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Saturday, Sep 09, 2000
More Art
September 9, 2000
I just got back from a day at the Met. I was there for several hours covering several centuries. The wide array of art, from the 15th century BCE to 1998, from many cultures and geographies, is amazing.
I enjoyed the ancient and the recent art the most. During the 50 block walk from the museum back to my room, I've been trying to put my finger on what ties them together in my mind. Perhaps the emphasis on the evocative rather than the literal. Perhaps the comfort with the use of abstract. Perhaps the "mythology you can use" aspect. Rather than being dead stories to be mined for decorative images, art and mythology are living connections to dream states and real politics.
The recent works I've seen in the past week which had the most political content were in the Babara Kruger show at the Whitney, and in a show about 19th and 20th century propaganda art at the NY MOMA. The contrast between MOMA's propaganda show and the Whitney's Kruger show left me with the feeling that over the last 50 years the arts community has not sufficiently engaged with mainstream culture.
Rather than enlightening the public to the nature of messages, Kruger's work has been much more effective in enlightening the marketing industry in how to concoct messages. ("Re-invent yourself" -- Nordstrom's, "I must have" -- Sak's Fifth Avenue) Who's to blame? The public, for not paying attention? The artist, for choosing a canvas too small? The art museums, for clinging to 19th century ideals about art and presentation?
Mythic art for ancient peoples was often intertwined with their daily lives through public spaces or common objects. If the modern art museum is the modern temple of the life of the mind, the vast majority of people are agnostics.
A current example of art exploring the dream state is an installation called "The Darkest Color Infinitely Amplified" by Tony Oursler at the Whitney. Technically, it's kind of complicated, but the visual effect is amazing. Essentially, it's a 3-dimensional light sculpture, which calls upon images from mythology, magic and art.
Oursler's techniques have the intense visual imagery needed to reach a short-attention-span, post-literate culture. But it goes the wrong way in accessibility. I can buy a print of Picasso's Guernica (perhaps not in the full 8 meter size), I believe it's possible to make a fairly effective video of Kruger's installations. But Oursler's work requires first hand exposure.
Perhaps the media of the future must be those which are most accessible -- film, video, audio, print, and now, computer.
Modern Art
September 2, 2000
Bill’s window has an amazing view of lower Manhattan. I took advantage of this by taking a series of photographs of Jersey City and Manhattan at different times of day, under different lighting conditions. Sometimes a particular view would startle me, I would rush to find the camera and attempt to capture it.
I was copying a technique used by Monet. Over a period of years, he made a large series of paintings of a particular cathedral, at different times of year, different light, different weather. He only saved a small sampling of the best, but to see the lot of them at once would have been a tremendous sight.
Currently at the NY MOMA, there’s a small display of photographic series. The one that most impressed me was a series of five photographs by Ansel Adams. The photos were taken from a fixed position, and captured the varying dynamics of five different waves washing over a shallow stretch of beach.
Excerpt from curator’s notes:
The quality of acute observation within a restricted sphere of ideal motifs frequently expressed itself in a series of very closely related photographs. In one sense, the development was a natural outgrowth of the essential role of editing in photography. While the painter can repeatedly revise a single picture, the easiest, most common and most productive way for a photographer to revise a picture is to make another one. As a consequence, editing -- ascribing success or failure after the fact -- is a fundamental to the photographer’s art, and it often entails making very fine distinctions. On occasion, however, two or more pictures, barely different from each other, may survive the test. Thereafter, it is only a short step to presenting the pictures together as a group, thus transforming the challenge of fine distinctions from an artistic process into an artistic theme.
Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, NY MOMA
I thought I was copying Monet, but I was cribbing from Ansel Adams.