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carrot in the rabbit’s paw is wielded like a weapon, and the once soft, leaky, and cheap vinyl shell of the bunny has been replaced by armorlike, costly stainless steel, which reflects everything surrounding Rabbit and deflects any allusions to the sculpture’s interior.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
Notes from the West 