One Day: Three Museums

Today, in true Art Girls fashion, we squeezed in as much art as possible before boarding a plane back to Los Angeles.

First stop: The Museum of Modern Art's presentation of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938. MoMA provides special early-morning viewing hours for members, and we arrived promptly at 9:30 in order to avoid the crowds.  Many of Magritte's paintings are on the small side and are filled with detail, factors which necessitate up-close viewing.  

René Magritte was at the heart of the Surrealist movement, and the artist developed key strategies and techniques to "defamiliarize the familiar" and make "everyday objects shriek aloud."  Photography was not permitted, so I clipped a few samples of Magritte's iconic paintings from MoMA's website.

  

 

Next up: the Christopher Wool retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.  Christopher Wool is a celebrated contemporary artist who began his career in the 1980s, a time when many considered the medium of painting to be outmoded and irrelevant to "avant-garde" artistic practice.  In the subsequent decades, Wool forged a highly-focused and successful painting career.  The artist uses stencils, patterned rollers, rubber stamps, silkscreen, ink, and turpentine (in addition to actual paint) to make his paintings.  Most are large-scale and black and white although there were a few pops of color.  Some are text-based, although the text is fragmented and viewers often must struggle to make sense of the letters; others are composed of repetitive patterns, contain overlapping flowers (taken from clip art) or are pure abstractions.

I was familiar with Wool's works as the artist is included in MOCA's collection and a number of my current clients own his works; however, viewing such a large amount of work at one time fostered a greater understanding and appreciation of his oeuvre.

Finally, we made the trip across the East River to P.S.1 and the largest exhibition to-date of the work of Mike Kelley.  P.S.1 is a unique exhibition space - it is a converted public school building.

Mike Kelley is regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time.  Over his 35 year career he worked in every conceivable medium - drawings, performances, video, sculpture, music, photography, prints, and painting.  His work deals with subjects as wide ranging as repressed memories, educational spaces, American pop culture, religion, class relations, childhood trauma, and Kandor (the capital city of Superman's home planet).  Given the diversity in Kelley's output, it probably comes as no surprise that we loved much of the work, found some pieces difficult to engage with, and just plain did not "get" other works.

Born in Detroit in 1957, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his tragic suicide in 2012 at the age of 57.

 

MoMA purchased this installation earlier this year for over $4 million.

Many of Kelley's works incorporate found stuffed animals.

A sculpture of John Glenn made from debris drudged from the Detroit River

Sonja admires an installation from MOCA's collection that I installed in Amsterdam during my tenure at the museum.

Kelly's "Memory Ware" series is named after a genre of Canadian folk art in which everyday objects are decorated with numerous small items (e.g., shells, beads, buttons, jewelry).  The artist's "flat" Memory Ware pieces are giant mosaics of everyday items and keepsakes.  Innumerable specific objects can be recognized, but none is the central focus of the composition.

Jackie poses in front of one of her favorite works.

Detail from the "Memory Ware" series

Kelly's "Kandors" are scaled-down versions of the fictional capital of Krypton, Superman's home planet.

Three museum exhibitions = three huge art-filled bites of the Big Apple!

For more information on the above exhibitions, visit these links: René Magritte, Christopher Wool, Mike Kelley.

Rain Drops Keep Fallin' on My Head (even though they're not supposed to)

Random International's immersive environment entitled "Rain Room" has caused quite a stir in New York City.  The interactive installation (on view at MoMA) consists of a room-sized grid of falling water that pauses whenever a human body is detected.  Hopeful visitors wait for hours in lines stretched around the block.  I awoke this morning at 6:00 and took my place in line at 6:45.  The doors opened at 8:00 for museum members, and I made it in at 9:30. Not too bad given reported wait times of up to 8 hours.

Only 10 people can experience the Rain Room at a time and once in the room visitors are encouraged to stay no more than 10 minutes.  A MoMA employee reported that four marriage proposals had taken place in the Rain Room and one visitor was rushed to the hospital after a handstand attempt went terribly wrong.  Most visitors spent their 10 minutes posing for pictures with their friends or significant others; I was no exception.

One couple decided to dance.  They were having the time of their lives.

They attempted the signature lift from "Dirty Dancing" but didn't quite stick it.  Still it was fun to see art taking place within art.

Despite the advanced technology involved in the work, everyone seemed to get a little bit wet.  Perhaps a sign that technology cannot control nature or mirror perfectly the actions of humanity?

As I exited Rain Room those behind me in line asked, "Was it worth it?"  For me, the answer is a resounding YES, but you know how much I love interactive art.  And I can't think of a more Art Girl way to beat the New York City heat.

For a humorous take on Rain Room, check out this Gallerist NY blog post.

MoMA encourages visitors to take photographs (finally!) and post them on Instagram.  You can view a live stream on the MoMA/PS1 website (click here).

Turrell Transforms the Guggenheim

This is the summer of artist James Turrell. Gentle readers may remember our earlier posts on this Light and Space artist's retrospective at LACMA and show at Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery.  A monumental site-specific installation at New York City's Guggenheim Museum has visitors lined up around the block.  

The Guggenheim rotunda in its natural state:

The Guggenheim rotunda Turrell-ified into an oval of tiered, shifting natural and artificial light:

As with Turrell's skyspaces, the museum installed a reclined bench along the edge of the room for visitors to sit, look up and experience the 60 minute cycle of changing colors.  From the point of view of the bench, however, one could not see the entire space.

View from the bench

Visitors populate the benches and floor

As you can see in photo above, some visitors took to the floor in the center of the space in order to be able to view the work in its entirety.  I resisted at first (floors are dirty...think of how many people have walked around there today...germs...yuck) but the temptation was too great.  I threw caution (and hygiene) to the wind and lay down on Frank Lloyd Wright's floor.

"Self-Portrait on Floor with Purse Pillow and Foot"

Interconnected rings lined with LED fixtures form concentric ellipses that echo the banded pattern of the museum's iconic architecture leading up to the oculus of daylight.  Here are a few photographs showing the radiating waves of vibrant color:

The museum also presented a few of Turrell's other works.

Again the museum guards scolded me for taking photographs!  This Art Girl can't catch a break!

"Excuse me, Miss - no photography, NO PHOTOGRAPHY!!!!"

Hot Town, Summer in the City

With the east-coast heat wave in full force, I sought respite at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Before spending time in the galleries, I went up on the roof.  Is this a crime scene or an art installation?  You decide.

(It's actually an art installation by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi.)

The back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, I went inside for the Met's Spring 2013 Costume Institute exhibition, "PUNK: From Chaos to Couture," which examines punk's impact on high fashion.  Punk is about chaos, anarchy and rebellion.  The Met guards were about order, not getting too close to the fashion, and absolutely no photography.  I took photos anyway, and felt so punk while doing so.

Dolce & Gabbana

A dress made from trash bags

Alexander McQueen

Brooklyn Bound

Remember the "Sex and the City" episode when Miranda moved to Brooklyn and it was as if she relocated to another state, another country even?  Having never been to Brooklyn, I had no idea how spot-on SATC got it.  As it turns out, Brooklyn is very far away from my upper east side home-away-from-home but worth the trek in oppressive New York summer heat (via a sweltering subway) to visit the famed Brooklyn Museum.

On view: the first solo show in New York of globally-renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui.  Born in Ghana and living in Nigeria, Anatsui expresses themes of freedom, movement, globalization and the concept of a "nonfixed form" through a unique artistic medium: linked metal bottle caps.  The artist's discovery of a discarded bag of aluminum liquor-bottle tops over a decade ago inspired him to explore their artistic potential.

Anatsui employs up to 40 studio assistants to flatten, cut, shape, and manipulate the bottle caps into more than 30 different shapes which are hand-stitched together with wire into blocks of color and patterns.  The artist then selects and assembles the blocks on the studio floor; the composition growing and changing until the artist is satisfied with the overall pattern and form.  In linking the scraps of metal, Anatsui sees himself linking the histories of the individuals who previously touched the objects.

Two monochromatic works brought to mind luxurious fabrics and the work of painters Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter.

Waste Paper Bags (illustrated below, foreground) is made from discarded aluminum printing plates (used for printing everything from newspaper sports pages and obituary pages to wedding invitations) manipulated to look like crumpled newspaper and formed into the shape of monumental bags.

Many of Anatsui's early works are made out of used mortars and discarded wood.  The work illustrated below is composed of individual strips of wood which can be arranged differently each time it is installed, reflecting the artist's desire for his work to remain dynamic.  These wood pieces were among the artist's first experiments in the "nonfixed form."

When working with living artists, museums often encourage them to be present during the layout and installation of their exhibitions.  One of the museum guards informed me that Anatsui did not arrive in Brooklyn until the majority of his works had been installed by museum staff.  Anatsui wishes to inspire creativity in the people charged with installing his works and says he merely provides "data" for others to reenvision and manipulate.  He was pleased with the museum's installation with one exception: a work entitled Peak (below, in the foreground).  Museum staff installed the work in such a way that the skirt part laid flat on the floor; Anatsui scrunched it up a bit to create a more wavy form.

Peak is made from the tops of Peak brand milk tins.  Drainpipe (below) incorporates the same materials.

"Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui" was a jaw-dropping exhibition of one of my favorite contemporary artists.  Equally magnificent was the museum's exhibition of watercolors by John Singer Sargent.  I was not permitted to take photographs in that show.  Click here to view Sargent's beautiful watercolors and learn more about that exhibition.