees…  The Republic found at least 1,700 state workers had been fired since Ducey took office, with the largest number from DES.

The majority of those fired across the state were over age 40. Older employees are more expensive to the state payroll because they typically have higher wages, cost more to insure, and their pension contributions are higher. Numerous fired workers told The Republic that Ducey appointees also targeted women, minorities, those with disabilities, gays and lesbians.²

The Church

This was on the news the other day:

ROME – A Vatican trial over $500,000 in donations to the pope’s pediatric hospital that were diverted to renovate a cardinal’s penthouse is reaching its conclusion, with neither the cardinal who benefited nor the contractor who was apparently paid twice for the work facing trial.

Instead, the former president of the Bambino Gesu children’s hospital and his ex-treasurer are accused of misappropriating 422,000 euros from the hospital’s fundraising foundation to overhaul the retirement home of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State. vatican/2017/10/14/

So I wondered if the guys in charge of Wells Fargo’s misfeasance went to jail.  But I didn’t even know about their bank fraud ring:

An Inglewood man convicted of running a bank fraud ring that pilfered more than half a million dollars from Wells Fargo bank and its customers was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison Thursday.³

Okay – steal $500,000, get seven years in prison.  So shouldn’t that happen to the cardinal and the contractor (who maybe should get 14 years, as he was paid twice)?  But no, I was thinking of the Wells Fargo employees who secretly opened 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers’ knowledge or consent.  Nope, nobody went to jail.  Not only that, but:

…it does not appear that Wells Fargo is requiring its former consumer banking chief Carrie Tolstedt…[who] was in charge of the unit where Wells Fargo employees opened more than 2 million largely unauthorized customer accounts… to give back any of her nine-figure pay… $124.6 million.

Wells Fargo… agreed to pay $185 million… to settle claims that that it defrauded its customers… The bank also said it had fired 5,300 employees over five years related to the bad behavior.⁴

More pleasant predators

The roadrunner has taken over my yard, and peered at me eating lunch.  And I caught a photo of the Cooper’s hawk at the birdbath.

¹http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2017/10/17/ducey-tosses-peanuts-teachers-while-throwing-banquet-his-staff/773475001/
²http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/2017/10/20/teachers-union-fight-20-percent-raises-just-like-gov-ducey-gave-staff-friends/782488001/
³http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fraud-sentencing-20170112-story.html
⁴ http://fortune.com/2016/09/12/wells-fargo-cfpb-carrie-tolstedt/
⁵Tutu Project

August in San Diego continued

Los Angeles

A continuation of art at the Broad Museum:

(We missed Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, a mirror-lined chamber housing a dazzling and seemingly endless LED light display. This experiential artwork has extremely limited capacity, accommodating one visitor at a time for about a minute, and requires a separate free timed same-day reservation which ticket holders are able to reserve, pending availability, after arrival at the museum at a kiosk in the center of the lobby, as we hadn’t figured that out when we first got in.  L said it’s coming to the San Diego Art Museum in November, so she’ll try to get tickets for it.)

A room of Jeff Koons, well known for his balloon dogs and other balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces, but years ago (1988) he did Buster Keaton of polychromed wood and others of its ilk.  This about Rabbit:

In 1979 Jeff Koons made Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny), the seed for so much of his future work… Seven years later, Koons… created Rabbit. The switch from the word “bunny” to “rabbit” is intriguing. Bunny is cute and floppy; rabbit is quick and sharp. The carrot in the rabbit’s paw is wielded like a weapon, and the once soft, leaky, and cheap vinyl shell of the bunny has been replaced by armorlike, costly stainless steel, which reflects everything surrounding Rabbit and deflects any allusions to the sculpture’s interior.

(Dorothy Cargill, who just passed away, at 86, in April of this year, the millionairess who gave our art group a tour of her Palm Springs home back in 2014 – I never finished those blogs – donated a larger balloon dog to the Palm Springs Art Museum, so “Jeff” made her a small one with a radio in it.)

I liked Forward Retreat by Mark Tansey.

Forward Retreat, 1986, describes the slipperiness of perception and questions the validity of innovation in art. The central image of horseback riders is painted as a reflection on water. The riders, all outfitted in uniforms of Western powers (American, French, German, and British), represent the nationalities of artists who came to dominate twentieth-century art history. They are seated backward on their horses, focused on a distant receding horizon, and are oblivious to the fact that their steeds trample on the crushed ruins of myriad pottery and objets d’art. With typically dry humor, Tansey implies two conclusions: that art progresses on the ruins of its past and that art making is propelled in part by unconscious forces.

Robert Therrien‘s Under the Table:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…  The table, at nearly ten feet tall, exudes an extraordinary presence.  One is compelled to walk underneath it…

 

 

Here a photo of another visitor.  Loved his diaphanous skirt, jacket with the skull, and fuchsia topknot, fitting nicely with Marakami’s work.

 

 

 

 

A few of Takashi Murakami‘s huge (pronounce that in Trump’s voice, without the “h”) paintings.  These were my two favorites, My arms and legs rot off and though my blood rushes forth, the tranquility of my heart shall be prized above all (Red blood, black blood, blood that is not blood), acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on board, although the ceiling reflection takes away from the blackness, and this one that I couldn’t get an entire photo of, as it wrapped around the room:

Takashi Murakami’s massive eighty-two-foot-long painting, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, reflects on the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan. Murakami discovered that roughly 150 years earlier, after the great Ansei Edo earthquake of 1855, artist Kano Kazunobu had created a large grouping of monumental scrolls conjuring the five hundred arhats, the traditional stewards of Buddha’s teaching. Murakami, through the post–World War II lens of Japan’s pervasive pop culture, again revived the arhats. In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow portrays a cartoonish, spiritual landscape, awash in an enormous tsunami of churning water. The work is a specific reference to a Japanese history of natural disasters and an attempt to place suffering into a visual language.

John Ahearn‘s Raymond and Toby.

John Ahearn has worked closely with his subjects, making life casts of people in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City… often making molds of people directly in plaster and casting them [this one in fiberglass]… Many subjects enact the roles that fill most of our lives — grocery shopping, walking a dog, getting children ready for school — and, subsequently, the sculptures are not only recognizable but joyful in their celebration of life.

I’d seen another of Kara Walker‘s cutouts at the Venice Biennale.

In African’t, [her] cutouts are nearly life size, becoming a theater of remembrance and forgetting.  Here, blacks and whites, men, women, and children, all participate in pre-Civil War scenes of degradation, sex and violence…

There were two of Shirin Neshat‘s videos.  (She has been exiled from Iran.)  Here are some shots from one of them.  Not much sound other than the wind and the women’s ululations.

Shirin Neshat’s Rapture shows a divided world where architecture and landscape stand as metaphors for entrenched cultural beliefs about men and women. The men are trapped in a fortress while the women make a long journey through the desert to the sea. While the men wrestle and pray, the women eventually board small boats to leave the land entirely. As with Possessed, Rapture’s poetic potential taps into the collective dreams, fantasies, and horrors confronting the Iranian people.

Cy Twombly‘s Nini’s Painting (Rome).  Think my color’s off; don’t remember the green, but looked online and saw it in five different shades.

Nini’s Painting (Rome)… is part of a series of monumental works completed by Twombly in the early 1970s that, according to some critics, were inspired by both a trip to a Jackson Pollock retrospective and the themes of repetition emerging in minimalist art.

 

Edward Ruscha‘s Desire.  He came into prominence during the 1960s pop art movement.  I liked this one.

John, by Chuck Close.  (Put L in the photo so you could see the monumentality of the painting.)

John, one of Close’s earliest paintings, is described as photo-realist…  instead of using mechanical means to transfer his images onto canvas, Close works entirely from sight to achieve the intensely animate detail…

Back to Tucson

Returned home Saturday afternoon.  The high for the day had been 108° and the humidity was 57% (not a dry heat!) as it had just rained.  Blowover from Hurricane Harvey.  A newscaster was interviewing someone in Texas whose house had just flooded for the third time in two years.  (Photo from CNN.)  I had just ranted about that in my last blog!  The feds should buy the house, tear it down, and make the land into a park.  And get rid of flood insurance!  Then I was thinking that all of the news had been about the amount of water (50″!!!) and the rescue of people, nothing about all of the oil refineries down there.  But on NPR this morning it was said that one million pounds of pollutants would be released around Houston:

On Sunday, Houston-area resident Stephanie Thomas told Houston Press “something powerful” hit her nostrils, describing the smell “like burnt rubber with a hint of something metallic thrown in.”

The La Porte Office of Emergency Management identified the chemical as anhydrous hydrogen chloride, a colorless gas that turns into a white mist of hydrochloric acid when exposed to moisture in the air. A Dow Chemical safety sheet warns that eye or skin contact causes severe burns, and that inhaling the fumes can be fatal.

Air Alliance Houston estimates that the area’s petrochemical plants will release more than 1 million pounds of air pollution as a result of Harvey…

(In April of this year, a federal judge ordered Exxon Mobil to pay $20 million in fines because the Baytown complex illegally spewed 8 million pounds of hazardous chemicals over a five year period.)  houston-refinery-toxic-pollution

That fits nicely with Trump’s pushing for the Keystone pipeline, and at the end of March:

..the State Department granted the pipeline giant TransCanada a permit for Keystone construction…

…it would connect with existing pipelines to deliver the sludgy oil to refineries in Texas and Louisiana for processing. Most of the refined product would probably be exported…  keystone-oil-pipeline

On a positive note, my plants having been loving all of the rain.  A few months ago I started making a daily bouquet for the shelf above my desk.  The flowers on the bougainvillea, Mexican petunia, and red bird of paradise last only one day, but there are so many of them that I can have fresh flowers daily.  (The woman who does the flower arrangements for our art group’s monthly art-viewing-with-wine-and-hors d’oeuvres did one with bougainvillea, giving me the idea.)  This arrangement of chive blooms (white), Mexican petunia (lavender), and red bird.  Yes, the chive flowers are a bit odoriferous, so I added some mint flowers (lavender) which don’t really show up here, but somewhat ameliorate the scent.

But all of my second round of tomatoes are still green, and the eggplants aren’t ripe yet.  I had to buy tomatoes at the grocery store!  As my daughter often texts me: #firstworldproblems  Like when the irrigation guys took a week to show up to fix a spouter on my drip system, which had to be turned off, so I had to water the garden by hand!  #firstworldproblems  Or the handle on the 20-year-old microwave broke off, and I had to wait two weeks for a new microwave.  (This is a rental, and the microwave was so old you couldn’t get parts any more.)  #firstworldproblems

Yes, I’m one of the spoiled Americans.  You probably are too.

Are You in the Top One Percent of the World?  According to the Global Rich List… an income of $32,400 a year will allow you to make the cut.  one-percent-world

August 2017

San Diego

Visited friends L and P last week in California.  Monday morning we made pinhole cameras and watched The Eclipse as tiny dots on white paper on their patio, coverage only 59% here in San Diego, kinda an eh event, but the weather was gorgeous. Then watched on television as The Eclipse moved across our country.  Our President wasn’t getting enough attention, as we were focused on Nature, so he pardoned Maricopa County‘s ex-sheriff, Joe Arpaio.  Arizona is such an embarrassing state to live in.

Next day went to see the movie Detroit, of the 1967 Detroit riot (think I was at Michigan State in summer school when it happened), because I am from Detroit and the director, Kathryn Bigelow, had done Hurt Locker, a good flick.  Do not see Detroit; way too depressing.

Thursday went to Balboa Park for an exhibit, Ultimate Dinosaurs, at the Natural History Museum.  At least a dozen complete skeletons, and a few great videos of the beasts flying by or walking by in herds, looking as natural as elephants.  The rooms, in the basement of the museum, were dark, and dinosaur roars and squeals emanated from the bones.  (My brother told me not to buy this camera ’cause it’s not good in low light. My bad – bought it anyway and it’s not good in low light.)  Lots of active information on how the continents divided from the original Gondwana.  (Explanation here from National Geographic: continental-drift.)

Wednesday was overcast, great day to hike one of the area’s five peaks, Kwaay Paay, at 1,194 feet.  We were in a cloud at the top.  Much easier than hiking at 12,000 feet!  (denver-2017.)

That afternoon to Ocean Beach to see friends N and G, who are renting there, escaping Tucson’s heat.  Walked about the town, through the large Farmer’s Market (Wednesdays 4-8 PM featuring locally grown produce, art & live music), and a short drive away, to Sunset Cliffs Natural Park, to see the sunset, it too late and too chilly for the ubiquitous divers who illegally take their lives in their hands.  TripAdvisor recommends cliff diving here!  (This photo from their site.)

 

Friday L and I drove up to Los Angeles to see the relatively new Broad Museum (pronounced with a long “o”).  It’s next door to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank O. Gehry Architects, which I have a photo of in this blog: 2014 san-diego.

She drove, and I was supposed to navigate.  After two-and-a-half hours of freeway driving, we could see the museum, but the main street, Grand Avenue, was blocked by construction.  Detoured to the adjacent street, but each of the next six cross streets had been turned into underground parking garages.  Finally backtracked to the correct cross street, but we were going one way through a tunnel, while the entrance to the parking garage was above us, going the other direction.  Took us probably 40 minutes to find the garage, once we were downtown!

Then we saw the line of maybe 200 people who didn’t have reservations for one of the 15-minute time slots, and, of course, we didn’t either.  L said to the guard who escorted us to and from the restroom, that she couldn’t possibly stand in line that long with her plantar fasciitis, so the guard gave us two tickets for immediate entry!

First, the architecture.  It is known as the Veil and the Vault.  The fiber-reinforced concrete façade, seen at left, was dubbed the “veil” by the architectural firm who designed it, Diller Scofidio + Renfro.  (The other photo at left shows the skylights providing filtered natural daylight to the galleries.)    The “vault” houses the collection storage, as well as the entry (photos at left).  This diagram from the museum’s website: the broad building.

Fabulous exhibits!

Three humongous pieces by a favorite of mine, El Anatsui, from Ghana.  (Mentioned him in this blog: monsoon.)  Friend L in front of Stripes of Earth’s Skin (detail, left – look at the curled copper wires and the small strips of aluminum, as narrow as bag ties), me in front of Red Block, for scale.

Born in Ghana and based in Nigeria, El Anatsui crafts giant shimmering sheets from bottle caps, reused aluminum commercial packaging, copper wire, and other materials. The elaborate works hang like tapestries referencing kente cloth, all-purpose pieces of fabric used in Nigerian and sub-Saharan African culture for everything from washcloths to dresses. The function of the kente cloth is often determined by its context. Red Block can be thought of in a similar manner; the firm square of woven red liquor labels can be folded and hung according to the dictates and curation of the institution that displays it. The materials are embedded with multiple histories and influences, ranging from the effect of the colonial period on Africa to current problems facing its people, including alcoholism, pervasive poverty, and the impact of global markets on the continent’s economies.

I’m going to post this and finish up the Broad artwork in the next post.

 

Berlin Day Three

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

A late start! The history buffs got up early to walk to the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charley. We others slept in. But our curator suggested that I trot to the shopping center across the street to see an installation by John Chamberlain, a tower of crushed cars.  (Since 1999, CAS has raised and contributed more than $1 million in artwork value to the Tucson Museum of Art in consultation with the curatorial staff. Acquisitions include works by John Chamberlain…)  TMA’s Chamberlain is only a foot or so tall, but cost many K.  Imagine how much this behemoth must be worth. The Tower of Klythie is in the Q Shopping Mall Gendarmenmarkt.

After breakfast, on a rainy, grey day, we took a coach to Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, “an international cultural centre [our guide, Jill Sheridan, is a private curator in London, so her spellings are English] where there is an artist-in-resident programme, workspaces for professional artists and it is an exhibition venue.”  Christoph Tannert, the director and project coordinator of KB, gave us background information and the tour.

In 1974 the defunct hospital [Hospital Bethanien: “Bethanien” was then a common name for welfare and healthcare facilities, most of which were run by church organisations, as it evoked the Biblical town in which Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead] was scheduled for demolition, but the opposition of political interest groups sharpened public awareness for the building’s history, thereby paving the way for preservationists to propose a series of redevelopment plans. Among them was Dr Michael Haerdter, the founding director of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH and its managing director until 2000. Under his leadership the institution grew into an internationally renowned project and presentation platform for contemporary art.¹

They moved in 2010 into a building that had manufactured metal chandeliers.  There are 400 square meters of exhibition space, but they have no permanent collection.  And in the basement are a wood and a metal workshop, complete with three trained workers and an engineer to work on the machinery for the artists.  Wow!  When I was in architecture school (with many more than 25 students), our wood shop was about the size of my living room.

There are 25 studios which face the courtyard.  Artists come from all over the world – this year from Japan, Egypt, Korea, Canada, Norway, German, Sweden, Thailand, Cyprus, New Zealand, the USA, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Australia, Switzerland, and Denmark.

Pets and kids are forbidden.  Each artist has a 75 sq.m. exhibition space.  They are supported for one year by grants of 1500€/month plus material costs.  The foundation is supported by the UN, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the EU, universities, cities (such as Berlin), countries.  In the US, Texas supports one artist each year.  This is the studio (one room, divided in half) of Joey Fauarso, from the US.

There are 600+ artists in residence all over the world, such as MoMA PS1 in New York and the London docks, both of which started in the 70’s.

The Künstlerhaus Bethanien is also an active publisher. Since its foundation it has produced over 300 books, catalogues and magazines covering a wide range of topics, exhibitions and projects.² This includes publishing a bilingual magazine each year: BE.  To BE or not to BE.  Or BErlin.

Elizabeth Hoak- Doering, who gave us a talk in her exhibit, psycho- pomp, has a fascinating backstory.  She was born in Philadelphia, earned a BA magna cum laude in Anthropology at Amherst College, an MAed at University of the Arts, in Philly, and a MFA in Sculpture from Boston University, after which, in 1997, she traveled to Cyprus on a Fulbright scholarship!  She moved to Cyprus in 2006, the only person, who I have heard of, who actually left the US because of Bush.

In 2011 she was selected to represent Cyprus in the 54th Venice Biennale.  She teaches Figure Drawing at the University of Nicosia, in both Greek and English.

There was a 98 minute out-of-focus video of a ride on the Ostsee Highway (Rostock to Wismar), which is made from reused slabs of the Berlin Wall in 1990.  (There was a lot of concrete to dispose of.)

She quoted a poem by Hilda Doolittle, but I didn’t write down the reference.  Perhaps Cities:

…That the maker of cities grew faint
with the splendour of palaces,
paused while the incense-flowers
from the incense-trees
dropped on the marble-walk,
thought anew, fashioned this —
street after street alike…

And she spoke of political freedom – how people express themselves.  But you need her description to appreciate these drawings.

Hoak-Doering’s Berlin works are devoted primarily to the recent past, traces of which she has been offered abundantly in Berlin. In Gesundbrunnen she explored the texts and drawings scratched into the air-raid bunker there as thoroughly as the signatures and messages from prisoners in the cells of the Stasi prison, Hohenschönhausen. Hoak-Doering did not copy, re-draw or photograph the inscriptions – which have often survived only in fragments or have been painted over in places – with any documentary intention: instead, she took the signs, engravings and inscriptions from their background by tracing and frottage, using this in turn as a pattern for a re-enactment of the unknown writers’ gestures and a focus on the surface as a transmitting medium. The direct ‘copies’ were left for the memorial site’s archives.³

Daniel M Thurau‘s exhibit is entitled It’s Only Rock’N’Roll (But They Will Play It At McDonald’s).⁴  One example at left.

 

Orawan Arunrak‘s Exit-Entrance. I just took a shot of the entrance curtain.  I can’t get the sound from this website, but it has the text of the conversation.  Here is the description:

All the artworks featured in the exhibition are are the visual and sound elements of a four-language conversation. It is presented in the form of installation of pattern images on the wall, which were designed from a conversation in Thai, German, English, and Vietnamese. It is the conversation between 10 people: a Thai monk, a Thai nun, a Thai anthropologist, a Thai woman, a German woman, a German anthropologist, a German man who ordained in a Thai temple in Berlin, a Vietnamese nun, and a Vietnamese woman, all of whom live in both Asia and Europe.⁵

There are gallery rooms for artists who live in Berlin.  One is Riccardo Benassi (whose work, if you google him, is all over the board); we viewed his Sleep’n’Spleen.  (We missed the acousmatic sound installation⁴ because we were not there during usual gallery hours.)

This is part of what is left of The Wall.  We have driven by this a few times, but I never took a photo, except for the graffiti.  (This from the internet.)

Lunch at Ubersee. Then a coach to the Springmeier-Gnyp Collection, where Marta Gnyp (she an art advisor from Amsterdam) and Giovanni Springmeier (a Berliner) live.  Much of their collection I didn’t care for; photos only of what I liked. The building, from 1903, survived the bombings (WWII). Even wallpaper in one room from 1903, but the chandeliers, one Murano glass, all new. Note: most buildings in Berlin are post-war, but some built with modern design, others to recreate demolished buildings.

This intricately beaded work by Raul Nieves, a Mexican artist, on their mannequin.  Below, a photo (from W) of the artist with some of his works (see this collection’s costume on the right) for this year’s Whitney Biennial.  (OMG – its website is totally disorientating!  http://whitney.org/www/biennial2017/artists.html)  Read this interview in his queer underground safe space from W – he’s fascinating.⁶

Petra Cortright, from Los Angeles,  does digital paintings created from a single master file of internet-sourced imagery.  I took this photo of a painting, printed on aluminum, which appears to be from the Zero-Day Darling exhibition.

Over the last few years, Cortright has been using Adobe Photoshop to make paintings, lightly hacking both the technology and the intended social use for this program—as an image-editing platform, Photoshop is frequently used to alter the appearance of women in photographs. Using websites like Pinterest, she sources colors, patterns, skin tones and other fragments of images. These elements are, then, integrated into the hundreds of abstracted layers that make up her work. This multidimensional process and hacking of visual language via technology was also a large part of her earlier video work, where she would “layer” software, manipulating the programs to create new visual effects and experiences.⁷

This is interesting, but you have to check out her website!  http://www.petracortright.com

Old master, 1690 (neglected to write down name, but not one of the Biggies), portrait of woman with embroidered dress, of tulips. Reminds us of Tulip Mania, beauty used for speculation, as many are buying paintings today. (A painting by the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat just sold at auction in New York for $110.5 M! )

One piece of Danh Vo‘s recreation of the Statue of Liberty.  We had seen a whole room of them on a private visit to Museion Bolzana in Verona two years ago.⁸

We the People, more than twenty fragments of monumental copper invade the fourth floor of the museum. The pieces reproduced life-size parts of the Statue of Liberty [as the original, out of copper, two pennies thick], an icon symbol of America, which is then revived dismembered.

In the ancient play, Medea, by Euripides, Jason leaves Medea for a Greek princess of Corinth, so Medea takes vengeance on him by killing not only his new wife, but her own children too.  This painting , by a German artist, whose name I did not get, depicts her bathing one of the children before she murders them.  (Whale bone in front not connected.)

Claire Tabouret‘s painting, The Blue Queen, 2016, from her show, Battlegrounds, which was shown at the Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, France.  You can see it better on their website (scroll down)⁹.

 

Portrait of English schoolboy (pimples and all) by Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra.  Known for her stark, engaging portraits, she often focuses on particular communities of people with an emphasis on capturing the awkwardness and self-consciousness of adolescence. “With young people everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed.¹⁰  I’ve seen some of her Beach Portraits somewhere, but can’t remember where.

A beautiful tapestry by Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, made from Jerrycans (5 or 12 liter plastic containers used for carrying water), although not as complex as those by fellow Ghanaina El Anatsui, who has gained international attention for his tapestries made from soda cans and bottle caps, and who I had mentioned in a previous blog.¹¹)

Based in Accra and working internationally, Clottey refers to his work as “Afrogallonism”, a concept thTat confronts the question of material culture through the utilisation of yellow gallon containers. Cutting, drilling, stitching and melting found materials, Clottey’s sculptural installations are bold assemblages that that act as a means of inquiry into the languages of form and abstraction.¹²

On, by coach, to Karin Sander‘s studio.  She sold 180 pieces of this wall at Basel in 1999.  It was wallpapered in canvas, and rectangles were cut out and then were then fit into dozens of differently sized clip-on frames and displayed in a top-to-bottom salon style: not paintings on the wall but  the wall hung as paintings.¹³ The walls are now going to be taken to Switzerland. The canvases sold between €4,000 and €10,000!

She also tacked canvases on a building to collect graffiti.  (Photo of her at left, below two of the graffiti-ed canvases.)

More recently, she has done scaled figures, 1/10 scale (you have to search for the dog).  She used a scanner to measure people, then a 3D printer to recreate them.  The first generation were monochromatic.

Then came the second generation, and all museum guests were scanned at an exhibition in Dusseldorf.

Sander created these Lilliputian figures by first recording her subjects in the round with sixteen digital cameras [there is one machine in Germany that does this three-dimensional photographic body-scanning, usually for the fashion industry], then feeding the images into a machine designed for making models and prototypes. From this photographic matrix, the machine sprayed layers of plastic according to the shape of the person at 1:10 scale, which was then painted with an airbrush.¹⁴

The third generation captured the colors as well.  This young girl, about 6″ high, in the artist’s studio.

A person is scanned with a 3D Whitelight Scanner [seen at right], and by selecting their own gesture, pose and accessories, visitors can shape these representa- tions of their own figures. The 3D body scanner reads the whole surface of a person’s body. The data is then transferred to an inkjet printer which three dimensionally builds the figures layer by layer according to the whitelight scan. The “mirror image” is completed… in either grey tones or color with all the details of the original person’s pose and appearance. The artist refers to these works as self-portraits.¹⁵

I am fascinated with the concepts she comes up with.  This for an installation in Berlin:

…At five different upstairs sites… Sander removed the wastepaper baskets next to the desks and cut perfect circular holes in the floor at the exact places where the bottoms of the baskets had been. At each hole a small metal railing was installed to prevent people from injuring themselves. For the duration of the exhibition, gallery employees were instructed to throw away paper trash as they normally would. But rather than filling receptacles, the trash drifted down to the floor below: a slow rain of paper from on high, a gravity-induced information flow, falling “messages” that made you consider the mysterious people at work above…¹⁶

 

She affixed vegetables to the wall in Kitchen Pieces.¹⁷

She mailed blank canvases.  The postal service wasn’t sure what to do with some of them.  In one case, a postal worker sliced off the previous label. (Yes, these sell for a lot.)

 

Recently she has been learning to melt glass.

After freshening up our our hotel, we had dinner at Hugo’s Restaurant, the East Boardroom, on the top floor of the InterContinental hotel, with a panoramic view of the entire city.  The food was marvelous and beautifully presented.  (I stopped taking photos of food.)  A lovely ending for the day.

¹http://www.bethanien.de/en/kunstlerhaus-bethanien/history/
²http://www.bethanien.de/en/programme/
³http://www.bethanien.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Presse_MAI_EN.pdf
⁴http://www.bethanien.de/en/exhibitions/riccardo-benassi/
⁵http://www.orawanarunrak.com/project/exit-entrance/
⁶https://www.wmagazine.com/story/raul-de-nieves-whitney-biennial-2017-studio-visit
⁷http://sfaq.us/exhibition/petra-cortright-may-13th-july-16th/
⁸https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/verona-thursday-june-13/
⁹http://artviewer.org/claire-tabouret-at-bugada-cargnel/
¹⁰http://www.artnet.com/artists/rineke-dijkstra/
¹¹https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/monsoon/
¹²http://www.gallery1957.com/artists/serge-attukwei-clottey/
¹³http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag99/dec99/sander/sander.shtml
¹⁴http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.411/
¹⁵http://lucienterras.com/projects/commission-your-3d-body-scan-portrait-by-karin-sander-during-the-armory-show/
¹⁶http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/karin-sander/
¹⁷http://www.notey.com/@cadaily_unofficial/external/10418570/karin-sander-at-helga-de-alvear.html

Berlin Day Two, afternoon

Monday May 29, 2017 continued

This afternoon we saw the Fahrbereitschaft [which translates motor pool or driving readiness – ?], with the Haubrok Collection. The series of buildings have a colorful history in the former East Berlin.  Purchased in its original condition more than two decades after the fall of the regime, a guardhouse, a sauna, and a bowling alley remain as reminders of its former purpose.¹  If you’re interested, read this English translation of the complex’s background: driving readiness.

Our guide for the week is an art curator from England, who put together our Programme.  This is what she said of the Collection:

This is a collection focusing on conceptual art built up by Barbara and Axel Haubrok.  Frank Hauschildt, who works with the Haubroks, will lead a tour of the site and explain its history after which we will visit the exhibitions and several artists’ studios.  Axel Haubrok will meet the group and discuss the collection during the drinks reception.

I absolutely loved 100 Boots by Eleanor Antin, 1973 when I first saw the black and white photos in some magazine in the 70’s.  So quirky.  These are just six of the many.  Unfortunately, they were behind reflecting glass, so you can see me taking the photos.  (You can google them and see much better images.)  A record of performance art.  100 Boots in a Field, 100 Boots on the Job, 100 Boots out of a Job, 100 Boots Try Again, 100 Boots Enter the Museum, 100 Boots Move On.

 

 

 

 

 

This is how Antin has described the conception of her 100 Boots series: “Somehow it came to me in a dream. There! Black boots! Big black boots. I got them at the Army-Navy Surplus then I printed them up on postcards. Over the course of it — finally two and a half years — fifty-one cards were mailed out to about a thousand people around the world. Now it is  a piece that I see as a kind of pictorial novel that was sent through the mail, came unannounced, unasked for. It came in the middle of people’s lives….It spilled out of their mailboxes along with bills, letters, newspapers, Christmas cards, divorce papers. They could tape it to the fridge, tuck it away in a drawer, throw it in the trash.”
Through the simultaneously haunting and humorous photos, Antin had found her first group to direct. She had also portrayed a clear character: an everyman with the might of fifty people, and as powerless as none. We follow 100 boots in its pursuit of survival, justice, and an expansion of consciousness. And by following 100 boots, we each become an extra pair. In essence, by simply having people look at the series, Antin has helped foster a unity among us. You could say that those boots represent us, all who have viewed them, as scattered as we are by place, time, and ideology. Is this a bit authoritarian? Sure, but isn’t all art authoritarian at some level? And that’s when the fact that these are military boots comes back around.²

I did not know of Allan Kaprow’s Pose before I saw this show, but I found this greatly amusing too.  Carrying chairs through the city. Sitting down here and there. Photographed. Pix left on the spot. Going on.  (Click on photo to enlarge.)

A two day performance where Kaprow and his friends walked around Berkeley carrying chairs. Pictures were taken periodically and left on the site where they were sat upon. The documentation of this performance is printed on seven loose sheets and bound in a manila envelope.³

I also love Mason Williams’ Sunflower.
Many in our group couldn’t get their heads around Conceptual Art.  Here is the Synopsis that our TMA curator gave us:

Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works…
Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim – that the articulation of an artistic idea surfaces as a work of art – implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which art was usually judged. So drastically simplified, it might seem to many people that what passes for Conceptual art is not in fact “art” at all, much as Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings, or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), seemed to contradict what previously had passed for art. But it is important to understand Conceptual art in a succession of avant-garde movements (Cubism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc.) that succeeded in self-consciously expanding the boundaries of art…⁴

The galvanised steel ducts used by the late German artist Charlotte Posenenske were not appreciated by most of the group.  This from Wikipedia:

In 1968 Posenenske published a statement in the journal Art International referencing the reproducibility of her works, and her desire for the concept and ownership of the piece to be accessible:

I make series
because I do not want to make individual pieces for individuals,
in order to have elements combinable within a system,
in order to make something that is repeatable, objective,
and because it is economical.
The series can be prototypes for mass-production.
[…]
They are less and less recognisable as “works of art.”
The objects are intended to represent anything other than what they are.

Our curator had also given us a Synopsis of Minimalism:

Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. A wave of new influences and rediscovered styles led younger artists to question conventional boundaries between various media. The new art favored the cool over the “dramatic”: their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism. Painters and sculptors avoided overt symbolism and emotional content, but instead called attention to the materiality of the works…⁵

In the last building were beautiful fabric hangings, but I neglected to record the name of the artist.  (Email me if you know.)

¹http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/sammlung-haubrok-haubrok-collection
²http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/antin/general%20press/2012_antin_yowzer%20yowzer_staff.pdf
³https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/716/
⁴http://www.theartstory.org/movement­conceptual­art.htm
⁵http://www.theartstory.org/movement­minimalism.htm

Berlin Day Two, morning

Monday May 29, 2017

Our room at the Berlin Hilton is a bit small, but my roommate and I have divided up the space. The breakfast buffet is marvelous, and I can get my lattes every morning.

Our first venue was the Boros Collection.  The building, which had been a WWII bunker, was renovated for the art collection, and a penthouse (which we did not get to see) added as the residence for the art collectors.  This photo I took of the exterior of the Reichsbahnbunker (Railway Passenger Air Raid Shelter), which was built by forced labor after WWII bombings; the “windows” on the exterior are fake.  I found photos of the penthouse (which is totally awesome) online, but they are copyrighted by Ailine Liefeld für Freunde von Freunden. However, they’re on this website: christian-und-karen-boros

The listed air raid bunker was constructed during the second world war… The building could house up to 3000 seated people distributed on five floors during air raids… a 1,8 meter thick outer concrete wall and a 3 meter thick concrete ceiling. In the year 2003 an art collector bought the bunker and commissioned Jens Casper of Realarchitektur to design a place for him and his family to live in and house his collection.
Outer additions were removed, the facades were cleaned and have been structurally refurbished. Selected ceilings and walls were cut out of the building, the resulting overlapping spaces now join the floors vertically throughout. Only parts of the interior walls are plastered and painted white. Traces of all former uses and incidents, graffiti, scars, bullet holes remain present.

To connect up to the newly created dwelling on top of the building, around 150 cubic metres of concrete were cut out of the bunker roof. The apartment is reached through this opening by way of a steel staircase and an internal open lift. It is laid out as an open plan with the living spaces flowing through the entire area. It has a ceiling height of 3.75 meters. Only few materials were used for the interior: concrete, smoked oak and shell limestone. The apartment is surrounded by a load bearing steel-glass facade, gardens, terraces, a pool and the Berlin roofscape.

The project has been widely published and received many prestigious awards…  bunker

We were allowed no photos of the collection.  Here are some of my notes, with similar photos from the internet:

One room had egg cartons of different sizes on the floor, by Chinese artist He Xiangyu. Gee, I recognized these bronze items right away, as I had made one in my lost wax class.  (‘Cept He covered his with gold leaf; I only sprayed mine with gold paint.) There is a photo of mine in this blog, before I spray-painted it: Lost Wax

His first egg carton installation had a “single actual egg – personal reflection of the artist on the one-child policy in China”¹. This installation had two eggs, for obvious reasons.  There was also a painting of his – lemons, them in white, the background yellow – similar to the one on this website: lemons

Two giant heads by Brooklyn artist Justin Matherly.  In the entry this eagle head This (photo on Pinterest).  They are carved originally from styrofoam, then cast in concrete, and set on walkers.

Next, Kris Martin, a Belgian artist, with Life after Death.

The Belgian artist brings together sculpture, drawing, photography, and works on paper that examine themes of morbidity, beauty, destruction and time.²

 

 

Avery Singer, from New York, does paintings, some huge, that look like black and white photos of computer animation, with lots of heavy, fuzzy shadows.

Employing the 3D-modeling software, Google SketchUp, to create an under-drawing, Singer applies acrylic paint to the canvas via an airbrush, creating images that are both digital and analog… part human and part cyborg…³

This website gives some examples: avery-singer

 

A large canvas by Danish artist Sergej Jensen, similar to this:

Jensen employs a range of ready-made materials in lieu of canvas including wool, silk, linen, and burlap. His works often eschew painting altogether, relying instead on sewing, bleaching, or staining. When used, paint has been applied subtly, sparingly, and at times from behind the canvas.⁴

Martin Boyce, from Glasgow, won the Turner Prize^4.5, and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2009.  A few nice mobiles and ventilation grilles with messages (much the same as these), venting to a closed-off space.⁵

German artist Johannes Wohnseifer, plastic trash in corner.  I looked him up on the internet; his works are all over the board, but couldn’t find anything resembling what we saw.

Johannes Wohnseifer’s video works, photographs, sculptures, and installations contain references to the history of art and design—analyzing our everyday life as defined by the media, in which the hierarchies between highbrow and lowbrow have become invalid.⁶

Katja Novitskova from Estonia was in the Venice Biennale.  This is the work we saw in the Boros Collection, Pattern of Activation, 2014 from Art Basel 2015 – larger than life-size horse digital print on aluminum looks 3D, arrow on trampoline is.  arrow on trampoline

German artist Peter Piller‘s photos of houses in series.  These photos are from the Sleeping Houses series.  (They are boarded up and “sleeping”.)

In 2002, German photographer and archivist Peter Piller obtained over 20,000 aerial photographs from a bygone business venture that endeavored to sell homeowners images of their own houses. In the statement for the work, somewhat dryly titled Arial View Archive, Piller explains:

“The salesperson had used a ball-point pen to add some revealing notes to the back of the photographs: “Not interested in pictures”, “looks nicer from the ground”, “wife keen, but house too expensive”, “you’ll get half a moped for that”, “doing it himself” or simply: “deceased”, for instance.

After several archive inspections, I was led to the first collection themes and classification categories: “Sleeping Houses”, “Floral Objects” and “Person in front of House”. Whilst sifting, for the forth, fifth and sixth time, through 18 removal boxes packed with yellowing photos and negatives; I eventually discovered the material that now constitutes the content of this book.”⁷

 

 

A few pieces from Norwegian artist Yngve Holen. Two sets of Hater Headlights that were similar to this, and a section of an airport fence, possibly entitled Butterfly, a symbol of death.  yngve-holen

Right, this massive piece of metal, the face of a CT scanner covered with a fishnet stretch fabric.  I don’t trust anyone for the most part. But then again, I am my own creature, 2015, plastic, fabric, metal.

For his first solo show at Galerie Neu, the artist has produced a new series of works with the face of CT scanners, the machines that create tomographic images from computer-processed X-rays… beige medical-grade plastic, and dressed with black, white, or yellow fishnet stretch fabric.⁸

Hubcaps that look like snowflakes, such as this one, right. yngve-holen-at-schloss

And a washing machine part, with a chicken, not with a car brand, but similar to this description (foto: Anna Kærsgaard Gregersen):

Sensitive to Detergent, Moving Forward (2012), which includes a VW-branded, ghost-white, 3D-printed chicken breast resting on the drum of a washing machine.⁹

Swiss Fabian Marti – photograms, some massive, covered with resin, of eggs.  fabian-marti

The only note I have for Michel Majerus is big, upstairs.  Cannot remember the piece(s).  This from Wikipedia:

Michel Majerus was a Luxembourgish artist whose work combined painting with digital media. He lived and worked in Berlin until his death in an accident in November 2002.

Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson did an interesting installation of mole holes, in bronze, scattered about a room.  Homage to Mole, I think it was entitled.  I couldn’t find any on the Web, so just imagine this dirt entry to a mole hole (right), without the grass, cast in bronze with a black patina.  Has to be done in the winter when the ground is frozen.  There were a few paintings too.

…Andreas Eriksson works with a variety of materials. Here in Basel he does painting, photography and sculpture, for which he uses structures from nature. His still works have their origins in the isolation of his homeland, a small place in the Swedish countryside. In accordance with the famous quote from Cézanne, he does not work subject to nature, but in parallel to it, such as when he traces the painterly structures and rhythms of a group of tree trunks…”.¹⁰

Some of the works, we were told, were chosen by Christian Boros’ wife, Karen, an art historian, such as a number of works by the German artist, Uwe Henneken, whose work has been described as kitsch or romantic, and reflects the “inner child of the artist”.  There were three paintings, and a number of sculptures of Monsters in boxes, like this.¹¹

There were a few bronze (except for the parasol) sculptures from Chinese artist Guan Xiao, and this may have been one of them: Slightly Dizzy (2014)¹², which I loved, and a video.  This was not it, but you get the idea: Guan Xiao

The works we saw of Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz dwelt on skin color, both in bottles of silicone, and in paintings, one done on gold.  She was influenced not only by the beauty industry, but also by Yves Klein… a notable French artist known for his innovative blue monochrome artworks.¹³

At the Venice Biennale 2015 (which we attended) the [Swiss] pavilion is filled with a monochrome liquid matching the standardized northern european skin tone.  (photo by marc asekhame)

pamela rosenkranz fills the swiss pavilion at the venice art biennale 2015 with an immersive installation … her chosen materials — bionin, evian, necrion, neotene, silicone, viagra (to name a few)¹⁴

But there was also a satellite photo kaleidoscope of earth.¹⁵

In the collection was a muslim robe, hand embroidered by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth, Untitled, from Cadernos de Africa [Cahiers d’Afrique] project, 2014, which was the one he had worn walk[ing] along old slave routes from Johannesburg to Lyon¹⁶ (or was it walking from Brazil to Miami Beach?) and then gave away.

He exhibits quite regularly in Europe, recently in the Lyon Biennale, and in Oslo for instance. Still the continent hasn’t had the opportunity to greet him personally, as he plans to walk the earth of Latin America and Africa, before going to Europe. He’ll get there eventually, finding his way via Africa. It is not a matter of dislike of Europe, Silva tells me, it is just a matter of priority, as Nazareth wants to understand his own roots first. In 2011 Nazareth went by foot to attend Art Basel Miami Beach. His trip took him almost a year. He was met with disbelief by border patrol; sometimes they didn’t accept his passport. He was wearing flip-flops, not washing his feet so they gathered the dust of all the America’s, to be washed off in the river Hudson as an apotheosis of his journey. While travelling, he took pictures of himself and the indigenous people he met during his travels, to look for similarities, to look for differences (‘Noticias de Americas’, 2011). It is his own background, being of African, Krenak and Italian descent that fuels his search for identity. Sometimes people think he is black, either indigenous. In Cuba, he was perceived as local. On Facebook he posted a message: “Being mixed-race and travelling through the Americas, my skin changes every day. At home the labels are not so well defined…I cannot open my mouth because then my skin color changes, there are days when I am an Arab, Pakistani, indigenous and other adjectives which may change according to other people’s gazes and the words to come out of my mouth at any rate, sometimes in the United States of America, when I go into white people’s shops, everyone is afraid, including me.”¹⁷

The curator giving our tour mentioned that he is now hyped in the art world, but when his art sells, half goes to the galley, and the other half he gives away (as the kaftan).  His suitcase was a sugar sack from Brazil (in the collection).  He is very much a performance artist.  Here is a video of him walking backwards around the Tree of Forgetfulness: Tree of Forgetfulness

Nazareth’s long walks question the notion of boundaries and the global scale. In L’Arbre D’Oublier, filmed in Ouidah, which was once home to one of Africa’s biggest slave trafficking ports, the artist walks 437 times around the Tree of Forgetfulness, which men were made to encircle seven times in a rite meant to erase their memories of the past. The performance gesture, a poetic attempt at rewinding history, is repeated by Nazareth around other trees, in Africa and Brazil, including an ipê amarelo (golden trumpet tree), the national symbol of the latter country.¹⁸

For the last artist I have written Ama Blanca and Brazil, but cannot find her.  It translates White Love.  Perhaps that was the name of a painting…

Phew!  On to Clarchens Ballhaus for lunch, then the afternoon collection.

¹http://www.galleryintell.com/contemporary-chinese-artists-at-the-armory-show-2014/
²http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/157
³https://art21.org/artist/avery-singer/
⁴http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2013/08/sergej-jensen-at-regen-projects/
^4.5 The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist… Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery… Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the UK’s most publicised art award. The award represents all media.
As of 2004, the monetary award was established at £40,000… A prominent event in British culture, the prize has been awarded by various distinguished celebrities: in 2006 this was Yoko Ono, and in 2012 it was presented by Jude Law.
It is a controversial event, mainly for the exhibits, such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – a shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst – and My Bed, a dishevelled bed by Tracey Emin. Controversy has also come from other directions, including a Culture Minister (Kim Howells) criticising exhibits, a guest of honour (Madonna) swearing, a prize judge (Lynn Barber) writing in the press, and a speech by Sir Nicholas Serota (about the purchase of a trustee’s work).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Prize
⁵http://mmk-frankfurt.de/en/the-collection/werkdetailseite/?werk=2005%2F4
⁶http://www.artspace.com/johannes_wohnseifer
⁷http://theexposureproject.blogspot.com/2009/04/photographic-typologies-peter-piller.html
⁸http://www.galerieneu.net/exhibition/125
⁹https://frieze.com/article/focus-yngve-holen
¹⁰https://artprize.baloise.com/home/news/2015/baloise-art-forum-andreas-eriksson.html
¹¹http://thebreedersystem.com/artists/uwe-henneken-artist-page/
¹²http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/apr/22/artist-profile-guan-xiao/
¹³http://blog.art.com/artwiki/~/yves-klein/
¹⁴http://www.designboom.com/art/swiss-pavilion-venice-biennale-2015-pamela-rosenkranz-05-08-2015/
¹⁵https://www.moussepublishing.com/products-page/product/pamela-rosenkranz-our-sun/
¹⁶https://frieze.com/article/walker
¹⁷http://africanah.org/paulo-nazareth/
¹⁸http://www.19festival.com/paulonazareth/?idioma=en

Easter 2017

Dyed eggs with my three grandchildren.  It’s trite, but they do grow up so fast!

Spring Flowers

Some of the palo verdes in the wash behind my house have turned yellow.  One of mine is now in flower.  The tiny backyard is looking beautiful.  A friend gave me a yucca and two prickly pear cuttings to fill in around the huge barrel cactus and rocks (see photo).

I think the quail have nested under a large Texas ranger in the side yard.  “Dad” was patrolling along the wall.

There is 18″ of ¹/₄” welded wire wrapped around the backyard wrought iron fence, and I assumed, when I planted a vegetable garden in a corner of the yard, that no rodents would get in.  Then I spied a rabbit, frantically trying to get out, until he realized that I was watching him through the window, and he froze. When I went out to open the gate to shoo him out, he was gone, and a dent in the top of one section of the welded wire.  He was so scared that he didn’t eat anything!

 

I enjoy seeing neighbors’ yards in bloom when I walk to the mailbox.  My next-door neighbor has this cactus in a pot, where it’s happily blossoming in fuchsia.  Orange flowers on a cactus down the street.  And this purple prickly pear is squeezed between an ocotillo and a saguaro.  My own prickly pear flowers.

 

Art

Can’t remember what I was looking for when I found Erwin Wurm’s One-Minute Sculptures on the Net. Check out all three websites – there are lots more.

 

http://publicdelivery.org/erwin-wurm-one-minute-sculptures/
http://www.stuk.be/en/one-minute-sculptures
http://sculpture.artapsu.com/?p=1581

Smoke Bomb Photos

Then I somehow got into these smoke bomb photos.  Above, by Julie Smith – Aviphile, “Lover of Birds.”

And this one: Se me escapan las ideas by Marina Gondra –
http://marinagondra.com/

But that’s enough for tonight. http://myportraithub.com/smoke-bomb-photography/  And you can google for hundreds more…