The City As The Ultimate Representation Of Twentieth Century Art

To mention Sol Lewitt and leave it at that is to do a disservice to the other artists showing at MASS MoCA since truly each exhibit is more engaging than the last. So, to continue my tour of our visit to the museum, one of the things I find most fun at a museum (and this is part of why I am particularly partial to contemporary art museums) is learning about a new artist whose work I like, but who is not as yet quite so well known. Yes, I’m sure this is only in small part due to an appreciation of the art, and in a large part due to the opportunity it represents to buy art, but I only buy things I genuinely like so I think it’s more or less the same thing at the end of the day.

The show that my husband had wanted to see, and which was the impetus behind our trip to MASS MoCA in the first place, is entitled “Invisible Cities”.  It is actually up until February 4, 2013, so if you have the opportunity to find yourself in North Adams, Massachusetts, within the next year, I highly recommend making the stop.  It was an overall interesting exhibit, not only for the individual works, but for the way in which it was curated and the varied interpretations of how we experience cities by the different artists, not just because each has a different vision, but because they actually appeal to different senses.  Emeka Ogboh’s Monday Morning in Lagos, 2010, consists only of a speaker mounted on the ceiling which plays the sounds of, as the title suggests, Lagos in the morning.  The city is given physical form, is literally mapped out, through the voices of the bus drivers calling out their destinations layered over the voices of other residents of the city.

In the first room we entered, full of fantastical three dimensional “cities”, the one set of painted collages mounted on the far wall was the least interesting work — that is until I got close to the images and discovered that they were in fact my favorite things in the room.  Mary Lum’s collages are surprisingly wonderful.  Surprisingly because from a distance I read them as yet another rendering of a certain kind of linear constructivism that has already been worked through in numerous ways by artists over the last century.  And yet, on closer inspection, Lum’s take on the subject is absolutely unique, contemporary and fascinating.  Her collages not only layer images and shapes, but layer a broad range of artistic idiom.  They bring together Constructivism, Cubism, Pop Art, you name it … there are elements Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Picasso, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, and dozens of others, layered over each other to create an image of the city which is beautiful, but more than that, which has a depth that draws you in with increasing intensity the longer you look.  The modern city is, in essence, the ultimate signifier of the 20th Century, the object which much of 20th Century art struggles to come to terms with, to give form.  And that 100 years of visual culture gets compressed into the space and form of Lum’s collage.  The following images show some of Lum’s collage work that was included in a show at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  The first image is most representative of the work included in “Invisible Cities”.

Mary Lum, "Index 2." Acrylic and photo collage on paper. 10" x 13" (Photo courtesy Mary Lum) - image via Gwarlingo.com

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The Art Of The Anal Mathematician Is Someone Else’s Work

Recently I have come across advertisements and reviews in a number of places for a new book entitled The Art of Not Making.  More recently, I have come across the book itself in a museum gift shop.  I have not yet purchased or read the book, so I get to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes:  theorizing authoritatively on something based on little to no actual knowledge.  Eventually I plan on reading the book, and will likely share what I have learned at that point, but generally I find discussing a book after I have read it to be an overwhelming process since I feel the need to address and answer to every one of the thousands of points made in the book.  Addressing only the simple layer of ideas outlined in the synopsis is a much more manageable, and therefore much more fun, project if you ask me.  The gist of The Art of Not Making is that it addresses the production of art wherein the artist conceptualizes the work, but hires other artisans to do the actual production, and examines the questions raised in this process.  As described on Amazon.com:

Master craftsmen, artisans, and fabricators are just some of the technical specialists who help realize the creative vision of these artists. But when an artist does not make his or her own work, what does it mean for the nature of art and for the status of the artist? What is the relationship between creativity and production?
The book explores these and other questions about authorship, artistic originality, skill, craftsmanship, and the creative act.

No doubt the book is coming out now at least in part because these questions seem to have some contemporary relevance and urgency, so it is not surprising that it seems particularly a propos to a number of artists I have been thinking about lately.  But while it seems on the surface to be an issue raised by conceptual art, the idea of artists hiring assistants, artisans or craftsmen to execute their visions has come and gone as a facet of artistic production for as long as there has been art.

I last ran into this book in the bookshop at MASS MoCA last week.  The museum was all around amazing and we saw a ton of great stuff, but because I had “the art of not making” on the brain, I was particularly drawn to the museum’s exhibit of Sol LeWitt wall paintings.  LeWitt appeals to me almost as much as a neurotic obsessive compulsive mathematician as he does as an artist, but perhaps that’s just me (and my poor beloved son who is, without question, his mother’s child).

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007) 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978 Painted wood 99 1⁄4 x 29 x 29 inches Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation Photo by Ann Hutchison © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and courtesy of the estate of Sol LeWitt - Image via the Blackbird Journal archive

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Hey There, You’ve Got Some Art On Your Dress

Yesterday’s post led me to think about not so much collaborations with artists, but instances in which fashion has modeled itself directly on works of art.  In the twentieth century, no one really did fine art fashion as well as Yves Saint Laurent.

In 1965 he presented his Mondrian collection:

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Embracing Nature … It’s Not Just About Hugging Trees

Since I was in high school, I have been drawn to architecture which has been designed to interact with nature, and taking its position in nature into consideration in giving it form.  That means that — I know, like millions of other teens — I went through the obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright phase, and the accompanying obsession with Ayn Rand phase.  And like many (although by no means all) of those teens, have struggled with the disillusionment when I was able to understand Rand’s political view ever since.

The longer I looked at photographs of a couple of recent homes built to blur the line between inside and outside, gorgeous and brilliantly designed homes, the more they began to look not so much contemporary, as Modern (insofar as that defines a decidedly twentieth century aesthetic ).   The interiors particularly are not so far from something Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed.  They are a distillment of a number of twentieth century architectural greats from the 1930′s through the 1960′s.  But as I say, that’s only after looking for a really long time, since on the face of it — and again, in their bones — these two homes are absolutely contemporary and innovative.

The Belvedere Residence by Anastasia Arquitetos, located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, takes advantage of the temperate climate by allowing outside and inside to flow almost seamlessly into each other.  Since aesthetics are my thing, mostly I’m just drawn to how exquisite the first floor patio is.  But the reality is, that the home was designed taking into thoughtful consideration how to maximize space in an urban context, how to take maximal advantage of light and air and manipulate them to make the house efficient and comfortable.

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The Jetsons Have Arrived

I was enthralled by the title of Chip Brown’s article on designer Marc Newson in this mornings New York Times Magazine:  ”The Future Isn’t Futuristic Anymore”.  Brown contends that Newson was captivated by the space-age utopia depicted on the Jetsons, but that while his own aesthetic over the years has been influenced by that paradigm, Newson has been disappointed by reality – by the fact of that future not panning out and leaving him feeling that “the future isn’t futuristic anymore.”  I struggled over the course of the article to digest this assertion, since it runs seemingly directly contrary to an observation I have made repeatedly over the last decade or so — that the world we live in is, in fact, the world of the Jetsons.  Sure, not exactly.  We aren’t buzzing around from place to place in our personal little flying capsules, yada yada yada…  But a lot of that vision has come true. (See Bob Sassone’s clever little piece on HuffPost Tv from a few years ago titled “So How Accurate Was The Jetsons?“)

The Jetsons Pictures & Photos – The Jetsons.

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Do You Want Your Art To Pick You Up? Bring You Down? Or Leave You Cold?

We're healthy and fit, and boy we're having fun.

So, about those metro stations …. I’m serious about the Moscow Metro being one of my favorite places. The stops and various lines are connected by these incredible tunnels and I could spend days going from station to station looking at the art and architecture. However, I feel uncomfortable being so enthusiastic because everything about the tunnels and stations is the product of an immeasurably oppressive dictatorship. To enjoy the mosaics of Stalin waving to the people, at some inescapable level, seems like a sort of approval for Stalin’s government. What remains true, nonetheless, is that while Stalin told people in no uncertain terms what their art could and could not look like – an imperative that was brutally enforced – the form he chose as sanctioned Soviet art was not an accident. It was effective precisely because people responded to it and read it positively, and that enabled him to twist it into a powerful form of social control.

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Happiness is a Kitschy Mosaic

After the succession of the posts on Soviet bus stops and then on the aesthetics of visions of the future, what follows logically is one of my favorite places in the world: the Moscow Metro. I couldn’t resist attaching 40 pictures, so this is going to be a two part post, with pictures today and discussion tomorrow. Each station has its own style — they are listed in no particular order.  Enjoy.

Novokuznetskaya Station

© Michael Vokabre

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The Future Looks Grim — Is That Really The Best We Can Do?

Minority Report film still

Minority Report film still

Disappointing post today, in that I don’t particularly have an explanation or solution for this one.  Sorry.   … I was just thinking about it this morning and had to share it.  I was watching Minority Report  and couldn’t help but wonder two things.  One:  Why are most visions of the future dystopian?  And two:  Why do we tend to imagine the future as a dark, concrete, grey, poorly lit place?  Obviously, they seem to be connected.  The dark, grey, dingy, concrete world with flickering flourescent lighting makes a great dystopia.  The answer to the first question is pretty straight forward.  As twisted as it is, grim visions of an apocalyptic future are just a hell of a lot more interesting than pretty little stories about happy people in a lovely world.

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Hello world!

What is the point of this blog?

Basic version:

We have to eat.  It is generally agreed that we have to get dressed.  Ideally we live in homes of some sort.  Why not eat delicious food?  Why not make those clothes beautiful?  Why not fill the rooms we live in with furniture we love?  Life is enriched by surrounding ourselves with objects which give us pleasure.

Philosophical version for people who clearly have way too much time on their hands (present company included):

A group of artists in the early days of the Soviet Union, calling themselves Constructivists, proposed,

“…to us art is the creation of new objects….  But it should by no means be supposed that by objects we mean household articles.  Of course we see genuine art in utilitarian objects produced in factories, in the airplane or the automobile.  But we do not wish to limit the production of artists to utilitarian objects.  Any organized work – a house, a poem or a painting – is an expedient object that does not isolate people from life but helps them to organized it.”  – El Lissitzky & Ilya Ehrenburg, “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” Veshch’ no. 1-2 (March-April 1922)

I would propose that all art can be seen as the creation of objects, and those objects are the means by which we organize and define our world and proclaim our own place in that world.

To say that wearing a pair of jeans and a grubby t-shirt that you grabbed off the shelf at Old Navy because you don’t have time to think about your clothes is not fashion, makes an artificial distinction that is nearly impossible to nail down and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  Every time we put clothes on, whether they are the clothes that we call “high fashion” or not, we are constructing an image of ourselves to present to the world which places us and defines us one the social and political spectrum of the culture in which we live.  That culture determines the choices available to us, what meaning is invested in the choices, and what values inform the selections we make.

It seems to be a dominant trend (among intellectuals in American society at least) to see Art (paintings, sculpture, theater, etc.) and finding beauty in that Art as intellectually admirable and value, signifying substance, depth and knowledge, and to dismiss fashion (and less so interior design – both tied into a conflicted relationship to “shopping”) as superficial.  We appreciate a fine restaurant and a good meal, but turn our noses up at anyone who seems to have invested “too much thought and time” in his or her appearance.  All production can be invested with more or less craft, skill and creativity, and this affects how we respond to the objects of production.  To make choices based on seeing value in the work and creativity invested in the production of any object is not superficial.  It is the source of pleasure.  It is, perhaps, what distinguishes us from animals — the ability to consume not just what we need of the world, in a primal way, but to shape the objects that we consume to bring us a different level of pleasure and satisfaction.  Life is enriched by surrounding ourselves with objects which give us pleasure.

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